Zoltar

:: before ::

:: after ::

Speaking of Hiking

Talk about steep.

Siraj is a coach, for those wanting a workout.

Hiking Trail

I recommend the Ezra Pound Trail into this thicket, or wilderness, and not because I'm expert in that country.  I just did another saunter and realized how little I'd explored before.

In a nutshell, right when we're discovering another Unabomber (FBI doing what it does best), and cogitating on how mental illness warps politics, I'm looking at the case of Ezra Pound.

Ezra was amazingly active, including politically, and saw himself as a change agent, helping to free his home country from crass tastes dictated by money.  He would reach them by true craft.

However, his hatred of the bankers behind the US side in the World Wars (1900s), because of how he saw things, had gotten him added to Hoover's "most wanted fugitive" list.  He was living in Italy.  When they caught him, they caged him, which would drive anyone crazy.

When Ezra was shipped back to DC to stand trial, he got to avoid the noose by pleading insanity instead.  He spent the next ten years penned up in an institution.

Conservatives sided with Ezra, not because of his Fascism so much as his lifelong commitment to freely speaking his mind.  He was the hallmark individual in the showcase of Individualism, which casts itself against the Borg, the hivemind, the groupthink attendant upon any Cult of Personality (these are the dragons we individuals must fight).

Right when he's in the middle of being committed and/or executed (the case is hotly debated in the rabid press), the Library of Congress decides he's a true American genius.

Londoners thought so too (he'd been living there a lot).  Ezra was admired around the world and friend of many a literary figure, from Robert Frost to T.S. Eliot.

The literati of that day wished Ezra to be spared the DOJ's wrath, and even the dimmest of wits could appreciate the bad light the "freedom champions" might be in, if they inanely gave the death penalty to one of their most celebrated rock stars.

This epic saga resonates so well in the current political climate that I'm surprised we're not seeing the movie already.  Hey, Hollywood!  Over here!  Start with The Pound Era for more context?  Who might we cast as Ezra?  Gump?

Caretaking

Since my bumpy ride (recent post), and my sense of wandering into a "CPU" (as a lone electron), life has indeed become computation intensive.

Mom's right knee, given ad hoc repairs after the accident in 2000, is no longer functioning.  We don't know if this change is permanent.  She needs an X-ray.

Just getting her in and out of the car could prove impossible.  I'm planning a dry run for tomorrow.

In the meantime, I'm glad I'm not commuting to some office every day, as I need to be on hand, in my role of caretaker.  I've been a caretaker a lot.

My wife suffered a long decline with her cancer.

Nor do I forget my dog.

I don't think Dawn would mind sharing this paragraph with Sarah. She was afraid of dogs at first, but developed a bond with said mutt.

Today I headed over to Glencoe, where I'm shepherding kids through an after school program.  If you dig around in my blogs, you'll find more.

Friendly Care has been supportive.  Maye Thompson let me in to borrow a wheelchair from the medical equipment library, founded by Alberta Gerould.

Bumpy Ride

Carol's leg gave way as we were standing there in the kitchen.  I turned to grab some grapes off the counter and boom, she went down.

At first I thought the grape I'd dropped on the floor had scared her.  Was it a mouse?  It moved quickly.  But no, I don't think she even saw the grape.  When I turned back, she was on the floor.  She had hit her head on the doorjamb, or at least I think that's where she hit.

She squawked as she went down.

Since she was fully conscious and there was no bleeding, I urged her to scooch towards the basement steps, which is where she manages to stand, on the landing.  She's fallen before, but not because her leg gave way, nor had she hit her head like that.

As for me, the clock was ticking, as this was a lab period wherein students look at projects, do their own thing, for a specific amount of time.  I'm to resume the "broadcast" but here I am supervising Carol's attempt to get upright.  The timing was to the minute.

The next lab came soon, so I could resume assisting her more.  Indeed, she had a bump on her head, like in the cartoons.  She'll need to call the clinic tomorrow, standard procedure in case of a head bumping fall.  I found an ice pack in the freezer once class was finally over.

Carol and I went to Multnomah County Elections office several weeks ago to make sure her ballot came to her address here in Portland, not the one in California.  Today, I got ballots for myself, and for Tara (who has moved away), but nothing for Carol.

I'll call the elections office tomorrow if nothing shows up in tomorrow's post.  We vote by mail here in Oregon.  Before then, I plan to drive downtown for my colonoscopy kit, fun fun.  I might get to have breakfast with Alexia.

