Remember LaTeX From Camp?

Hey high schoolers, remember Camp?

What might look like super hard STEM, with all those Ramanujan Identities, turns out, from another angle, to be typesetting.  As the typesetter for the mathematicians, you did not need a degree in whatever they were going on about, but you did need some skills when it came to arranging symbols.  That's setting type.

Thanks to Steve Jobs, who rescued business computing from being the unimaginative dullard monster  Microsoft / IBM had in mind, we got highly developed fonts a lot earlier than we might have.  

The only other technology that might have saved us, from the dreary fate MS DOS had laid out for us, was LaTeX, the brainchild of Donald Knuth. 

As it is, we got Apple LaserWriters and PageMaker and desktop publishing, and I got a job at CUE (Center for Urban Education).  That's when I picked up some of my skills as a trainer, and to some extent a desktop publisher.  

I usually got high marks for working with people.  Some of my lecture presentations might have been too weird for some tastes.  I wasn't auditioning for prime time commercial television, let's put it that way.

Anyway, coming back from Memory Lane:  remember our Covid Camp earlier this year?  Some of you might still be following.  

We didn't do a lot with LaTeX but we did explore Jupyter Notebooks, and their ability to make use of the LaTeX layer, a built-in JavaScript library I assume?  Right, the MathJax JavaScript library.

Famous BizMo

:: Henry Ford Museum ::

Election Postmortem

The Trump legal team is amping up a public perception that the vote favored Trump out of the gate, but then the blue horse mysteriously (i.e. deceptively) overtook the red horse just in these corrupt blue cities, places akin to Portland, where chaos reigns. Anti-Trump votes flooded in from nowhere, even after polls had closed. That's the hand wavy scare 'em story Guliani tells. It's the most obvious thing in the world this was all planned in advance.

That's close to the mark in that this was all expected (different from planned). Same with expecting another sars. People say you planned, but you merely anticipated the likelihood.

What the chanting mob doesn't hear are the sober voices, even ahead of the election, offering a likely scenario: Trumpers think it patriotic to hit the polls on election day, pro forma, as that's the Norman Rockwell all American Apple Pie GOP thing to do. Dems, on the other hand, realize there's a plague, are in lockdown and are voting absentee. More than in any other election in history, especially in big cities, it's about voting absentee.

So what happened, in many a big city is: they counted election day votes first, as they came in, and then turned their attention to these piles and piles, many coming in after election day anyway, but postmarked that day or before. We all know the scene, I'm reciting a litany.

Same day patriot MAGA votes made it look like Trump was roaring ahead. But this was anticipated and named: the Red Mirage. The big blue cities do have more Dems, and those votes were counted last. When all were counted, Blues dwarfed Reds. It's not nefarious. Not only is evidence of fraud lacking, but the "big obvious fraud" they want you to see, has an innocent explanation.

Random Facebook Groupthink

:: sugar lobby ::

A big problem is the journalism always stays shallow, like are you for or against Medicare for All (M4ALL)? As if that's what matters. Who says it's even possible?

"But other countries...." Don't give me that. The states have only recently gelled into a federation and just a couple generations ago the whole experiment nearly fell apart in a civil war (the whole idea of a "civil" war is a bug in the horse and buggy English language). "America" (as in the "the United States") is indeed exceptional, but maybe not in the sense people mean. I'm more in Ann Coulter's camp: the USA doesn't really exist. Never has, not really. Not by her criteria (control of borders and so on).

If you want government involved in healthcare, think prevention, think how we used to see vicious anti-tobacco ads, gross lungs (like on Canadian cigarette packs even now). Imagine many vigorous ad campaigns aimed at fast food, dangerous toxins, exposing past crimes (like that movie about DuPont, Dark Waters). Imagine free detox camps on federal lands, like scouting for adults, where friendly government employees teach you life skills and help you get your life back. Just imagine. A completely different world.

Today's non-existent wimpy destroyed carcass of a government does not dare stand up to the cowardly capitalists, who need to hide behind its Big Daddy skirts, pointing at scary competition (Huawei, Citgo, TikTok...). The Corporate Cowards are too busy using the dead carcass of Uncle Sam as their shield, to ward off competing profiteers. Your medical state, your health, has zero significance. You can die tomorrow. FEMA just has to pay for the refrigerated truck. That's the "public health system" you pay taxes for.

