Transitions

"Transitions" might be a euphemism for "altercations" in some cases, some of which I'm party to, others of which I only observe, or contribute to more as a coach, someone else the boxer in the ring.

Under "smooth transition" might be Carol's annual migration, arriving last night, Inogen in tow (an oxygen maker).  Delta, then Alaska helped her get here.  Who didn't help was the Washington party who blocked egress from my driveway.  Fortunately my neighbor was observant enough to identify another car we could get moved and I didn't have to call the towers.  I left a trenchant note on the windshield.  A minor glitch in the grand scheme of things.

No, the CoC (Code of Conduct) was not conceived with reference to the EEOC (I had a front row seat watching its evolution) much as people trained in the latter's view of things might want to ape their cultural imperialist brethren and try to lecture us on what we "really mean" by terms like "harassment" and/or "discrimination" and/or "don't be mean" -- as if we needed schooling from Washington DC in diplomacy (as if anyone did -- OK, some could benefit).  That was my reaction to the working group proposal, but I'm not one to rain on a policy wonkers' parade, let them wonk.

Then I got testy with Hansen again and got into seriously tooting my own horn.  The censors decided to give him the last word in public, with Anna in on the CC'd reply.

For one thing, the EEOC stuff is all about employer-employee relationships, but when strangers aggregate in a business hotel or campus to update one another in their shared profession, that's not about supervisors and supervisees.  Attendees are guests, of the hotel, of the conference program.  They are not slaves of, they are not employes of.  The guests are also "respecters of" various rule books, some unwritten.  There's always new space to carve out, old space to reclaim, so all of this takes work and role playing.  I favor "rotation" as a management style, which is also effective against typecasting (though some embrace an image).

There're lots of CoCs out there, lets not forget, so we also should not over-indulge the illusion that only ours is in force, as if the board game were entirely ours to set the rules around.  Not entirely true is it?  So whatever your CoC, remember you live in a hybridized world, which is not a bad thing, it's what keeps you from being a dictator, and that's a good thing (for you included).  In science fiction, each school of thought gets to sketch its Utopia, like Quakers did in Pennsylvania.  In practice, no one agenda trumps the rest.  Most European immigrants preferred to invest in Indian Wars and/or Slavery, at least in some regions.  Philadelphia was less a capital for those institutions than say... you guessed it, Washington DC again.

However, as astute historians have picked up, it's not smart to completely discount other cities and their roles.  Chicago has made a huge difference in academics, right up there with Boston.  Las Vegas took some games that were cooking in Havana and recreated them close to LA, reaping a bonanza.  New York City is way more than a financial capital, but then so are London and Tokyo, not forgetting Paris and... this is sounding like a game called "capitalism" don't you think (what world capitals do you know?)?  What's the hog capital of the world?  Where is "Toon Town" really?  Cities vie for reputation, form alliances.  Portland (Oregon) and Austin (Texas):  keeping each other weird.

Such talk excites a rebellious peasantry, suspicious of being typecast as country bumpkins, like Scarecrow of Oz, presumably a metaphor for the farmers, who knew more than they could afford to let on (this is a theory in literary criticism, linking Oz to the gold versus silver debates, theories about money).

The University of Illinois, with its advanced computer science and Mathematica-based teaching, cannot be cast as second fiddle.

But "there there" I say in mollification, I'm making use of metonymy, synechoche to be precise, wherein "Chicago" really means "the whole of that bioregion" and its peoples -- many dating back for centuries, well before the recent waves, the self-styled "documented" and their gang lands (Mafiosi, Yakuzi, whatever WASPs (a real West Side Story and of course a source of endless graffiti (some of it quite alluring))).

I talked to David Koski tonight for 95 minutes, from my side a few updates, from his a circling of the "T & E Module express", a fast train into the ticking center of the synergetics concentric hierarchy.  The T and E are both the same shape but sizes come apart based on surface:volume ratio, much as triangles come apart in spherical trig, as never similar unless congruent.  The E is a little bigger, but is likewise a logical slice of the golden cuboid and 1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron, our NCLB Polyhedron for those following the thread of Pentagon Math (and about a thread is all there is sometimes).

Blowing up the T-made Triaconta from 5 to 7.5 creates the meetup with the volume 6 rhombic dodecahedron.  Blowing up th E-made Triaconta, by phi, is what gives the phi rectangles PV edged Icosahedron of 18.51, husband to the smaller Pentagonal Dodeca, both in the Platonic Five if we wish, this "super RT" their marriage.  Volumes are in tetravolumes with unit tet as one (edge PV).  The T-modules have volume 1/24, just like the A and B, but their Triac is .9994+ the radius.  E and T come apart, as E's radius is one exactly (it's diamond-face to diamond-face diameter that of the IVM ball, again PV).

Altercations I'm in the sidelines on:

(A) Should AFSC plan on changing digs in Portland, Oregon any time soon?  Staff seems happy where it is and there's no room back at the Stark Street meetinghouse.  However, our committee seems unsettled about the issue.

(B) Should SE Chapter FNB declare itself an athletic event wherein car use is a foul, out of bounds?  Of course these rules only extend so far.  Lindsey and Satya have both set an example of what vegan powered bicyclists might contribute, were they given at least one chapter.  But it's not a matter of "being given" where anarchy reigns (no King to appeal to).  The leadership simply challenges people to not bring their car-based lifestyle onto this particular stage.  They get to everywhere else.  Where's the "no car use" town, or just part of town?  Europe seems way ahead on that one.