These were not the only bumps in the road today.  The assignment I'd been given said I'd have eight students and I went to all the work to create eight login envelopes.  However I only had three.  I found out later that the office had messed up and confused my class roster with another in Seattle.

However I'm saving the "best" for last.  Tonight was session ten of ten for my Introduction to Python class, and my usual practice is to reward those making it to the very end (we lose some along the way) with a camera view of the pet python sliding around on my arm and so on.

The python's name is Barry and he's well behaved, never gives me problems.  It wasn't his fault I left the lid off his aquarium (terrarium?) when I put him back.  After class was over, I watched a couple Youtubes, about the 3D CAD stuff I'm teaching, and when I looked up, he was gone.

I immediately closed the door to the room, hoping he hadn't made it out yet, and began a thorough search.  Fortunately, he was under the second chair I checked.  Good outcome.  He's safely back in his habitat.  Tomorrow I'll buy him his meal.

I've been under the weather myself.  I feel I'm back to 90%, but not 100%.  The head cold went to my lungs.  I don't think it's pneumonia this time, but I'll closely monitor (I have no choice).  Fortunately, I have no more classes for at least a week.

Virtual Expos

Lewis & Clark Exhibition, 1905

The so-called World's Fair, sometimes called an Exposition or Expo, was a much higher profile event before the corporate donors decided they had nothing worth showcasing.  Expos were for sharing Big Dreams for the future.  Electricity.  Freeways.

Now that we're looking at Peak Oil and are facing the realities of atomic and plastic waste, a lot of it irretrievably mixed into the ecosystem, what's the Big Dream?  Universities may have degree programs in cleanup, but Earth Day and Expo were not originally planned to be the same.

The oil producing Arabians are among the most conscious of Peak Oil, given the oil boom happened only recently, to the whole planet of course, but especially to them.  Dr. Fuller referred to oil reserves as "starter fluid" somewhere.  We could use it to boot a sustainable global civilization, but not if we couldn't wean ourselves off the stuff in time.

Now that we have television, internet, phones as movie cameras, the idea of millions flying or driving to an Expo might be counterproductive.  We have Burning Man.

The idea of Virtual Expos might make some sense, and also ways to make global development scenarios more of an audience participation business.  Having people on street corners raising money is less imaginative than fielding roving crews of troubleshooters, with fans and contributors watching from home.  That's what Bizmo Diaries was a lot about:  fantasizing about those teams and the surrounding reality TV.

But don't business mobiles drink a lot of Peak Oil?  Are they part of the problem more than part of the solution?  I'm all for having that debate.

First Stop on the Tour

I was just posting to Facebook that "bridging the gap" would be a great first tourist stop in the mathemagical theme park (we use Python __magic__ sometimes).

Here is where we familiarize ourselves with the concept of Zonohedra.

A zonohedron has faces with opposite-edges-parallel (picture a stop sign), minimally rhombi, as well as opposite parallel faces, like a cube has, or a rhombic dodecahedron.

The rhombic triacontahedron is likewise a zonohedron and our "gap" inheres here, between two of them.

Consider two RTs (thirty diamond faces each) of almost exactly the same volume, but the one is a little smaller, making for two sets of faces, one set slightly within the other.

Along each radial, from the body center, two diamond faced centers occur, towards the tip.  There's a tiny gap between the two.

Here's the ratio we go by:  the RT inside, the slightly smaller one, has a volume of exactly 5, relative to the reference tetrahedron of edges 2R.

The ball of radius R very slightly protrudes, at each face center, a small hump, a pitcher's mound.  The apex of each hump marks the center of a 5+ volumed RT's face.

Each RT has a "nice" property:  a volume of precisely 5, a radius of precisely R.  The latter, scaled up by Φ, becomes yet another RT of volume 20 * √(9/8).

When we scale the smaller volume five RT up by 1.5 or 3/2 as a scale factor, its volume turns into 7.5 (red), and its radius into Φ/√2.  It now shares a set of vertexes with the volume 6 RD (yellow).

The new face radius, of the 7.5 volumed RT, will be the 3rd root of 3/2 times whatever it was before (call it h), since to boost a volume by 3/2, the edges need to expand by the 3rd root of that number, or about 1.14471424255333.

The resulting face center to body center radius (believe it or not):  Φ/√2 where √ and sqrt mean the same thing, arithmetically.