Americans are going down in history as the most ripped off population ever. They had a bright future there for awhile, but after WW2, the private sector started cannibalizing and cannibalizing. All that research, all that Manhattan Project, ended up enriching a few families. The Business Plot succeeded (the first time failed). But you wouldn't know that from reading the press, because the press is owned by the ones who did the good eating. Talk about "fat cats" but who draws those anymore? You must fear Russians. You must love your Corporate Persons and their fake news. They rule you. Obey.

A real public sector could afford to give every American citizen a fitbit if they wanted one. Several government channels would give unbiased health advice. Not paid for by the sugar lobby, what a concept. As it is, the sugar lobby has direct access to child optical nerves via cartoon commercials. No "government" push back, how could there be? When there's no government.

A real public sector could afford to give every American citizen a cell phone, stocked with apps needed to do business with government, claim benefits, schedule activities, volunteer. We all know having a phone is like a prerequisite for getting anything done, but there's no Verizon SafetyNet [tm] is there? Shareholder operations have no responsibility to citizens. The government does, but it's long gone. The USA (1776 - 1983) was a bold experiment.

Broken in What Sense?

I sense a lot of confusion when it comes to in what way the elections system is broken. On the face of it, just making people wait hours and hours in line is symptom enough of the abject poverty of (lack of investment in) public infrastructure (the whole idea of a "public sector" is somewhat fuzzy in this age of privatized warfare).

Greg Palast and others focus on voter roll purges, where little postcards go out (this is one technique) and if the occupant fails to respond, they're kicked off the eligible voter rolls. Another technique is to very sloppily share rosters of names across states and purge "likely duplicates" that aren't likely to be duplicates at all. This is done in the name of being "conscientious" and "protecting against voter fraud" (of a kind that's not at all common: voting multiple times).

Thanks to modern media and growing public awareness, this kind of systematic voter suppression is becoming harder to get away with, but it's also not the kind of cheating we're looking at on election night, in terms of ballot counting. In that case we have deeper concerns about closed source proprietary machines with possible back doors.

The time to address this real and legitimate concern is *not* in the middle of the election of course. Making all these simmering backburner issues come to a boil right now has everything to do with sowing chaos and confusion and weakening the legitimacy of the "ruling" party.

Again, as a 3rd partyist, I'm not against the DNC and GOP ripping into each other against the backdrop of both having diminishing relevance.

As a 3rd partyist, I'm not too chagrined if neither the GOP or DNC feels it has much of a mandate to do whatever, other than repair the public sector. We're doing our own research on what that means. Our state governor needs to publicly share plans for the vast economic refugee camps we may be needing soon. Unlike Syrians, we can't just walk to Europe.

New Curriculum Technologies in the Global U

Random Comments

I'm pleased with the new realism seeping into the political sphere, meaning people are waking up to the fact that organized crime is running things, with tacit approval from the benefitting authorities.

What's ineffective is to respond with moral outrage. Since when has "rule of law" applied internationally? The United Nations depends so much on donor nations, with the city-state of DC quite willing to pull the plug, should the UN get in the way of its world domination objectives (not shared by other city-states across the land, nor by Canada).

The idea of sovereign nations respecting one another's sovereignty sounds nice on paper (Kellogg-Briand Pact for example) but in practice it's still powerful crime families and various mafias vying for turf. There's a separate set of rules for the very rich. That's not at all new. That's history.

If you want to express outrage, I suggest it be towards infantilizing schoolish textbooks written by craven professors who have to pretend otherwise. It's our curriculum that's to blame for our awkward inability to face the world cooly, without a lot of self-pitying cynicism.

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Poor immigrants, refugees, spread across North America in a couple hundred years and threw together a ramshackle, ad lib style of government based on the idea of individual freedoms and government staying out of everyone's business.

A pandemic hits, not the first time, and thanks to a great freeway system and no precedent for "isolating" whole counties or states, huge numbers of Americans die.

The Americans don't have a real country yet, according to Ann Coulter (Adios America), as the "citizen" and "borders" issues were never settled and no serious national public health system was ever put into place. Americans like to put Americans in cages (prisons etc.) as that seems the easiest way to solve things ("just criminalize it" -- the national motto if there were one).

250 years is not much time, even in historical terms.

Amazing they managed to get a stimulus check out. Those computers (Hollerith machines) have proved their worth at least.

