Schools of Tomorrow

The schools I imagine are visited by away teams, but also source away teams. It works that way in sports already, but think of a Pycon. My school sends tend peeps to a Pycon in Brazil. Another time, we're visited by Brazilians. As we were here in Portland, for that Pycon. I hosted a guest.

When an away team returns, a debriefing happens, meaning the team reports on its adventures. There's real time monitoring too though. No need to wait until the trip is over to start filing reports. The bizmo teams have their road trip reports. The travelogue as a genre is the ballpark we're aiming for.

What might an away team study? Public health policies, transportation plans, ways of providing people access to necessary infrastructure, a skill sorely lacking in many American cities. The Portland school system has dispatched several teams to Finland, thinking PPS has much to learn from how Finnish do school.

Away teams visiting a school might be studying lifestyles that work in conditions of extreme remoteness. The technology begets workflows. Lessons learned.

Free Spirits

:: gypsy nomads (ai) ::

What some of us discover about our fellow humans, which is not that surprising in retrospect, is that indoor-living, so-called, is an anathema to a percentage thereof. 

Whereas I am able to get excited by the prospect of a penthouse or simply an apartment, and have lived in several, I met fellow travelers at Occupy Portland and other places that just couldn't abide being cooped up between the four walls of anything, which doesn't mean they'd eschew all manner of shelter. They just wanted to be free of certain types of restraint.

We don't have to look far to find long-running themes behind this longing for an open sky lifestyle. The crush of cities, especially during the advent of the industrial era, was especially noxious and toxic, and the Romantics rebelled, seeking a back to nature aesthetics that resonates with us today. Although classified a Transcendentalist, a post-Romantic movement, Thoreau's lifestyle at Walden Pond set a template for "off the grid" living.

However beyond not wanting to be cooped up in a high rise or even a suburban ranch style domicile, is not wanting the encumbrances of another system's bureaucracy, where "the other" in this case comprises all those "normies" who want to play-act being members of various nation-states. Some humans take a look at that whole game and would rather opt out.  "No citizenship for me thank you" is their polite enough refusal to go along. Is it that the "right of citizenship" is actually something more mandatory than a right? A duty even? Is a person free to surrender citizenship without adopting another?

Certainly many people would love citizenship in a "real country" that gave them rights to visit other countries besides the real one. If you don't have enough documentation to cross any border whatsoever, then the game of borders will likely seem awfully onerous. You're denied citizenship and therefore even the human right to go somewhere else, where you won't be a citizen either.  Once a person reaches adulthood without citizenship in any country, it's no piece of cake to finally find one.

What the United Nations might have done is come up with a catch-all default nation that anyone could choose if falling through the cracks otherwise.  Plain Vanilla Nation (PVN) would at least provide enough documentation, e.g a passport and ID card, to merit taking out loans, buying property, booking passage. But no, that would have been too easy.

However, even with a PVN in place and/or much easier rules, a percentage of my fellow humans will prefer not to become citizens of any country. I'm thinking as a matter of human rights, their preferences should be respected. 

However, the flip side is an individual does make waves and thereby builds up karma and it's unreasonable to grant a cloak of invisibility to someone who is going to be impacting planetary history, even if only in a small way (who's to judge?). That's why we give each other names, titles, roles, credentials: to keep records and let others predict what they're getting into, if they let so and so join their ranks.  

So whereas I empathize with those wishing to escape citizenship in any nation, I'm not seeing "incognito mode" as a basic human right on the same level.  Just because we don't record your nationality doesn't mean we can't open a file and register events along your timeline.  You'll want a timeline too, for your own protection in some scenarios. You may work harder than most to not show up in files or on radars and I understand that's your preference.

Prompt: Gypsies sit around campfire, enjoying guitar. Some children are wearing VR goggles. HDTV screens glow through the windows of gypsy caravans. Moonlight. Horses.

:: ibid ::

On Color Blindness

I was never a big fan of “color blind” when applied to “race” as a concept. But then I admit up front to having a lot of suspicion of, and bias against, those ethnicities that aspire to teach us about their various “races” (is this a sporting event?).