In other words, the original h, for which the RT has a volume of exactly 5, is Φ/√2 multiplied by the reciprocal of the 3rd root of 3/2, or about 0.99948333226234344.

Another tad-bigger RT, has a radius of R precisely, just a tad larger than the volume 5 RT's of radius 0.9995, weighing in at about 5.00775803133283.

The tag-bigger RT's volume is granule greater than 5, of necessity, but look at how tiny the gap in radius:  0.000516667737 is pretty small, compared to 1 R, the reference length.

That's why we might pay you to pay some mind to this little difference.  Without concerted attention, it might be overlooked.  Attention means concentration means doing work (measured in iota perhaps).

Let's take stock of what juggling balls we get in the air with this exhibit:

• 2nd and 3rd roots and powers
• the golden ratio Φ
• the power rule (relating linear to areal to volumetric growth)
• two spheres (and a thin wall between them)
• a pair of RTs (tiny difference in radius, volumes 5 & 5+)
• an RT of volume 7.5 sharing vertexes with the RD of volume 6
• an RT of ~21.21 embedding the Jitterbug icosahedron (as long diagonals)
• five concentric zonohedra (six counting the cube of volume 3)...
• one of which is the the space-filling RD of volume 6
• the concept of tetravolumes
• T & E modules (RT)
• A & B modules (RD)
• alternative powering models
• scaling by Φ

For a first stop, that's not bad.

What schools have a mandate to teach this stuff?  Paw through Youtube?  I'm finding more researchers getting a clue.

We might call this exhibit Prying Open Synergetics as we're managing to suck some sense out of a hairline fracture that came to light only after Dr. Fuller already had put some years of concentration into his newly emerging discipline.

Bridging the Gap

What the humanities came up with, by way of anthropology, was a device for probing their sister STEM, regarding her meaning for "dimension" and "paradigm".

"Could you have a different number of dimensions for space, in a different paradigm?"

Rather than wait for an answer, the New English sprung upon us a new system, asking "there, is that the kind of thing you mean?".

By New English I mean anglophones in North America with their various nationalisms and other dreams, not to be confused with New Englanders, which more formally refers to a few of their "states".

Their English was different enough to permit publishing a positive futurism that was neither racist nor classist in conception.  This wasn't socialist realism.  Tractors were not core.

I've taken a different tack, having learned of these old schoolers in my early twenties, with four years of university behind me already.  I gradually worked my way into their network, attempting to find out more about their operations.  Where do the dome companies fit in?

However life is fairly quantum mechanical and one brings strong interpretations to whatever findings.  Facts under-determine what we believe to be the case.

The fun we're having branding "the gap" might be of relevance.  We're referring to a crack, a thin fracture line in the mathematics, between two volumes, relating to a perfect sphere which we may or may not require to "exist" in some namespace.

My "mind the gap" writings and videos give the flavor.  Of course we know about the London tube and the gap they mind therein.  These aren't so far apart.

The pun "GNU English" comes to mind and refers to "geek-speak" and especially all that computer science stuff as we call it today.

Computerizing the new paradigm had some number crunching aspects, especially around vectors and simple linear algebra, but mostly we're talking hypertext and what that added to the equations.

In hindsight, I'd say links to Canada stay important, and the University of Toronto in particular.  This is in no way a new development, I'm just saying it hasn't been fading.  Dr. Arthur Loeb was in New England proper, but the Eschers were and are Canadian, as was H.S.M Coxeter.  Today, we think of Hinton and ML and how Canada has embraced its heritage as a major contributor to Deep Learning.

I'm thinking Truckers for Peace, variously branded ("without borders" etc.), will continue gaining ground in Canada.  Opportunities to swap routes on a global basis are more likely to open intra-parent sometimes, meaning subsidiaries of the same directorship are more likely to collude with their own employees than are government agencies with bureaucrats, few of whom have any experience driving trucks.

What ties these threads together is of course the various brands and logos that allude to the shared "design science" ethos.  You see these in both hemispheres, and once you know what to look for, a whole ecosystem emerges.  Like when you first learn of the "octet truss" when learning about architecture; suddenly it's everywhere.  It was there all along, but it takes awareness to distill meaning from apparently irrelevant details.

For example, TrimTab Beer in Birmingham, Alabama, is definitely on the Meme Train when it comes to New English.  I've got the T-shirt at least.  I'm still not drinking beer, not because I'm off alcohol but because the Pacific Northwest has some of the best IPAs imaginable and I was turning into a real addict, flooding my system with unneeded calories.  I may get back to sipping, but have some goals to reach first.  I'm reconnecting with Wine World.