Mostly, the government, such as it is, is about protecting the interests of those who prop it up.

If we ever want something more, we'll need to consciously create it. An engineering feat. Not a job for mostly lawyers.

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From my point of view the educational system extends to include the socialized military. Families send their males (mostly) to military academies, which are boarding schools. Pirate Party USA supports residential mixed age high schools, with same gender options, that need not be military oriented. Lots of magnet schools drawing from across the land. Mixed age because high school is something you need every 10 years or so, as the fundamentals change. Like today if you don't know HTML you're illiterate, yet eligible to serve in government (why?). Free high school (it pays students -- UBS *) would help boomers get a grip. Parents and kids often enroll in the same courses and do the same homework, no stigma in doing that.

* UBS = Universal Basic Scholarship = UBI but with income compensating work/study.

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The border and citizenship issues that go with: 

(a) engulfing a huge amount of land in a hurry and 

(b) importing and depending on slaves and agricultural workers, can't be dealt with overnight. 

Covid has exposed our complete lack of a real public health system because we don't have much of a public sector. All that hype about how rich a country this is mistakes private for public wealth. We used to have more of the latter but since WW2 the public sector has been cannibalized to an extent it's no longer possible to tell the truth about it in "polite" society. 

People react with infantile outrage, instead of wanting to roll their sleeves up and deal with the karma. Better to let them believe in their "government" then. Let them sleep.

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FEMA has played a very low profile during the Covid Crisis, perhaps having learned from the Hurricane Katrina debacle, to stay out of the limelight. 

The new approach was to push it out to the governors to handle the problems, and compete with them.
The "FEMA camp" meme is mostly used to terrify people, lest they actually be served by their government in times of need. If only the public sector could find a way to help refugees from the private sector.

A lot of our private sector economic refugees go into the military, and I'm sure the Pentagon would be unhappy if civilians could avail themselves of socialized services to the extent the military does, without the price tag of undergoing brainwashing and training in after birth abortion techniques (state sponsored homicide).

Americans have a huge internal refugee problem and yet have been conditioned to see any organized move to help them as the hand of a globalizing anti-Christian conspiracy.

The homeless population doubles and doubles, with malign neglect somehow morally superior to whatever the Chinese are doing (at least we have Chinese to accuse of human rights violations, a convenient "feel good" outlet).

If FEMA sets up tent cities for economic refugees, then pretty soon the public will expect treatment for drug addiction. Such expectations could only undercut Murder Inc., where the big bucks are still made. Killing humans still pays more than helping them. Economics at work, right?

Insurance Story

I've been putting off yakking with my car insurance lady, about an accident over a year ago by now. Exactly what was I paying for in terms of damages?  

We'd pulled over and talked, I didn't see any dings, everything looked fine and she agreed.  Then comes the call from her insurance about something that happened on a Saturday.  That's not when it happened.  Yet my account was dinged.  I need to follow up on that.  Scrounging around for a number...

OK, we had an excellent therapy session. We talked about 2017, and how the date of the accident is wrong. But no big deal. That's what I needed to hear, and what got charged (claimed and approved).

Now I'm in line to get a tracking app that will measure my mileage and adjust my rate accordingly. I'll be one of the guinea pigs.

What would Medicare for All really look like?  I still think GI phones, which you won't want to use in subterfuge because it's designed to track. Keep a private phone for other purposes.  At least poor kids at the border get the apps, because America is for Americans.

I also talked to customer support. If the rooster sound in the distant background was added, for texture, much as people on Zoom stage their heads (audio version), then brilliant.  I much prefer the "rural setting" picture of customer support.  Relaxed on a beach somewhere, with a data helmet?  Lucky me someday, right?

I know it never happened on a Saturday, since I was driving home from Sellwood Middle School. Probably a Friday then?  I gave her my business card for contact information.  I'm glad everything got settled.

History Repeats

The big story I'm following is what appears to be the crumbling of two stories, interconnected. The original plan was (a) link Trump to GRU (b) GRU to chem attack in Syria (c) chem attack to Skripal incident. British Intel failed to pull it off. Not surprising.

— Kirby Urner (@thekirbster) October 19, 2020

Moving Targets

I'm experimenting with high bandwidth self brainwashing techniques by tackling a series of difficult topics, but not ones for which I need a huge amount of prep.  MIT chemistry, with a focus on orbitals, was a good starting point, given the Linus Pauling House is such a topic (search these blogs?). 

