E Module Mensuration

Quoting from Dave:

T = 1/24 = .0416666
E = (√2/8)(ø^-3) = .0417313

So, the T & E modules are close in volume, and the difference was what Fuller expounded on in Synergetics 2.

If the Rhombic Triacontahedron is 120T modules, it has a volume of 5 tetra volumes. Alas, the "radius" was not exactly 1, but .999483.

So, the Rhombic Triacontahedron's volume was really 5.007758 or 120 E modules, when the radius is exactly 1. Kirby figured that out, how to get the radius for the exact volume 5 Rhombic Triacontahedron, which is .999483 or (2/3)^(1/3)((ø^1)/√2)).

The radius in question for the Rhombic Triacontahedron is from the origin to the center of the rhombus. The radius to the long leg to the short leg is ø^1:ø^0:ø^-1 or 1.618034:1.000000:.618034.

This was an epiphany for me since the E module derived from the Rhombic Triacontahedron had a radius of 1, so the legs were .618034 and .381966.

Increasing the edges by ø^1 we have a long diagonal on the Rhombic Triacontahedron that is the same as the icosahedron's edge of 2, which fully inscribes within the Super Rhombic Triacontahedron.

By increasing the radius by ø^1 for the 5.007758 E module Rhombic Triacontahedron, we get the Super Rhombic Triacontahedron.

Thusly, an E module is 120th of the 5+ volume Rhombic Triacontahedron or (√2/8)(ø^-3), and the next larger sized E module derived from the Super Rhombic Triacontahedron is ø^3 larger or √2/8 expressed as E3.

Quoting from me:

The blue icosa is the standard 18.51 of Synergetics, as is the yellow cubocta ("VE") of volume 20. The other shapes are all non-standard in having that 1.851 edge, 1/10th of the volume number, but here an edge.  The green cubocta, has those smaller edges, which is in turn the interval for the whole 4F tetrahedron.

Which is why the yellow cubocta sticks out. What defines the "non-standards" is the tetrahedron to which our standard icosahedron is flush.  The small green cubocta has a volume between 15 and 16 whereas the yellow one has volume 20 as you know.

The icosahedron + its dual = rhombic triacontahedron of whatever size.  In the jargon Koski and I have been using, the "super RT" would be the standard (18.51) icosahedron + its dual, combining to form this rather large combo.

It's when you scale down that super-RT by 1/phi that you get the RT mother-of-Emods i.e. 120th of such is what is named an "E module" in Synergetics.  David measures in those, and phi-up, phi-down versions of those, in terms of place value (base).  The video expresses volumes in "super-RT sized Es" plus standard Es, one could say.
  

Then in Synergetics we have the "T module", a fine distinction, in that the T's volume is exactly that of the A's and B's, whereas the E's is only really close (the exact ratio being a focus in Synergetics 2 another number with phi in it, though Fuller avoided greek letter stuff).

The Thoughtless Generation

The horrific mutilation and scarring of Mt. Tabor, an historic site, is due to begin this October.

The Southeast Examiner ('The Fast Track Reservoir Disconnect' by Midge Pierce, April 2014) pleads with neighbors to fight this elective mastectomy / self-disfigurement, but for $7 million, the contractor-mercenaries are lined up behind one of the most loathed politicians in Portland's history, Nick Fish.

This ignorant and suicidal attack on our own infrastructure and water system is psychopathic to the core, yet citizens already know that governments will run amuck and commit to policies more damaging than any army of vandals could ever hope to imitate.

OMSI, a once great science museum, has not heeded proposals to model the civic water system to its citizens.  I think by now it's too late.

This sell-out, once great museum is complicit in the denigration of Portland's living standards, in its refusal to go with place-based education.

We all learn to overlook what's happening locally in exchange for the fiction of "caring" globally.  Sappy liberals are as much to blame as butt-ignorant ditto heads.

Our "environmentalist state" is in the process of being betrayed at the deepest level, by the odious Nick Fish in Portland, and by a weak / spineless governor, all set to let the coal economy exploit our infrastructure for the purely private gain of greedy idiocrats.