For my part, I went back to socialist realism and the tractors, finding them another type of "turtle" for moving around on a computer screen, in response to whatever instructions.  The tractor may plow back and forth, planting ASCII or Unicode, or follow a more CRT-like raster pattern, more of a spiral if you connect east with west.  Some of my Python students know what I'm talking about, or check my Github site.

Tweening

The concept of "tweening" comes from ToonTown, the animation industry, to which Portland plays host.  Comics too, witness Dark Horse.  Manga and anime, for those used to a more Japanese spin.

The "in between" frames connect the "key frames" -- in hypertoons too.  I claim hypertoons to be my invention, where scenarios intersect through switch-point nodes.  With no break in continuity, your playheads travel through a "spaghetti ball" of toons (edges, segments, clips).

Where physics comes in:  are we able to connect key frames A and B with a set number of "tween" frames without breaking any physical "laws".  Physics is under pressure to provide guaranteed, deterministic results, provided one follows instructions.  No miracles required.

Calculus is all about expressing rules in terms of neighboring frames.  Some scientists flirt with the notion that each frame determines the next in some ironclad fashion, such that all the unfolding action is like clockwork, deterministic, including our own thoughts and feelings.

Believe it or not, such a notion is actually a comfort to some, as "it could not have turned out differently" is a kind of reassurance people sometimes offer.

In practice, the meaning of "determined" breaks down if the trajectory stays unpredictable, even with the benefit of hindsight.  "Given what we know now, we still could not have predicted what would happen, back then" is not that unusual to hear.

Sans any closed form formula letting us crystal ball the future, our only way to find out is to get there.  However, statistics still tells us about likelihoods, and that death, if not taxes, is certain.  Taxes remain highly probable.

All questions of determinism aside, marrying the language of animation to scenario planning and calculus is not a stupid idea.  We're always making recordings these days, to various media, of what goes on around us.  The study of trajectories, of particles in cloud chambers, is at the heart of quantum physics.

Lonely Lives

Some days I kick back and delve into Youtube.  Given what I pay monthly for optical fiber, to CenturyLink, I think of such R&R as getting my money's worth.

Besides, I'm not just goofing off.  Youtube is not a porn site after all.  Yesterday I was immersed in MIT's 8.04 Quantum Mechanics.  Today, I'm back to freakish humans and the lonely lives some of them have.

That I would go back to watching about Pi Guy, who recites some 20K digits flawlessly, is apropos given what I've been up to in Jupyter Notebooks.  You'll find a link to the above video in the For Further Reading section.  I'll take you there by way of edu-sig.

Brain science sometimes struggles to explain these phenomena.  Reality stays humbling.

Sputnik Day

I watched this documentary about the Apollo Era yesterday evening, without having consciously tuned in, until somewhere in the middle, that this was Sputnik Day, October 4. The movie started sharing about October 4, with a Sputnik 2 in November, and I'm thinking "hey, isn't that today?" Sure enough.

A big Our Backyard newspaper large format thing, color pictures, came from Metro addressed to Dawn Wicca.  I might not have given it a second look, but Carol plowed into it, spending the better part of the day with it. 

To her, it's a newspaper about the legacy of Dr. Jack Urner, who she say worked for Metro in the 1950s and 1960s.  I was only a toddler and grade schooler, so who am I to dispute.  I know he worked for the Portland Planning Bureau, I just don't know when Metro (a tri-cities thing) got going.

Jack went on to work for Libya, Egypt, Bangladesh and some others (I'm not ranking them), but Portland, in Carol's mind, still bears the imprint of his greenway and park oriented thinking.  When you live in the Pacific Northwest, you're automatically some kind of landscaper and gardener. 

He was not a Robert Moses type, looking for where to ram through a next freeway.  Indeed, he probably left the States partly to get away from the Robert Moses types.  But again, kid brain speculation maybe doesn't count for much.

Gamification:  I was thinking about board games and how we played them as a family.  Geeks stack them at home and sometimes get them down.  All adults.  Computer companies hope you'll play there.  Why go home when you can socialize in a state of the art rec area?  Then get back to work. 

You can say that's exploitative.  You can say that's how some people prefer to work.  The only downside is the dorm isn't right in the same building.

