Agricultural Studies

Continuing a story... the old propane tank had not been swapped out yet. I wanted to have the owner in on moving tanks around. 

Indeed, I'm working closely with the owner on the whole "Boeing production line" we call it (complete with quality control) whereby each section of the wheel line gets a five point inspection:

(a) the wheel itself (mid-section) is ready for service, with the spokes and cleats all in order
(b) new sprinkler with leveler assembly installed, with tightened nozzle (also called nipple)
(c) new drain (from a box in the Gator)
(d) new gasket (old removed, grooves brushed, new gasket glued in)
(e) pipe section is obstruction-free

You've seen these wheel lines I'm sure. They must be advanced from riser to riser in most setups, a riser being where the irrigation system pops up with like a hydrant. Each section of pipe, used, recycled, presents its own set of problems, in terms of removing the old hardware and replacing it. The owner and I would yellow tape any section passing the above five point test.

For R&R, I got to ride in the backseat as a passenger in this three wheeled EV that easily navigates the backroads amidst farmlands. Tomorrow: we'll try the burn pile. Again, I'm a sorcerer's apprentice, not an on-my-own master, on this particular totem pole. 

My model is: you can be a big kahuna in your special circles, and then you're just another WalMart shopper stuck in traffic everywhere else, except that's to extreme. You'll rank higher and even have speaking parts in some "theater" (a military term). 

Out here in the flower fields, I'm a trainee, still learning the ins and outs of irrigation. I think and talk a lot about simulations, like SimFarm, SimAnt, SimCity, when I'm doing this work.

A tractor going back and forth, seen from above, is one of my computer science topics as well. The field is a data structure, most conveniently tabular, of rows and columns, and the tractors are read-write devices, especially write devices, able to inject permutations, seedlings, into the dirt.

In my Python implementation, I have a generic Field type, and a Tractor type, and a kind of mutual awareness between the two in that each tractor introspects its Field instance and vice versa: the Field knows what Tractor instances are on (or in) it.

TrimTabbers Meet: American Dreamer

I came across American Dreamer by Scott Eastham as if in a dream, as here was a new book about Bucky yet I thought I'd seen them all. What parallel reality was this? That was some months ago, and by the time TrimTab Book Club was ready to read it, I had lost my copy. 

That was my excuse for taking a break from the meetups every other week. 

More specifically, I've been feeling called to tie off loose ends that only I can tie off, such as around Quadrays as I've implemented them, in Python, and so forth. I should prioritize projects on which my presence could be critical.

Besides, Trim Tabbers have privileged access to digitized versions of syllabus assets.

What book will we read next? I tossed The House of Tomorrow onto the queue, but not necessarily for any time soon. More likely, we'll tackle Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth next, which surprises me, only because I'd assumed this group had already taken that up, as one of the core classics.

After that, I sense a lot of interest in CJ's book, newly available. His practical guide to comprehensivist studies is based on his own experience of being a trim tab in this respect, i.e. steering a course that would optimize whatever free energy (Subgenius: slack) was available.

Energy is a function of frequency, when it comes to light, we should remember. Super high frequency lasers are the "new thing" a lot of photonics experts are taking a look at (although not directly -- laser light tends to be hazardous to one's eyeballs).

We talked about the eclipse quite a bit, even watching Nathan's 7 minute home video of the experience.

Me in chat, interacting with my peers:

Book called Polyhedra by Cromwell documents how the concept of polyhedron has become more ephemeral over time moving from “solid” to more like “wireframe”. Synergetics is certainly consistent with this trend, but then there’s the Zeitgeist as a whole, of which it’s reflective.

“Tetrahedron” is a long-winded word for “thing”. Turns out the etymology of “thing” is a “meeting” (in Finland?). “A thing is a meeting of things”.