I accept the kind of “blindness” (we call it) that makes what most would see as two colors seem the same. But then someone had the idea to extend this ophthalmological usage into the realm of eying skin color, making it a be virtue to have a kind of blindness to color, versus an illness or disability.

My views are more statistical:  it’s easy to picture a world wherein skin color really is a reliable guide to ethnicity and who knows what else, maybe extreme correlation in other attributes. After centuries of eugenic breeding, we probably could create the racial regime we (faux “we” as in “not me”) wish we had. Speculative fiction has shown us some of the ramifications. 

We’re good at creating mono-cultures. Sucking all the imagination out of something is one of our specialties. We could have a world wherein everyone was a card-carrying white, brown, black, yellow or red (pure races) with recognized admixtures as “mixed race” impure. If you’re into racism, that probably sounds like heaven.

However as more migrants wander the world, growing to adulthood as itinerants, they learn that skin color in itself is not a reliable guide to much of anything, until maybe one starts to localize, in which case this white guy standing next to me in the supermarket probably is carrying, they all do in this town, people of any color. 

Like duh if she’s wearing a uniform, the kind designed to advertise one’s state supported right to exercise violence against others (talking about “police” but exactly what that means varies widely).

I’m just saying as a matter of self interest and self survival, don’t leap to conclusions based on a facile, unconscious manner, regarding other attributes of a person going on too few clues. And how many clues are too few is what statistics is all about as a subject. 

How small and efficient a data set might I rely on, to predict the future? 

That’s like asking what dashboard of what instruments. You need a temperature gauge (let’s say) and a sense of altitude (aloofness?). What instrument panel would you dare fly by?

I’m saying “skin color” as a dashboard instrument likely dates your dashboard i.e. I can assume more about you if you jump to conclusions, then you should about me, just because I act and look “white” in some sense (including skin color). 

The clueless hick in some movie, most benignly a harmless clown, will behave in a stupid manner towards someone he incorrectly and absurdly concludes he should diss. The crowd roars with laughter.

My ethnicity may not be readily apparent even to me.  In novels and movies, those of a certain type, raised by those of another type, are finally reunited with others of their own kind. These make good animal stories sometimes. The chosen all converge, having been seen as strange in their respective villages.

I’d like people to be pleased with their skin color and looks more generally, as I tend to benefit to the extent the planetary population experiences a satisfying enough level of happiness. My living standards drop to the extent everyone around me is miserable, as I’ll feel miserable too in that case.

I’m all for others having happiness, starting with being OK with themselves. But all that is easier said than done as people may have unrealizable ideals for themselves and thereby experience much frustration if there’s no clear progress happening towards that end. Sometimes who you want to play is not how you’re cast. Many could characterize their situations in these terms, whereas a few claim to be living their dreams.

In such a happy world, getting a read on you skin color in RGB terms (it would vary around your body) would not seem surreal or creepy as you would not be thinking in paranoid terms, anymore than when you color match a paint to the color of your house. 

You have the eye of an oil painter with a canvas, brushes and pallet. With such any eye, you’d hardly wish a form of blindness upon yourself. You’d wish for the contrary. Skins are beautiful, eyes too. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not into color blindness.

To be fair, I could translate the so-called virtue of color-blindness into terms I’d more agree with. We want to be able to tune out the irrelevant given finite bandwidth to what’s relevant. We all want the sense to sense what’s important and that includes schooling our senses to overlook, marginalize or otherwise deprioritize what’s not germane. 

Sometimes metaphors, like mattresses, need to be turned over and lied on their other side. To overturn and air out is not an implicit criticism of those who went before and flipped them from where they were. Every generation begets its flips or tries to. Some ethnicities pretty much specialize in flipping (or “revectoring” as I call it).

Media Campaigns

To label the above TV test pattern a case of “cultural appropriation” is one gestalt one could apply. My view is closer to: oh good, n8v America has taken over television i.e. the “appropriation” is going the other way and now maybe the weather reports will be more bioregional, not cutting off at these arbitrary “white man” borders, not that I believe “whites” form a race e.g. the Aryans, the Pueblo of the Caucasus, with me somehow a member of their tribe.