Board games:  I don't want to hear if it's capitalism or socialism or whatever ism, just run the simulation and show me the script.  Let me see the movie. 

Taxonomy can come during the postmortem.  An ism is what you die of.  In the meantime, lets play.

"Lots of little experiments, very few big ones" was my MTOD.  GST > Econ.

Me Too

I was falsely accused of sexual assault once.  We were stopped at a busy train signal, lots of cars waiting, in SE Portland near OMSI.

I was driving her back to her car, or thought that's what was happening.  All of a sudden she jumps out of my passenger side seat and jumps in the car behind us.  The gate goes up and I go on by myself.  Gee, I thought we were just friends.  She had a boyfriend in India.  I knew we weren't dating. She'd been a guest at Wanderers that time, which is how we met.

The next day I get a call from some policewoman saying so-and-so was registering a complaint or something like that.  I told the officer I was clueless and incredulous and had my hands on the wheel at all times.  She'd said nothing to warn me she was about to jump ship.

Why would I try making unwanted advances in the middle of a packed street while waiting for a train?  Headlights were shining through my rear window.

The officer advised me to think twice next time before driving a younger female around unaccompanied.  Meanwhile, my accuser texted me that any time we were in a public place together, such as a public meetup, she reserved the right to scream about it, stage major theater.

We'd been at a pro Jeff Merkley party (he was running for office) and she worked for Novick (likewise running, and competing), or she claimed to, so I always assumed her motivations were political.

She thought I might be influential and wanted to show me how quickly she could tarnish my reputation, spread rumors, and keep me away from venues she might attend.

She later moved away and changed her name (I found a public blog post where she talked about doing that).  I don't try to follow what happened after that. I posted something to my blog closer to the time.  This all happened over a decade ago.

Bizmos Meet T4P

Some of you may have realized that a fleet of bizmos (business mobiles) and a fleet of trucks, might serve in complementary capacities.  The bizmos need to pave the way for our citizen diplomats by visiting truck stops and talking up the program.

Soon:  drivers and their apprentices will be coming through here, from faraway lands.  Some will be homesick.  We're not trying to make them suffer unnecessarily.  Perhaps we have movies in their native language?

Remember, the standard bizmo comes with an ability to download an image from the cloud, your image, such that, as a driver or crew, you get to pick up where you left off, with customization.  Your favorite music, language tapes, even screen savers, are all on tap.  A lot of trucks work the same way.

Sometimes we'll be using bizmos to transport drivers from one route to another.  You've finished your segment from that Chinese city to Pakistan.  Now we'll let your relax and talk with others while we take you to a next assignment.  Yes, like a taxi, but sometimes we need more bells and whistles.

As a bizmo fleet training supervisor, I might help orient new crews to their vehicles, in the process of sketching the program.  We could train up and down I-5, or I-95, before sending more seasoned crews to more challenging assignments in Asia or Africa.  Likewise, we're receiving drivers from those faraway locations and want to show them the lay of the land.

Orientation is the name of the game in a lot of contexts.  Do that right, and you have happy campers, up to the challenge.  Skip that step, or do it incorrectly, and you're inviting a lot of frustration, on the part of the insufficiently oriented.

I've enjoyed committing to the "boot track" for this program i.e. crafting some blueprints.

T4P == Truckers for Peace.  You can read more about that in my blogs and on Medium.  Or visit a truck stop near you.  Look for us.

Integral Design

I showed up early today in hopes of crossing paths with Jon Bunce.  Don said on the phone he comes early sometimes, makes coffee.  No dice.

Being early has other advantages, in that I get to overhear the three ladies to my right chat with each other.  Nirel is here too, busy setting up two cameras to make a video.  We're waiting for the coffee to be ready.  It's ready.

Glenn is talking about what he's been reading.  He has lots of stories.  He enlisted in the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army.  Thanks to really high test scores, he got sent to the long program in Vietnamese, almost a year, at Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey.  He excelled at learning Vietnamese.  That's the only school he's graduated from, aside from high school.  That's when he learned he'd be serving in the NSA.  He received a top secret cryptographic clearance.

I was teaching Python last night, until 10:30 PM or so, then switched to watching more 911 videos on Youtube, this time through the LaRouche PAC.  I've tracked him for a long time, all of 96 years old by now. I checked Wikipedia.

Like many Americans, I've spent quite a few hours considering the events of those hours on September 11, 2001.  You'll find a smattering of posts in my blogs about it.