Important to remember that XYZ in physics has no gravitational or electromagnetic presence. It’s ghostly, there for reference, not to participate in the chemistry. We have to allow Bucky’s concepts the same pre frequency freedoms i.e. it’s not like all of a sudden we have to imagine literal metals just because the IVM is under discussion instead of XYZ. That’d be double standards, a fallacy.

Equal and opposite is an ideal in physics. “Ideal” usually means “never happens, really”. Perfect circle. What’s so perfect about what never exists, right?

Fuller’s thought experiment: look around and decide if every feature you see is: a face (F) a corner (V) or an edge (E). Can’t these interconvert? Can’t we see a corner as a whole ball, with many faces? Of course, we do this all the time. V + F = E + 2. Etc.

 

Social Media

Likely a lot of think tanks have already published findings regarding the new face of war, given social media, and global telecommunications. The curtain went up on "networking" back in the early 1980s, in terms of what people are up to. Didn't you know? We network now.

When they say "a military trains to fight the last war" that's not a criticism so much as a statement of what there is to go on and extrapolate from. When a new war starts, one finds out then if the training was apropos. Usually a lot of it is, and feedback from the theater helps the training get better.

My impression is that more people than ever are casually following world affairs at a level even State Department officials would have had trouble engaging with, at the speed of yesterday's media. 

Even while riding a city bus, one can lurk in on the latest secret discussions between German military planners thinking of ways to take out that bridge in Crimea. The stamps commemorating that event are already printed, with the celebratory cakes going stale in the fridge.

I was listening to a Canadian mercenary last night, talking about his motivations for joining a unit fighting Russia, only a few weeks out of uniform, and after fifteen years of service. He wanted to continue with the lifestyle and he had a simple ideology: to fight an evil dictatorship. He went to the front voluntarily. That's the kind of theater he felt drawn to, now that he'd tasted combat. Some guys relish the flavor. They like the bonding, the sense of a team.

Civil War History

In a strict Quaker jargon, one of my own rolling, but based in the lit, we have: ranters and quietists. The quietists typify the practice as Silent Worship is our central ritual, yet spoken ministry or sharing is also allowed and expected, which is where the ranters come in.

However, that language, of quietists versus ranters, is somewhat misleading in that these are roles more than persons. A given Friend will get more ranty, or move towards a quietist aesthetic. Quietists still talk, we're not Trappists. Neither side feels forced to concede as the tension is perennial.

Translating back in time to the North versus South in the northern Americas (Mexico and Canada played roles), Friends were often farmers and many could use the help, so when Friends in London passed a minute declaring slave owning off limits, those in the new colonies felt obliged to obey or jump ship, which was easily doable in the sense that many brands of Christianity accepted slavers with open arms.

Being in the minority, as not slave owning, Quakers started to feel the evil eye of their neighbors, as slavers saw their own way of life as moral, ordained, reflective of God's plan. "Who are these Quakers amongst us with their uppity holier than thou attitudes?" 

Much of the prevailing ideology was rooted in ideas about Noah's sons' families and their offsprings: the many races. Which was best? Or as Darwin had taught us to say (somewhat tautologically): the most fit?

Many Friends upped and left their properties in the east, especially in the southeast, and migrated west. This was still a feasible strategy for average families, but with a catch: it continued to pitch the whites against the reds (as seen in racial terms by those living the dream), shorthand for the differing genetic lines now attempting to coordinate the sharing of resources. 

Humans often do this thing called "war" when attempts at coordination fail. War is a kind of helpless flailing but with lots of lipstick and dress up (especially for guys). Other times, humans succeed in remaining coordinated.

I tell the story of Sam Hill as one such post Civil War refugee. The practice of slavery was now somehow encoded in the Amendments as prohibited, and society would find workarounds, other legal forms of forced labor. Debt is always a primary motivator, as we learned in the first five thousand years.

Whereas Sam got all the way out to Seattle and the Columbia Gorge, many Friends halted their westward journey in Indiana. 