My “media campaigns” don’t tend to have a lot of voltage behind them. My Pirate Party doesn’t rake in the dough, given the esoteric nature of our planks and platform. 

We support new forms of public schooling geared towards building democratic institutions and training future diplomats. As it stands, private prep school alumni remain over-represented in the diplomatic corps (including the Peace Corps) and under-represented in the rank and file military i.e. the Smedley Butler racketeers, employees of USSA-style military socialism with capitalistic characteristics i.e. privatized profits.

In another campaign, I poke fun at the Qyoobists (hint: “Cube-ists”) and no one has a clue what I’m talking about. I like to denigrate and lambast a pseudo-ethnicity, science fictional at best, that no one believes in: people who worship the cube as their golden calf, and make it their symbol of rationality. Sure being “against” these people sounds surreal by design. Talk about straw men!

Another campaign involved taking a test pattern such as the one above and replacing the steady tone soundtrack with something more auditorily interesting: Azan. Why not immerse any viewers tuning in a test pattern in some American heritage of that flavor, Islam having been present in the Americas for some centuries, as a consequence of slavery especially although not exclusively?

However the TV stations mostly eschew test patterns these days and viewers are forgetting what they are and how they would appear in the wee hours of the morning, when a station had no other programming to offer. 

At least we’re free to publish share those Azan segments on YouTube, perhaps unlisted, and perhaps with creative modifications of the test pattern design.

Reflections on Racism

Perhaps to more clearly register my disdain for ethnicities which indulge in race talk, I’ll revert to “Caucasoidal” and maybe go back to “Negroid” and “Negroidal”. 

I was listening to Candace Owens going on around whether candidate Harris was truly black or just colored, and whether she was a deplorable horrible person for cooking collard greens in the bathtub, and sharing a recipe online. 

For Owens, this was posturing, whereas for me it sounded like a genetically complex individual (aren’t we all) attempting to convey her ethnicity, which contained this and that in some Venn Diagram. We could call greens a southern food without getting too chromosomal or hormonal about it. Does Kamala also eat crawdads?

Also, in popular parlance, even though the courts had desegregated schools on paper, it still wasn’t happening, because, as Candace points out, people tended to live in segregated neighborhoods because of history. Segregation is a social phenomenon, and even if Apartheid is over, that doesn’t mean the ghetto townships are gone.

Just saying: stuff on paper, through legislation, is not the whole difference and may make next to no difference at all, as when people flaunt the law, or perhaps scoff at it. “Thou shalt not discriminate against Russian speakers”. Yeah right, I can hear the ridicule among an inflamed Russophobic populace (hypothetical). Private clubs (e.g. NATO) might still keep them out, whole gated communities.

I’m happy to see Kamala as a small girl, feeling herself to be in the front line against desegregation even though bussing wasn’t in itself the legal act of desegregation, which happened earlier in her region, through the courts and legislation. 

Or rather, it was new policy aiming to standardize the schools in some meaningful sense, rather than by appealing to some pie-in-the-sky court decision. 

I just didn’t see a need for Owens to sound so scandalized, because in her little book of definitions, the fight against desegregation had already been won by the time Kamala was a school girl in Berkeley. That’s sleight of hand, to make courts the authority, and not anthropologists.

In asking if we really want to go back to talking about octamaroons and race as some kind of blood substance, Kamala is hoping the answer is no, that we aren’t really that fixated on genetic makeup. 

But Candace herself, racially Negroid, says the answer is yes, we want to speak precisely in racial terms (an oxymoron). As a Caucasoid, I’ll leave that to her then, as I don’t believe it can be done.

Day After Halloween Chatter

Without doing any deep dig as of yet, I'm going to speculate the two memes, "flying spaghetti monster" (FSM) and "string theory" have already amalgamated in some memeplex, hither or yon. Definitely hither, in that I've thought of it, but I'm speculating yon also.

