Wednesday, March 16, 2022

Replit Demo

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

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

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

Monday, March 14, 2022

Group Theory for 8th Graders

Permutations REPL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, March 11, 2022

Rumble Test

Tuesday, March 08, 2022

Car Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, March 05, 2022

Taking a Break

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Trial Balloon Legislation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show some charity.  

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

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

Truckers Revolt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truckers should have a lot to look forward to.

Friday, January 28, 2022

Churning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reach out to rural areas for local supply agreements.  

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

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

MLK / FBI

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

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

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

One might blame Hegel in some ways.  

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

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

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

Monday, January 10, 2022

Four Directions

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, December 20, 2021

New Circuit Designs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, November 26, 2021

TG 2021

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

More Quaker History

Watch Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Urbit Urbus

Urbit is Urbiquitous

Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Fake School

Cosmic Fishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake school is as real as fake news.

Recursive Python

Monday, November 15, 2021

Imported Tweet

Saturday, November 06, 2021

Revaluation of Values

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Musings on Theme Park Planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does choosing to remain oblivious make us devils?  

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

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

Monday, October 18, 2021

Just Say Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

===

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

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

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Trucking and Social Media


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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