As one might imagine, the ranting that went on within Quakerdom was often fiercely delivered and strongly felt. The whole nickname moniker of "Quaker" alludes to their excited tremorous state when "infused with the Spirit" as they might describe it, and not meaning alcohol.

The Religious Society of Friends as it is formally named, is not Pentecostalist, meaning "speaking in tongues" (the whole practice, popular in other denominations) is not encouraged, but sharing from the heart certainly is. 

Many a Meeting for Worship is broken up with remorseful sobs or quiveringly principled rants, as it's what the format allows and is designed to withstand.  People shake hands and go their separate ways, or stay for coffee or tea. A more affordable form of group psychotherapy would be hard to come by.

In pre Civil War days, when owning slaves was already grounds for being read out of Meeting (how Quakers got disbarred), the ranters were often abolitionists. They would make their true feelings known amongst other Friends yet perhaps remain mostly quiet by day, tending their farms, minding their own businesses. At night though, underground railroads were happening, as fleeing slave families were passed forward, towards prospective freedom.

Such abolitionists were also labeled immediatists, because their rants were to the effect that the abolition of slavery was long overdue, not only among Friends but amongst the populace in general. Otherwise, the hypocrisies and contradictions of going forward as a democracy, one with a Constitution, would result in the latter's demolition. 

These abolitionists were a type of unionist then, wanting to preserve the nation state as one, not fated to become two. To this end, the non-immediatist, non-abolitionists were willing to grandfather in the practice of slavery where already legal, but not extend it to new states, already foreseen as far west as Lewis and Clark had taken their survey, at the start of the 1800s. 

Other more quiet Friends were, like Lincoln, thinking that once the slaves were freed, they might move en masse to a homeland, in order to be far from their former owners. Liberia? Belize? These were among the fantasies common in that day, and some freed families and individuals did flee to these places, as well as to Haiti.

Some Friends could say to themselves they had no dog in the fight. Many unionists were quite happy to return runaway slaves, countering the underground railroaders with more respect for the autonomous region.

Much of what helped end slavery came about because humanity was industrializing, having harnessed the power of steam, fossil fuels, sun and wind in new ways. Humans had less need to rely on other humans for their calorie output and horsepower. Horses faced retirement for the same reasons. 

Humans professionalized and refined their practices around "power tools" and ages without slavery became possible, even if in practice, enslavement persists. Sociologically speaking, the planet is not free of slavery, even if the arrow of civilization points in that direction. Alfred North Whitehead held that it did, almost tautologically, as a matter of grammar. Civilization is the opposite of tyranny and oppression.

A 1900s American inventor, R. Buckminster Fuller, pointed out the positive benefits of industrialization in terms of "energy slaves", units of caloric output that represented what a hard-working human might do in a specific unit of time, in comparison to a horse. Horsepower is energy per time, not just energy without a time dimension. 

Humans might eventually do the work of a horse (e.g. plow a field), given days extra, but their horsepower is rated less because of the extra time taken. 

This "energy slave" writing proved too "hot potato" in the early 21st Century, at least among some groups I encountered in American universities, as too many racisms were still simmering, boiling over in some cases, and any use of words such as "master", "oversight", "slave" were considered too triggering on the face of it to admit within polite conversation, and academics often strive to be polite (why what they hand out is called a diploma). 

Many Meetings, frequented by academics, did away with their "Oversight Committee" nomenclature. No contemporary would want to serve as "overseer" (i.e. "supervisor") the thinking went, as the old timey language sounded too slave-owny.

One ongoing conversation within General Systems Theory (GST) -- cite Boulding -- is whether mechanization is inherently at the expense of, or is optionally a booster of, higher living standards. Of course so much depends on what counts as "higher". 

Having a bleaker history, more nightmarish, is certainly a way to lower living standards. What will we have to look back on? Consider policymaking in the light of future hindsight. Practice "anticipatory design science" (Fuller) as if your lives depended on it.