Politicians:  the scum of the Earth.

Speaking of betrayal by mercenaries, the fast tracking of the Transpacific Partnership trade "agreement" has attracted nothing but scorn from Cascadians.  This is the process by which governments delegitimize themselves and commend themselves to the ash heap of history.

We aren't surprised to see Washington DC first in line to self-disembowel.  That city has been a gutless wonder for longer than I can remember, a ceaseless source of bad / depraved decisions.  Why do people listen to DC anymore?  I know I don't.

May the family names and company brands of those who participate in the war on Mt. Tabor live on in infamy as traitors to our city.  Historians, do your homework.  These were among the truly depraved of our planet, as bad as Blackwater.

Remember not to be like them.  Have some self pride.  Be a generation the world celebrates, not an execrable monster of which history is ashamed.

HB2U YouTube

As We May Think...

If we watch enough commercials...

:: with thanks to DK ::

Episode Two

:: sleepless in Portland ::

Bravo on Episode Two, an effective video.

I think we might get some jail terms for certain cops pretty soon.  Worth prosecuting.

The miss-assumption of the propertied that they own the public lands and infrastructure, and that the police work for them, against others also entitled to public access, is here acted out in a kind of high stakes street theater.  Private wealth versus democracy.

As soon as the police side with private wealth against an entitled public, they become goons and thugs, regardless of outward uniform.

The City of Portland is not getting the police protection it deserves, so long as the mayor behaves like a hostage to the Business Plot er Alliance.

Here's a link to Episode One.

Cramming on Unicode

I floated the idea of having Unicode a theme for OST during OSCON this year, with OST a subdivision of ORM.  That got me cramming on Safari, plus I've been looking over Holden's shoulder as he blasts a set of I-Python Notebooks out to Amazon for review, some of which focus on Python 3.x's byte, bytearray, and str type objects.  That's my focus here.

To recap:  I have a somewhat roller coaster like curriculum that gives both an encouraging and a grim look at humans and their history.

The story of Unicode, its development, is more or less a story of collaboration against the odds, laying a kind of Tower of Babel foundation, but without the intent to build toward a pinnacle, with one language winning out.  On the contrary, there's still room for entirely new languages.  This was forsightful planning and so an encouraging story.

The negative dip into grim times is the rounding up of peoples in extermination camps, working them to death in poor conditions, with "keeping tabs" using "Hollerith machines" by IBM, the beginnings of our vast databases, both SQL and noSQL.  Using computers to hunt down and destroy entire ethnicities, to commit genocide, is one of those dark patterns, as it keeps happening in history and engineering has served to amplify and intensify the pattern's efficiency and viciousness.

Back to the Unicode story, UTF-8 is what saved its bacon, as ASCII-users were not about to bloat their files with little payback.  But then we should remember about patient names and the ability of Unicode to represent a patient's name in a native language on the monitors, perhaps with a romanized phonetic reading ("romanji") for the nurses and doctors.  Unicode lets you display fluency by quoting multiple languages in the same document.

In UTF-8, the boundary between ASCII proper and the encompassing Latin-1 is at code point 128.  With the first bit now occupied, two will be needed (at minimum) from now on, and the leading byte will show 110, 1110, 11110, 111110, 1111110 indicating up to "six cars total" (including the "engine" or leading byte).

Like a train of three bytes would go:  1110 0001 + 1010 0000 + 1011 0000 where I'm using + to separate the bit patterns.  Payload bits would be the xs in 1110 xxxx + 10xx xxxx + 10xx xxxx i.e. there's room for 16 payload bits for a total of 2**16 or 65536 code points, all within in reach of this three byte encoding, with more bytes waiting in the wings.

What is 0001 10 0000 11 0000 as a decimal number?  Unicode is just a consecutive numbering of a huge inventory of font-provided glyphs.  Turns out its 6192, which happens to be the Mongolian letter sa.

Hominins (ISEPP lecture)

I shirked my responsibilities as a member of Oversight Committee to attend this alternate church venue for a science lecture on 4.4 million year old fossil records of hominins.