In my cultspeak namespace we already have an identifying functor type object connecting FSM to "partially overlapping scenarios" i.e. that's a spaghetti image also, with hypertoons, and the FSI tetrahelix tunnels — all this stuff blogged about already.

Switching gears, we made it through another Halloween, sans many of the formerly living, and we miss them, will sometime join them. We had a drizzle going, plus the west side of Chavez is less homey than the east side, in terms of costume density per sidewalk. At least that was our shared experience, me, Derek and Dr. D.

My job had me teaching Python upstairs, remotely, over Zoom, fiber optic, while Dr. D. and then Derek (aka "Deke") started minding the door. We had Zoltar outside on a cushy chair, not especially able to sense vibrations (the porch is concrete), so kids climbing the stairs would not set him off.

However, whoever was handing out candy only had to tap on Zoltar's orb, and he'd start randomly reciting one of his four routine remarks, always ending in a cackle. Zoltar has been a mascot in some chapters, such as around this time in 2019, when Lattice Gallery popped up full of c6xty et al.

Speaking of c6xty, I have that pyramid out front, that looks like soccer balls stacked up but kept from unstacking by some basket weaving of plastic members. Everything is plastic, which some of my anti-plastic friends are not really into, but that's the Anthropocene for ya. 

So I added new Christmas lights, all white, with a white chord. I got over 68 feet of 'em for about $11 on sale at the Hawthorne Fred Meyer.

They won't last long though. I'll journal when they go out -- they'll be on through the winter nightly, as our neighborhood supports outdoor lighting like that, as permitted / encouraged decor. My plastic pyramid is pretty popular. I'm the mathematician on the block according to neighbors three doors down (we've talked about the pyramid, when I go by with my dog, and she told me neighbors in between say I'm a mathematician -- so what does the chatterbox say?).

More Pipeline Adventures

The dog and I retired for the night amidst first reports of another salvo in a tit for tat that’s been mostly tat, talking about Mesopotamia again. We got up early and came to Sam’s farm. Sam has been studying the history of Mesopotamia, which apparently hosted a culture that, for some three thousand years, got by with no discernible government, at least in terms of royalty, lineage and like that. I’ll have to ask him the name of this civilization at dinner.

The field work today was unloading lots of three inch pipe segments from the irrigation pipe trailer, pulled by the all purpose Gator, so we could fill it again, from pipes still amidst the flowers. Acres and acres of beautiful flowers. We took a couple breaks, one for me to go get my boots on. We may do some more pipe line dismantling tomorrow, depending on weather. Josh came by and he and Sam spoke casually but in earnest regarding the rest of this year and next year’s first growing season.

University of Oregon was playing Illinois today, here in Eugene. I say “here” because the farm is near the adjacent community of Springfield, home of Homer Simpson per local lore.

My cohort, the group I’m guiding through the foothills of Python, switched over to studying Git for a couple days, letting me off the hook.I packed the car and took off. By the time the sun was coming into view, lighting up the sky, we were already south of Salem on I-5. The rest stop was all about me, not Sydney. I wanted a thermos cup of coffee and a couple plain donuts. The drive is about two hours.

The meetup hosted by BFI, featuring D.W. Jacobs, was still giving me some ideas about how we might take it from here with the BEAST modules, now BASKET. David Koski is tackling the icosidodecahedron (ID), the RT’s dual, sizing it in a specific way vis-a-vis the 2F Cube of volume 24. I’m behind having an ID to play with in my flextegrity.py sandbox. For outputting to POV-Ray. 

For those of y’all new to these blogs, Flextegrity is a trademark given by this farm’s owner to his lattice-based inventions, within which branded category one has sub-brands, such as C6XTY. We did a whole museum on C6XTY in December of 2019, in downtown Portland. Lattice Gallery we called it. As a contracted 3D graphics guy, I developed my Python around this same lattice, hence the module name is no coincidence. My GIFs and PNGs have featured prominently in the Flextegrity corpus.