Summer Jobs

first published December 10, 2023

Diaspora Nations

Where I start with New Palestine, or Palestine for short, is it's a Diaspora Nation to begin with, as was Israel in the sense many people give the word, even through it had no existence as a jigsaw puzzle piece on the UN game board at first, much as Palestine doesn't today. 

Sure we see those maps of shrinking land areas, but those never belonged to a bona fide state, or people wouldn't be clamoring how we still need a state.  I'm seeing "Diaspora Nation" and "University" (global network of campuses or bases) as essentially synonymous. 

US citizens, counting expats and those deployed to bases outside the US, likewise comprise a Diaspora Nation of sorts. Citizens intermingle. The planet is such that Chinese, Guatemalans, Koreans and Irish Catholics all live in the same cities, even if having, in some cases, their own small and large businesses, schools, travel and real estate agents, restaurants, journalists and so on.

Imagine a Palestine, not typecast as "Muslim" (yet serving many Muslims), not an "ethno-state", that owns a fleet of cruise ships, has skyscrapers in many great cities, scattered farmlands, hotel and rental car chains. 

The idea of a "government" owning these things sounds socialistic, but let's talk about a mix of public and private sectors, and let's have no large militia given no extensive borders to defend, but lots of holy sites and many lands to develop (e.g. Guantanamo Bay if the Cubans buy in), so we need an army of engineers.

The same facilities might be shared among several Diaspora Nations in many cases, as when we place new stadium-shaped Old Man River style bases around the world. 

We might make these agreements without waiting for big wheels to turn slowly, in the UN or wherever. As private entities, we're free to get on with the formulation of our global states university system, our Promised Land.

The Nonstop Love-in

That's the title of Johnny's new (and first) book, in all caps. Johnny Stallings, a veteran of these journals (blogs). Nick Consoletti, a premier networker, made me aware of this guy, who could memorize entire Shakespeare plays, and perform them, as one man shows. His stamina is that of a high athlete. Whatever's the mental equivalent: he's in shape that way too.

The invite popped up on Facebook, with his picture on the cover. The event was at a neighborhood coffee shop and grocery store, after hours, in one of those hard to navigate niche neighborhoods, wedged between main arterials and made maze-like with one way and blocked off streets. I used to work in this neighborhood, for CUE, by then back with EMO just down the street on Bancroft.

The venue was packed, with folks queued to get their signed copies. I took a seat right away, assuming I'd get my opportunity to buy one later, and I was right. Johnny read excerpts from his book amidst adoring fans. The guy is a renowned playwright and thespian, and poet, in these parts. He's a Whitman aficionado. and I'm join him in celebrating that guy, in chapters past, when Nick was with us.

Stallings spent thirteen years doing workshops in male prisons, with the work spilling over into the women's prisons, as we later heard from the audience. Sometimes he'd stage plays, but a lot of the time it was just to gather people and do scripts or whatever. I was not part of his inner circle of volunteers and have only bumped into him randomly, on Mt. Tabor, at the bank, a few times in recent years. But I follow from a distance. This was a great opportunity to reconnect.

I only just bought the book last night and haven't sat down with it, but based on his readings, I'm already sure I'll be loving it. He well knows the book might come across to some as pollyanna, artificially upbeat where life is more complicated. Here it helps to know his audience: that prison population, already maxed out on misery, deprived of freedom, and not needing an education in how to be down and out. Johnny was that little dot of yin in a yang world, or of yang in a yin world, providing hope it'll all turn out someday, the wheel of life.

About Quakers

[an excerpt from a math4wisdom post]

In my post-military and/or slightly para-military asylum city refugee camps, we keep the fun parts (helicopters) and lose the dumb parts (e.g. murder, mayhem...)

Quakers, eventually a business-oriented bourgeois sect, evolved as a part of the trend away from organized religion and the oppressive tyranny of the English caste (class) system. Per Quaker lore, we invented fixed pricing which made wholesale / retail catalogs possible (it didn't matter what your title or position in society was). We owned Barclays Bank, Lloyds of London, Cadbury Chocolate... (but never the Quaker oats company).