But my resume shows I'm more an applications developer than a chemist.  Instead of chemical reactions, or nuclear reactors, shouldn't I be grokking React?  You read my mind.

However React hasn't been just sitting pretty, nor has Vue.  Both these Javascript frameworks, favored by Web developers, have their successive versions.  Hence the title of this blog post: moving targets.

Where to jump in?  

In high bandwidth brainwashing, our approach is not so linear.  Get a lot of dots on the sphere, even as you connect them.  We can think about the "best sequence" on a second or third pass.

PDX Code Guild was using JQuery when I started visiting.  By now they're using Vue, with a Django back end (another moving target).  Newbies should do well starting with Vue3, if jumping into web development through a Code School.

High Bandwidth Brainwashing

Back in the early days of the internet, I used to campaign for higher bandwidth formats. Sometimes what's hard about school is not that the teacher is going too fast.  The teaching is meted out at an agonizingly slow rate, aimed to last about twelve years. The teacher is under no obligation to keep pace with students.  It's a one way street.  Stay with the pace of the teacher or get singled out as too slow or too fast.

As expected, with the sudden tsunami of alternative channels, those wanting the higher bandwidths could produce and consume at their chosen frequency.  It's not like a given student always consumes at the same rate.  Per Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, one adjusts to match the content.  Other reading comprehension strategies pertain.  

I scored 790 with my best combined SAT scores.  Both times I was consistently high on both scales.  Add that I'm living in the Philippines and I'm easily interesting material, for whatever student body a recruiter might be building that year.

However all of the above doesn't mean I adore brain teasers and crossword puzzles. Nor do I esteem myself as a master of trivia.  My Go skills suck, Golang whatever.  However I enjoy movies and lectures about what I'm not good at.  Where I'm low performing, I look for complementary instructors and entertainers.

Of course we say "brainwashing" is bad, because what's implied is an involuntary reprogramming. However when studying or cramming, wanting to get good at something fast, we actively seek out effective shortcut or time-saving techniques. If the connotation is "I'm brainwashing myself, with stuff I really need to know" then the innocuous meaning is you're seeking like a PhD in something.  We all wish for the magic pill that gives us Spanish, or Devanagari or whatever. 

Cosmography for Teachers (School of Tomorrow)

My arc in the Youtube stash as been towards integrating Synergetics into the philosophical literature. I've been announcing this as my project for some time, however announcing is not the same as doing, so inevitably, if into walking my talk, I'd have to do some walking. I hope my accounts come across as fleet footed and not overly pedestrian.

"Target acquisition" has ironic meaning if depicted as someone getting a target (e.g. "kick me") posted on his back. One may appear to purposely enter the crosshairs of others, trained to shoot at specific signs, by disguising oneself, on purpose, to get their attention.  In taking Harold Bloom on board, in my latest Youtube, has the School of Tomorrow painted itself into a corner?

My wiring diagram is pretty simple:  extend New England Transcendentalism through No More Secondhand God to Synergetics and its "geometry of nature". Technology is hers.  Automation is hers. Humans flail about in their Earthly Kindergarten, yet we see have gained traction, to the point of bearing some responsibility for the biosphere as a whole.  We are the Borgosphere already.

Back to Harold Bloom, he presages Jordan Peterson in bemoaning a turn of events within University, where ideological currents now run counter to his tastes.  Taste, like smell to Nietzsche, means a lot to opinionated scholars.  Dr. Bloom makes it clear that for him it's all about time management.  You have only so many hours to read, so why waste your time with not the best?  That's a compelling argument, unless maybe you're doing anthropology or natural language analysis.  Perhaps you're into observing, or seeking, some operational dialectic, Marxian or otherwise.  "Whence this 'taste'?" in other words.

Indeed, I've used the A where PATH crosses STEAM, to mean Anthropology, not Art, because I'm willing to subsume Art.  That's my heresy, shall we say.  Philosophy, as practiced by Wittgenstein, is in many dimensions turning the arts of Anthropology upon one's own matrix (subculture), thereby setting up some recursive vertigo in some disciples.