Back to Glenn:  he was studying the PT boat fleet and working on cracking the Vietnamese code matrix, which had changed right around when he got there.  As the new guy on night duty, he got out his colored pencils and managed to crack the code.  As the lowest ranking guy with an attitude, he got no credit for his feat.  He was also never asked how he broke the code.

In Vietnam they'd been under attack quite routinely (not from PT boats; they were on a base on land).  The guys were not in a good mood, this being an ill-conceived war.  Higher ups were actually thinking of sequestering the ammunition, not a popular proposal among the enlisted.

Rotating vets out ASAP was the better solution, the Pentagon had learned, so their anti-war sentiments would not affect the new recruits.  For the next year and a half, he was back at Fort Meade, at NSA headquarters. 

Upon completing his military service, Glenn managed to secure a scholarship position at Antioch College, which, given its work / study approach, lost a lot of its students to full time employment.  His far western background and military service made him a good diversity candidate.

He'd tried formal schooling before, before enlisting, and after leaving the electricians union, much to his dad's distress.  He worked 8 hour shifts in a commercial laundry, dealing with restaurant, hotel and hospital linens, in order to pay bills and sit in huge lecture halls listening to grad students with microphones.

Dropping out, yet continuing to go to school, was not an unusual pattern in those days, and Glenn followed it in the case of Antioch.  One could still learn, but without the overhead of a big tuition.  Attend class, keep the student card, just don't expect a degree at the end of the tunnel.

Through Antioch, Glenn encountered Helen and Scott Nearing who preached radical simplicity as a lifestyle.  Glenn absorbed these values and became more yet autonomous and self sufficient.  He learned to live off the grid.  He'd become one of those back-to-the-land anti-war hippies.

In a later chapter, he joined a Jerome, Arizona manufacturing outfit.  The company made some of the best mercury vapor detection devices anywhere, important in mining especially.  Thin gold mesh filters.  Better than most of the competition by at least an order of magnitude.

He learned to build clean rooms, wire networks (computer, electrical), do plumbing, while working at this remodeled high school.  With rent going up, they moved to another high school (this time buying it outright), and Glenn took on refurbishing it from the ground up, outfitting it to be the next factory facility.

A five day intensive workshop on integrative facility design, which he took in San Francisco, in preparation for the factory's move, proved pivotal.  Having already had years of hands-on experience, he was in prime condition to take advantage of the course, and see the value in its teachings.

Those with only college coursework behind them lived in a different world.  Glenn was coming more from a construction background.  The workshop instructors actually invited Glenn to join their traveling road show in the end, a high compliment.  However he went back to his dream job in Jerome, where he had a family and friends.

The Jerome instrument company was eventually bought up by a competitor, its people fired.  Glenn and his wife divorced, with Glenn retaining custody of the two kids.  His son was precocious with computers and already had a computer business before finishing high school.

Through his son, Glenn was introduced to the internet, which inspired him to unify a lot of his thinking, using a set of heuristics he calls "the Global Matrix".

By a global matrix he means what I tend to call a "hexapent" (not in the Oxford Dictionary -- at least not the shorter edition) as in HP4E ("hexapents for everyone"). His spherical matrix has layers, say 256 of them.

If the word "layer" gets you thinking of "data layer" or "drawing layer" in like Photoshop, you're on the right track.  GIS systems typically superimpose data layers to give us relevant visualizations.

The Global Matrix inherits from memes like Macroscope, also Geoscope.  These are animated globes, ways of displaying global data.

Glenn is inspired by the I-Ching's ancient octal matrix to think in terms of bits and bytes.

The global matrix is more like a computer, and octaves stay important.  This wasn't the technical talk.

My own path took me to "Global Data" as the name of a science fiction supranational, one hatched outside the whiteman jurisdiction in some N8V context (e.g. Warm Springs), managed by wise elders.

GDC, which I've often blogged about, was all about sharing global data as a service (DaaS), not unlike Google Earth does. When Glenn and I met, we found we had much in common, in terms of goals and aspirations.  We both think in terms of a public service.

I'd compare my relationship to Glenn with my connection to David Koski, who likewise was highly committed to a certain path that converged with mine in many ways.  I'd glomed on to Synergetics, not knowing some guy in Santa Monica was blissing out on recursive E-modules.

Glenn has written a synoptic outline of a book, with clever chapter titles.  He's passing that around now. He thinks a lot about history, ancient civilizations, logic.