Dr. Tom White is an expert, and he correctly praised Terry of ISEPP for the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture series, which has brought the best minds to Portland, to edify our populace.

Best if Cascadia has a literate capital, don't ya think? -- unless our capital is Seattle, which I'm all for, in the brochures for public consumption.

Anyway, we learned a lot.  Africa seems to be the matrix for early homonin development.  A "homonin" is a human lineage specialist species whereas "hominid" includes the apes, which are seen as branching off just a million or so years before this latest species, Ardi's.

Ardi's species predates Lucy's and so is probably Lucy's ancestor type.

Chimps spring from a branch that forked earlier, in that great Github in the Sky we call "evolution" (or "goalless morphing in response to feedback" if you want to remove the "march of progress" spin that adheres to much of the evolutionist talk).

I will piggy-back my thanks atop Dr. White's, to Terry, for helping make Portland a capital, an intellectual gemstone.

Too bad about the impending earthquake.  Maybe with less of an ice age thanks to global warming it'll be deferred?  Hope springs eternal.  Plate tectonics don't care that much about ice or no ice.

Tom did a lot to promote evidence and reason as the two prongs of science.  People are welcome to generate and publish texts on a different basis, just don't call it science, was his warning / advice / plea.

Speculations sometimes go off the deep end into pure storytelling and myth,  as we find in Fuller's Critical Path and later Tetrascroll (subtitled "a cosmic fairy tale").

Fuller is capable of doing science (applying reason to evidence) and contributing to it, however he's more of a literary figure, like Mark Twain.  "Bucky" aka "Dr. R.B. Fuller" made forays into science but in some dimension only camped there.  His literary base was more a latter day Neoplatonism, a philosophy, not in the sense of "Christian" so much as "Geometric" i.e. concerned with Platonic Forms.

Some of Dr. Fuller's wild speculations, about human prehistory for example, explore in a surreal space of mytho-graphic imagery, exciting to the intuition perhaps, but at best proto-scientific.

Someday we may have tools to "transmit life-forming information" to other planets, other than I Love Lucy, and thereby beam ourselves (and favorite "pets" e.g. dolphins) to a post Earthian location, not talking about Mars.  But such is the stuff of science fiction, not science per se.

Corporation Meeting (2014)

This is my final year as a Corporation Member of the AFSC.  I've served at least one earlier three year term.

On the theory that Yearly Meetings appoint whom they choose, and AFSC receives these appointees without approving them, I was able to "sneak in" as an attender (and former member), promoting my theory that attenders may be as actively Quaker as members and should not be treated as second class in principle.

So in that sense NPYM is flaunting the AFSC's by-laws, which insist, implicitly, that "a Quaker" be defined as a "a member of a Yearly Meeting".  I've recorded my non-member status in the surveys sent around to us and no one has raised a fuss.

The board, which is more central and more powerful in terms of AFSC's governance, does allow non-Quakers to serve (up to 20%), which I suppose might cover people such as myself, who claim to be Quaker, but choose not to signify this attribute through the institution of recorded membership.  I'm not on the board however.

Attenders, sometimes more active than members, and on occasion more "cutting edge" in their practice, should not be overlooked when it comes to serving on the AFSC corporation.  One reason some have not sought membership -- as when a same-sex couple finds the local meetings still refuse to take their marriage under its care -- is their practice is ahead of the curve.

I shared these concerns and perspectives at one of the breakout sessions.  Lucy Duncan agreed these were relevant and important concerns.  I also reiterated my view that FCNL and AFSC need to maintain distinct identities.  Succinctly:  FNCL is about changing the law, whereas AFSC is about "breaking" the law (think civil rights movement).

In another meeting we played a board game about the horrifyingly silly-fascist nation-state game, wherein humans are penned in at birth and disallowed much freedom of movement unless especially economically privileged.  I played an undocumented Polish guy with no possibility of US citizenship.  I worked in a restaurant in Philadelphia or somewhere, with no other family here.  Most of us weren't going to reach the citizenship goal.  The game is rigged that way, with an outer loop that just goes in a circle.