A newish book called Quakernomics (not by Quakers) documents their middle-class capitalistic utopianism, which was centered around the idea of a company town, with jobs, health care and education for all. Most industrialists didn't care for this socialistic model, but it's part of New England Transcendentalism as well, this impulse to form egalitarian communities that are also prosperous (not unlike the kibbutzim in some ways, although I'm no expert).

We (the Quakers) reached our apex in power during the industrial revolution in England. Pennsylvania was to be our utopia but we were quickly outnumbered by other Anglo-Euro immigrants eager to engage in Indian Wars and other forms of awkward jerkiness characteristic of their clans.

Quaker Rufus Jones helped establish the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as the Quakers' social action arm. I've worked with AFSC quite a bit over the years, in various capacities, lots in my online journals.

Founder George Fox, popular in some military circles, advised worshippers to escape the "steeple houses" (everyday churches) and join him in talking to God directly, yet collectively, in a silence imbued with a sense of expectancy, and from meetinghouses instead (no steeples).

Religious Society of Friends is the formal name, and comes from a passage in John wherein Jesus says he wants friends, not servile servants and sycophants.

Show & Tell

What are the dynamics of learning a practice? Draw your experiences from any and every corner of your life.

What I come up with is we need to talk about the role of peers, how to work with them, in addition to who and what are they.

Let's go back to a classic classroom of kids at their desks, teacher up front, like we see in so many movies. The peers are the students, and they check each other out, for looks, for behaviors, for cues, for clues. They also check out the teacher, and learn from student teacher interactions. How the adult in the room behaves with peers one's own age, is of interest, in addition to the subject matter.

Suppose the teacher encourages show & tell, meaning she or he sets aside time during meetups for lightning talks, meaning students showcase their own work for minutes at a time. Perhaps these sessions get recorded. Perhaps students have access to the raw recordings and edit together their own works, in turn topical in show & tell (like in a filmmaking class).

A core purpose of Show & Tell is to give peers a way to assess their own performance relative to the class material, and not just relative to classroom theatrics, which I reiterate are not irrelevant. They do this by comparing their own increasing level of mastery with that of others. 

Some life coaches will butt in to say one should never compare. I say always compare but not in the judgey way of "who's better?" because in a multidimensional space (most of them are) there's no obvious "better" dimension. Develop your tastes. Learn to articulate them.

If I all walk into the same class knowing nothing about sculpting with clay (the "even playing field" metaphor), and within a week, three peers are showcasing the realistic-looking busts of famous people they've made, then I might feel motivated to practice more, to make my Show & Tell likewise interesting. We call that peer pressure, but that's only one form of it.  Call it "I want to be a star too" pressure.

Perhaps I'm a Python teacher online, and my students are all adults with jobs in IT. I'm recalling my real world experience with Saisoft here. What we did some, but what we could have done more of, is schedule lightning talks every other session, perhaps for only 15 minutes, enough time to get three show & tell presentations. 

This would have been equally applicable when I taught data visualization (histograms and like that) for Clarusway, although in this case we had whole separate practice sections as distinct from the content lectures (which I provided).

I've also been a Python teacher in person, going from school to school after school, providing content in the programmable period between "classes over, teachers done" and yet parental pickup is still at least another ninety minutes away, as they're at work. 

What to do with this time, pre rush hour? 

Greater Portland schools provide a smorgasbord of optional electives, provided by various providers, from nonprofits to for-profits. My entree was through a for-profit, Coding with Kids, and we stress show & tell for the reasons above, and more.

After some coaching in Codesters, an online Python learning environment sharing many features with MIT Scratch (a curriculum prerequisite one could say), students would try stuff on their own computers. We aimed at one laptop or desktop per child (OLPC).

I'd actually bring Chromebooks if the school had no computer lab to lend us -- but usually we used the school's lab, in which case Windows, but not always. 