The operations 'and', 'or', and 'invert' make more sense to him then 'and', 'or' and 'not'.  Negation and inversion have different connotations.  He got into triangles.  His two hour meeting with Stuart Kaufmann at Sante Fe Institute was another milestone.  Stu has been an ISEPP speaker here in Portland.

Sam Lanahan, another "blog character", has entered the story at this point.  He's been supportive, including by providing some color copies of Glenn's book, which has text on left pages, pictures on the right.  Two were passed around. Glenn and Nirel are working on a website.

You'll find a lot more about Glenn in my blogs.  I've told his story before, however today he's been doing a good job distilling it.  He's planning to do more technical talks as a follow-up. 

Snapshot

I thought I was delaying my trip, on foot, to the local market, in order to catch the CBS Evening News at 6:30 PM.

However I got caught up reminiscing about my Quaker ethnicity on edu-sig, and looking up at the clock, realized it was almost over.

I caught where Hasbro says Bizjet is now OK in Scrabble, but not Bizmo yet.  Then came a story about a loyal all American national anthem singer.

A Next Peace Corps

  Friends and the Military from Western Friend on Vimeo.

We might take this opportunity to empathize with an emigre (immigrant) still proud of her or his homeland.

The reason for the change in citizenship had nothing to do with disloyalty or dislike, and now comes the age of national service (in this science fiction, it exists).  Besides, many have dual citizenship.  Triple?

In which nation's service does one serve?  Wouldn't this be an excellent time to go back and tie off loose ends by serving the old country?

Fast forward and we're in a world where you're welcome to commit your years of national service to the nation of your choice.

How is this different from the US Peace Corps for example?

Woah, that was pretty fast!  How do we get there from here?

Individual families won't agree with some policy-making body -- such as the US Congress -- on who the enemy is.  The Trumps don't hate Russia enough, a big problem for some in Hicktown, USA (not for others) and their elected representatives.

That's but one of many examples.

The bottom line is junior wants to serve in the military of an avowed enemy of the United States.  That's how it looks to the president.

New this Fall, on the TBD network i.e. what a soap opera.

Right, I get the point:  if the "service" is pointing guns at one's fellow human beings and threatening to pull the trigger, or even pulling it, that's not really the kind of service we mean.

The youth wishing to serve in Japan might be a dog lover, but she's not there to hurt Japanese, much the contrary.

And how do we know?  Because Japan manages the service wherein foreigners serve Japan.

This isn't outsiders reaching in with their institutions, so much as families allowing their loved ones to make a difference on the planet under the auspices of cooperating services.

Will this ever happen?  That's a matter of translation.

Foreigners flock to US based universities, as students, faculty, administrators, technicians, janitors, health and food service workers, the list of roles goes on and on.

The technicalities of paperwork, whether these be people on visa, green card, citizens, obscure what is consistent across many psychologies:  a loyalty to the US and/or a subculture therein, and the values thereof.

Perhaps it's really Harvard they care about?

It's all in how we apply filters, as to who shows up in our samples.  Which is kind of my point:  the patterns I'm suggesting are already evident, just under the guise of other namespaces (they're described in other terms).

The context required for such programs to make sense is one of mutual advantage and symbiosis.  We all benefit to the extent humans are prospering in a sustainable manner, not at the expense of an exploited group (i.e. of one another).

Trading young people around, of their own volition, and not only young people, in a context of their committing to national service, is a shared investment in greater mutual understanding and compatibility down the road.

That's a pretty-enough sounding political speech (the stuff & fluff of world diplomacy); usually a good sign when it comes to bridging the bright light of actual day, with movie theater science fiction aesthetics.

A Front Door

In this day and age, if operating in compatibility mode with USA OS (more elsewhere), there's a way to do it in Windows.  You need a friendly front door in the Citizens' Desktop (not its real name), which is part of Homeland.

Jungle-ware (multi-species), such as Anaconda/Python, need to obey rules of the road, starting with Start Menu aesthetics.  The above screen shot shows that happening, with Spyder also along for the ride.  Spyder is another IDE (interactive development environment) for Python.  Python is a computer language.

One of my pillar tenants is both pedagogy and andragogy benefit when the needle wavers between two extremes, we might call them left and right brained, but don't have to.  I waver between (1) storytelling, lore, and (2) deep dives into the details of syntax, getting technical.