In terms of overlapping scenarios, Sam knew Bucky Fuller through the Applewhites from back in the DC metro area. He went with Bucky to the Philippines as a guest of the Marcos family, around the same time my dad was there working for UNDP, UP, USAID and maybe some others. I was in high school at the time, at ISM, which just had a reunion in Dallas, which I attended vicariously through Facebook.

Sam’s grandparents were the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald of Great Gatsby fame (an American novelist), and Zelda, a southern belle from Alabama or something along those lines. However it’s not like having famous grandparents entitles one to a farm in the Willamette Valley, some of the best farming country in the world. Sam’s entrepreneurial ventures encompass way more than just the Flextegrity chapter. I’m not the expert, more just a beneficiary with a shared interest in Lattice Graphics and other matters lattice related.

I’m sure that sounds cryptic to outsiders (the lattice stuff) so it helps to know that Bucky Fuller, the American inventor and futurist mentioned above, had a fondness for a uniform distribution of points in space known to science by several names, and to architects as the octet truss. NASA uses it a lot, for space frames, but so do ordinary Earth-focused construction companies. Alexander Graham Bell famously dove into the same scaffolding. If your high school failed to connect the dots for you here, that might be symptomatic of the dark ages we’ve been enjoying. Keep bouncing around in these journals if you wish to bone up on what you’ve been missing.

Hate Watching

In the world of TV criticism, we have this concept of “hate watching”. I heard one of the talking heads in a YouTube use that just now, and I was reminded of an old train of thought that rattles through my head from time to time, to wit that not paying for what you’re viewing is not always this unprincipled thing one does on the sly, while maybe feeling guilty if caught doing it. 

No, sometimes a censor watches videos by an adversary, looking for a good excuse to take it down. We’re free to make up a model here: let’s have the censor really hate that X is going out to viewers, such that the last thing the censor wants to do is support X financially. 

When you consider programming destructive and want to counter it, you do not, in the same moment, fish for your Visa card. You want to monitor, maybe frustrate, not support.

Without meaning to become a Bible thumper, I will point to the famous dictum of Jesus that one should “love not the world” (John 3:16). You’re free to “hate watch” all the ignorance and cruelty in a way that focuses your mind and gives you more powers as a monitor and supervisor.

Out of “hate watching” comes distance, disavowal, non-complicity, one might say innocence, but not apathetic aloofness. To “hate X” is to have some stake in X and its outcome. The divided mind is a divided will. Rather than be of two minds about something, be clear what your ethical duty is: to disrupt, obstruct and derail.

Returning to the theme of jihad, said world you disown may include your own sorry psyche, meaning you’re actively inferring your new psyche into existence. Self hate in this sense is more like preparing to jettison a booster, or to break free of an eggshell. You hate being stuck in a form you’re clearly growing beyond. There’s not much victimhood nor even fear, only fury. The Biblically minded speak of righteous wrath, but there’s no need to be loud about it.

Ghost Nations

:: gentrification ::

The world is replete with peoples who believe they would benefit from nationhood if only the nation in question existed, but it's not on the list. But already it's not that simple: maybe it does exist, but as a sub-nation within another nation: the Navajo nation comes to mind. It's defined within US law. But what is the US defined within? A community of nations, which tries to achieve some form of stability and rules based order, but fails in many dimensions.

What's to keep a Ghost Nation from recruiting citizens without upsetting pre-existing citizenships? A Ghost Nation has no existence in the eyes of the United Nations, or maybe quasi-existence. Take Palestine for example. Some states recognize it as a state, but there's not enough gravitas in the picture to rescue its would-be citizens from extermination programs undertaken by some UN members.

That the UN is unable to keep its own members from cross-border incursions by military forces is a fact of life. Indeed, frustration with international law has led to a general breakdown in the whole structure, leaving the question open as to whether this current configuration was more transitory than many at first believed. Is anyone working on restoring its integrity?

When people hear other people say "race is a social construct" they have no idea what that means. Aren't nations social constructs too then? Yet we take them seriously. Just because a concept is a "social construct" doesn't mean it comes with a strong opt out option. Racist states insist on labeling by race, which is how we know they're racist. You can't have apartheid if people won't play the game in the first place.