After playing with Codesters for awhile, some student would raise a hand to get enqueued in the next round of Show & Tell. The student took control of the projector, and screencast their own work. It didn't have to be a work of art. 

They could also show off work they'd been doing in the meantime, meaning at home, in case the magic was working and they felt motivated to program "off the clock" as it were, during free time (we had no formal homework in this program). Occasionally a student would become "an addict" but in a socially approved way that had them rocketing up our "Coding Ladder" of coding abilities.

In sum, whether you're teaching online, or in person, if you have a cohort of students we might call peers, given them opportunities to show off their own work, in terms of what they've been learning. I realize this is not a novel suggestion. In a creative writing class, people read from their own writing. In a creative coding class, people run their little demos, be those games or animated greeting cards, or even musical numbers (both Codesters and MIT Scratch allow for musical composition, another kind of programming, to some level).

[enhanced version on Medium via LinkedIn ]

Pattern Matching

I've been continuing to explore my own ignorance, by filling in holes, so to speak. Regarding the US Civil War period for example. 

But I do so searching for patterns that match our own time, such as around the topic of forced migrations, attempts to escape, underground railroads and so on. Yes I'm talking about Gaza and the NPU.

Judging from what ChatGPT says about me, one might imagine I'm engaged in many high level discussions with peers regarding our emerging new 4D paradigm. I'd say I'm engaged in only a few such interactions. 

Even within the pro Bucky camp, the stalwarts like to throw in talk of tesseracts and n-dimensional Hilbert Space, to remind us they're math savvy. Although there's nothing wrong with doing that per se (showing off is one's prerogative), there's a corresponding risk of further diluting the Synergetics namespace.

I hope to accomplish similar ends (evincing math savvy) by merging my operations with various M4W machinations, thereby helping to buffer and mediate my relationships within academia, via a network of independent thinkers (including some PhDs, other nimble ninjas).

We don't have to once and for all time resolve this chatterbox debate about whether I'm "really" a mathematician. The LLMs take their cues from the past, which continues to aggregate, providing a continually changing picture with hindsight. I deserve a peer group regardless.

From my M4W memo of earlier today (shared on Medium):

I’m anticipating chatbot writeups about me will change over time as more journals of repute decide to include more of the math memes I’m into.

Like I keep thinking MIT Technology Review or one of those will drop an article featuring our ongoing “tetrahedral thinking” subculture, this many years after Bucky, maybe even picking up on the Martian Math angle, now that ChatGPT has spilled the beans.

Maybe I'm more like a Martin Gardner figure, playing around the edges with some intriguing language games?

I would count Quadrays as one such language game, a vector machinery that only makes sense in the context of the Synergetics volumetric hierarchy, and that perhaps explains the overall attitude of indifference towards this topic: people simply got tired of listening to RBF's "disciples" over the years and tuned out that whole subculture, which didn't seem to be getting much of anywhere (a self-fulfilling prophecy).

Of course I think that's unfortunate because much of the world was looking to Americans to define a bright future for Spaceship Earth, the Apollo Project having been a promising start. Rule by threat of violence is so comparatively weak as a strategy as to not really count as one.

So I can't say I blame the next-gens for tuning us out. In retrospect, we didn't attract enough strong readers from the humanities side of the fence. People treated Synergetics like a literal physics, and as permission to dumb it all down. True: Synergetics contains speculative content along with alternative concepts, relating to physics. But it's also about psychology and death. It's hard to read, in the way a difficult writer like James Joyce or Ezra Pound is hard to read.

Fuller considered Freud a pivotal figure, along with Einstein, as both these thinkers taught us to attend more to the unconscious and invisible side of things. Through Fuller's writings, one comes to appreciate how we act automatically (robotically) from past conditioning, with mindfulness (an optional attribute) inducing greater awareness and less awkwardness over time. He distinguished mind from brain.