Back to Bucky, we need to remember one of his working assumptions was nationalism, a new kid on the block to begin with, would certainly morph in the face of jet travel and globally embracing telecommunications. He lived from the 1800s to the dawn of the internet, and was already fully into hypertext when he died.  Remember Dr. Vannevar Bush anticipated search engines in the 1940s.  Technology expresses through us, the invisible hand moving us, inclining us, by means of invisible chessboards, using pieces the ranks of which we scarcely guess.

In other words, Bucky was looking for signs of demise, among sovereignties, in the very concept of sovereignty.  When nation A carpet bombs nation B, that's an obvious sign of no sovereignty, i.e. that's not a relationship among coequal kingdoms, free to make their own alliances.  

The nations haven't really gelled, given the disrespect of sovereignty we have all witnessed.  Furthermore, the USA had proved itself incapable of passing an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for women.  Those of us getting The Graduate Review (for esties), saw Dr. Fuller's essay foretelling the USA's demise as a likely consequence. By the 1980s, the Grunch had completed its "tunnels under Disneyworld" takeover, per Fuller's Grunch of Giants subversive narrative.

School of Tomorrow (Supermarket Math)

Supermarket Math? Check out Digital Math, a Silicon Valley offering.

Ulka's Python course is good too.

Wanderers Meet on Zoom

This was close to our standard Equinox Party, and in the absence of the pandemic, we'd be gathering at the Linus Pauling House around now.

We're catching up using this higher bandwidth technology, about changes in our lives since our last gathering, months ago.

Fall Term 2020: Kick Off Lectures

Update from Portland (School of Tomorrow)

August Sixth 2020

August Sixth has special meaning around here, and for the world, as it marks the first time an atomic weapon was used by humans against themselves, with strong intent. Another detonation would follow, over the city of Nagasaki.

Humans were nuking themselves in various "tests" as well, irradiating themselves and their environment. Many thought nuclear war was inevitable, and many still do, so low is the average faith in politicians and the political process.  Religion was marginalized earlier.  What's left?  A sense of self preservation maybe?

Portlanders have typically turned out for a simple ceremony, emphasizing Japanese-American friendship, in a park with that moniker.  That ceremony has been suspended this year, has have most formally planned group events for the summer.

We're hoping that friendship stays strong and remains mutual, much though it may have been tested since that darker age.

Visiting Faculty (School of Tomorrow episode)

More about Kailash Ecovillage: 

Camp C6XTY

Leela and Melody got to social distance in my backyard, much like old times.  We had a breezy summer evening.  Naturally the conversation turned to the protests downtown.  Melody has been studying the emergence of private militias in her neck of the woods.  Privatization has come a long way.

I've been continuing to recruit future faculty who might work Martian Math into some already favorite set of topics. My approach is to keep my content Humanities flavored (that sounds somewhat cannibalistic I realize), meaning I'm not spinning my home base as a place within STEM territory.  

We bridge to STEM, over the C.P. Snow chasm, with our C6XTY bridge (there's a marketing angle). The point of casting it this way is to not make STEM, mathematicians in particular, the bottleneck.  Given their track record, we can expect little to no help from the Mathematics Department on this one.  Philosophy has had to step up to the plate, with links to Literature.  We're more in PATH (Philosophy Anthropology Theater History) than in STEM.

You might think the rap above would have nothing to do with the Rastafarian | Pastafarian combo I'd like to see center stage at the Justice Center, once there's some serious equipment.  

Why not a full sound and light show, impromptu?  Food carts?  I'm not saying I'd go, because of Covid.  If the actual downtown presence shrinks yet continues to stream the process, I'll have felt part of something.

Seriously, I'd turn the downtown scene into a reggae festival, given the Blues Festival was denied us this year.  The link is the importance of streaming, and the fact of a larger audience watching from home. That's how our school works as well.  If you were following Lattice Gallery last winter, in downtown Portland, you were probably doing so remotely, perhaps from Japan or Korea.

Portlanders are missing all their favorite summer events and have needed to channel some of that disappointment into an already frustrating push for social change.  There's a need to keep it real and focused and not just go for fluff.  My suggestions qualify as "peanut gallery" as I'm more kibbitzer than producer in this picture.

Dr. D. and Glenn were also properly ordained for the occasion.  I'll plan to invite DB for the next one. We're still keeping the numbers down.  Blue House has been through many chapters.

School of Tomorrow: Place Based History Curriculum

See: Americana in Grain of Sand