Those hoping to keep the idea of nation-states intact may not see time running out the way I do. They see nothing to be concerned about. But then I'm not seeing anything all that melodramatic about calling out melodrama. 

We all know what programming means. We're programmed to act in our various roles as social creatures. I'm not seeing that changing or needing to change. What's always changing are the programs themselves, not our ability to self-reprogram.

In the newer programs, perhaps one gains citizenship in a ghost nation without moving anywhere. There's no specific place you need to be to be a citizen of X. On the other hand, you may be expected to fulfill  duties of citizenship in some way, let's say not by joining a military necessarily, but maybe that too. Citizens work to serve their fellow citizens. Service to others is what gives rise to a sense of nationhood.

Existing UN member nations may feel their sovereignty is threatened by ghost nations, but given they've  learned to co-exist with various global entities already, such as banks, shipping companies, airlines, oil companies... it's not a stretch to see ghost nations as akin to universities, with spread-around campus facilities. 

That's how I'm seeing Palestine these days. 

Not all its facilities are in West Asia by a long shot. Nor is its citizenship clearly defined. People of any religion might choose to "dualize" and identify as Palestinian in addition. I could be a Palestinian. So could you. We could have another million Palestinians by the end of the month, which sounds pretty meaningless and empty. So what? I'm not saying I know exactly. I'm exploring the space of possibilities.

Doing Philosophy in 2024

I'm not using chatbots myself yet much, not directly, but I'll share prompts with collaborators and get results back, plus I do hands on text-to-image almost daily. Ergo, if asked whether I use AI on the job, I'll definitely cop to it.

Case in point: I was doing text-to-image drawing from one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous memes: beetle in a box. LW was a 20th century luminary around whom a huge volume of secondary literature has been generated, about the man, about his philosophies. Ergo the LLM had a lot to train on.

Possible prompt: Write a few pithy paragraphs about the point Ludwig Wittgenstein was trying to make in his Philosophical Investigations when he wrote about the beetle in the box that only he could see into. He was doing philosophy of language, we know that much. Say a few things about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in the context of contemporary philosophy more generally.

In the Facebook Epistemology chatter (General - anything goes), Isaiah posted two audios voicing his concerns about abusing AI: in sum, using it to off-load practicing thinking and thereby rendering oneself dumb minus continuous propping up by AI. 

Fallon circled Perplexity as the best chatbot to use and shared what Perplexity came back with when prompted as shown above (possible prompt).

Perplexity:  

In his later work, particularly in "Philosophical Investigations," Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the "beetle in the box" analogy to illustrate the private language argument. He suggests that if everyone had a box with something called a "beetle" inside, but no one could see into anyone else's box, the term "beetle" would have no public meaning. This demonstrates that language derives its meaning from public use, not private experiences.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy marked a shift from his earlier views in the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," where he saw language as a logical structure mirroring reality. In contrast, his later work emphasizes language as a social activity, where meaning is determined by use within specific contexts or "language games"25. This perspective has influenced contemporary philosophy by challenging the idea of fixed meanings and highlighting the fluidity and context-dependence of language.

KU: the above two paragraphs are quite acceptable. The secondary literature is vast.

KU (copypasta from chat window): 

I appreciate Isaiah's voiced qualms re chatbot abuse. In this particular case I'm in the role of human expert who knows the Wittgenstein stuff really well and wants to see if the chatbot has anything well-informed to offer. 

My friend Daniel whom I conspire with on Math4Wisdom (that Coda I mentioned) has access to Perplexity and I agree it seems one of the best. 

There's another topic "Quadray Coordinates" (see Wikipedia) which hardly anyone but me and a few others know about, meaning there's precious little secondary literature [typo fixed] to train on, and not surprisingly, even Perplexity gave back a lot of crap when Daniel prompted it about quadrays. But I bet down the road, when more training data exists, the quality of chatbot chatter will much improve.