I'm thinking of the philosopher Rene Descartes wandering around Europe with has valet, a cross between a tourist and military journalist.  With an EU passport, he might get away with that today.  Jesus Christ would have no hope of getting an employment-based visa to the US in our day, having only low level carpentry skills -- "Rabbi" wouldn't qualify as a skill unless he had a baccalaureate degree -- and coming as he did from an ethnic minority background.

So why doesn't the AFSC make more use of the nation-free Dymaxion Projection?  Chris gave a slide show on that at a math-GIS meetup, which I missed because of our program (malesh -- too bad).  But shouldn't Fuller's anti-nationalism (along with Einstein's) get some notoriety from Friends?  He, like Bayard Rustin, was also a Medal of Freedom winner.

We have this myth that the US does not export a large number of migrant workers to the rest of the world i.e. that it's a one way street.  That's because migrants in Okinawa, Afghanistan, Germany, and Korea, Marshall Islands, and so on, are accounted as "US military personnel" vs. "migrant workers".

Catching Up

Lots going on.  I watched eXistenZ yet again, with SH and CP, LW drifting in and out, but then forgot to return it to Movie Madness.  I did that today, walking back by the Hawthorne Liquor Store, picking up vodka for me, gin for SH.   

Movie Madness had some oldster stars behind tables, selling souvenirs / memorabilia around the 38th anniversary of Carrie, with an exclusive engagement at The Hollywood Theater on Sandy tonight.  I was sorely tempted to go, believe you me, but it's one of the few DVDs I own and I'm on a budget, time/energy-wise.

Speaking of vodka, I listened in on some "over the fence" chatter (figuratively) regarding the situation in Ukraine, a major Python state.  UA.pycon has been on of the biggest [ cancelled in 2014! ].  US.pycon is not even technically within the 50 states this year or next, but the way I think of it, it's a suggestion to that population center (US) where to go (in Canada) for the Pycon in their area (but wouldn't Canadians go there too?).  I'd say CA.pycon is in Montreal this year, but that's not how it's seen:  a different management team plans each convergence.

It's more the Flying Circus model:  US.pycon is on tour in Canada, a new opportunity for Canadians, to have it close by.

Is there a RU.pycon?  Yes indeed, most certainly.  Russia is a Python state too.

Which topic brings me to NATO (one of my nicknames is "nato professor").  The Quaker meetinghouse was turned over last night to Veterans for Peace and fellow travelers, an inter-generational shindig twixt Vietnam vets and Gulf War vets, among others.  The public was welcome, and for them, the (Netflix-available?) Sir! No Sir! was recommended.

What's Roz Savage up to these days?  Talk about catching up... I should visit her web site.  We had dinner together once, she won't remember.  I was somewhat smitten, but then I'm prone to being smit (smited).

Segue from Smite:  that's what David Koski called "half-a-Mite" -- a pun.  The half-Mite or Smite is a shape at the root of a language game called space-filling with Archimedean honeycomb duals.

Lastly, Lindsey had on loan from her girlfriend Melody, an interesting compilation of Edgar Allen Poe stories on DVD, with young / original talent, including Jane Fonda.  Walker'd seen the first episode with Melody, the last three with me, leaving one left for me to catch up on before returning it to Multnomah County Library.

Jane's right up there with Sissy Spacek as one alluring / interesting babe, many vets would agree (of any gender); not that I'm a vet, though I've spent time on bases.  Ex-marine Gill Gilleland was my scuba trainer.  Another ex-Marine taught me roller blade skating when I was younger, Tom Connally my spirit guide.  Dave Fabik, a VietVet, member of Bridge City, read the welcome letter from our Portland Quaker meetings.

Princeton Club of Oregon.  I got to visit Julian Voss Andreae in his current studio, to converse about the octet-truss.  Way cool.  I'm grateful for these privileges and that's why I blog: to share my front row seat.  Check it out!

Happy Birthday Alexia!