Contrary to stereotypes, computer programming does not require shutting down one's imagination, draining one's fantasy life, fighting one's propensity to daydream.  On the contrary, keeping story lines in mind and visualizing theatrically, like a movie director, helps glue together what one is reading and writing.  Programs have a plot.

Stepping back from any specific drama and considering one's possibilities in the abstract, is what it's like to focus on the language itself.  We might want to code up a Supermarket, a Casino, an Observatory, a Spaceship.  What these have in common, in Python, or in any computer language, is their grammar.

In mathematics we face something similar:  a need to keep the imagination fired, and abstract at the same time.  Here is where polyhedrons enter the picture, in the form of one's own visual and tactile environment.  We're in a scenario already, with furniture, with sets.  Lights, camera, action.  "Camera" means "room".

Unifying computer programming and polyhedrons is another pillar aspect of my curriculum writing. The stereotype around polyhedrons is they're a topic in computer graphics, first and foremost.  However consider leaving visualization to the imagination and coding only numeric changes in surface area and volume as a function of changes in radius.  Using @property, we may inter-relate all three.

Yes, I'm talking about scale, which is turning out to be an important source of generalizations.

Through Windows, I provide a front door into PATH and STEM.  Anaconda creates a space, after which Jupyter Notebooks kick in.  We learn Python in connection with its ability to sort polyhedrons in order by volume.  The focus is on grammar, however in a way that fires the imagination rather than damps it down.

Groundhog Day

Today's Ground Hog Day (film allusion) ascent of Mt. Tabor was a wide departure from the norm, statistically speaking: I took the bicycle.

I've been riding this sturdy metal beast to one of my meetups, some miles away, not too challenging terrain.  The route up Tabor is far less distance yet a lot more of a climb, and I decided "walk mode" would be permitted once inside the park.

I have a hard time writing "park" without Westworld resonating, having just plowed through Season One start to finish, special features included, a Warner Bros. DVD. I'm between gigs.

On my way to returning it, I stopped over at Glenn's and shared the first two episodes, which he enjoyed.  He knows where to rent it:  where I returned it.  We have one of those hard to find video rental places in our neighborhood.  I got it back before the deadline.

That was yesterday.  Today, having made it to the mid-level reservoir, I stood overlooking the city and marveled at the small birds frolicking in the foreground.

As fortune would have it, Glenn was on his way down so we walked and talked our way to Chavez, me wheeling the bicycle. Once across Chavez, Glenn staying east, I locked the bicycle to a rack and carried the helmet, doing a full bag's worth of supermarket shopping.   I lashed the bag to the back with tight bungies and managed to mount and ride back.

My day since then has been less of a physical workout, unless growing out my beard counts.  I'll shave that today, and spend a few calories.  I do appear to be slowly losing pounds as I continue the No Beer Diet.

Reciprocal Base Agreements

From Facebook profile:

Is it time to talk about inviting some foreign military bases to North America, in the name of reciprocity? So many US in Okinawa and Guantanamo. Oregon might be OK with a couple bases. They're mostly used for joint marching band exercises, sports, practice using crowded airways. We'll bring back the cavalry and make movies.

Chögyam Trungpa had an army going as I recall. They'd drill and stuff. Oregon could host a Tibetan military base, except the weapons would be metaphysical (like incense).

Who Gets to Be a Mathematician?

Responding to an essay on Medium:

Given trends in AI (machine learning), humans are coming to appreciate that in constructing and internalizing any Reality Model (the process starts before birth) one is performing intensely mathematical operations, updating new “priors” (synthetic a priori judgements) in some Bayesian feedback loop, complete with cybernetic back propagation though many layers of perceptron.

As Kraftwerk so eloquently put it: “we are the [mathematicians]”.

Dr. Keith Devlin showed biological life is at bottom a form of mathematical computation. Humans claim to do it consciously, as a brain activity, on top of a 99% automated metabolism.

Sure, universities want their name on the bottle, when the math smells and tastes like the real deal. They’re like wine merchants. However I’m always willing to accredit the mathematical abilities, properties and practices I encounter in so many walks of life. Fine wines come with many labels.

English majors studying New England Transcendentalism come up against a lot of architecture and geometry these days. Their PhD may be in American Literature of the 1900s, but that means knowing what the “isotropic vector matrix” is all about (1970s metaphysics), and of course “tetravolumes”. No, this isn’t mathematics necessarily, but when it comes to Reality Modeling, such concepts have utility.