Dietary Equivalents

You may suppose I'm proposing to talk about actual foods, but no, I'm being metaphoric again.

In the early days of eCommerce, per Supermarket Math, we had our LAMP stacks, with Linux at the foundation and a "P-language" at the top astride a database, although many just said P stood for PHP and were done with it.

Others said PHP, Perl and Python.  Then Ruby came along.  Then Node.

Now we have many more stacks these days.  Saying you're a "full stack engineer" leads to the logical next question: "of which stack or stacks are we speaking?"

By analogy, what might I swap out of curriculum XYZ to insert new topics, just as nutritious, maybe more so.

For example, we want to share Regular Expressions.  They were invented by a mathematician and they're used a lot in the real world.  They get used in bash, in vim, and in Django's URLs dispatcher.

We need to keep primes versus composite and really build on those more.  Euclid's Method for the GCD needs to appear in many languages.  Computer languages, that is.

The absence of most modulo arithmetic in the lower grades (we might still do something with "clocks") has more to do with anti-German sentiments in 1900s New England, than with its everyday relevance to cryptography and the blockchain.

Lots of Euclidean geometry moved in to push out anything Gaussian.

Some top down imposition of the "one size" that "fits all" is very likely going to fail, next to a system allowing schools to compete and distinguish themselves.  Biodiversity trumps monoculture over the long haul.

Those getting in to Martian Math early, will have that clearness of foresight as a bragging point, should the Digital Mathematics of the Silicon Forest, continue to prove itself a standard in some way.

My ideal Polytechnic features GST and Digital Mathematics in competition with more conventional fare, such as Economics and a less literary approach to core STEM.

Our bridge from PATH to STEAM keeps us anchored in our values,which we're not afraid to have.

We look at ethics / aesthetics quite a bit, comparing lifestyles.  That's what engineers do.

Occupy University I'm calling it, continuing my experience from OPDX days.

From the Pi

I'm physically in the living room, Mac Air on my lap, connected by VNC to the Raspberry Pi in the basement.

Getting this far has been a struggle, as my former password, AFAIK, had stopped working.  Had I forgotten resetting it?  But then why did passwd reset seem to work, yet not work.  Something about /etc/shadow?

Anyway, I followed instructions to change cmdline.txt on the Micro SD card, an hour-long project given my best card reader adaptor was not the one that ended up working.  Then came other issues, requiring a remount and so on.

Now, at last, I'm able to do what I used to do:  use VNC from a remote laptop to get the Raspberry Pi desktop.  Yay.

In celebration, I opened Blogger from the Pi and am writing this blog post virtually, from 192.168.1.5 behind the router, not from the Mac Air.

Secret Knowledge

Time Flies

:: Carol and Celeste ::

A cliche we've all heard is the older one gets, the faster time flies.  Then follows the standard explanation:  well duh, each year is proportionally less and less, of one's entire life.  We also learn from the patterns.  The seasons spin by, marked by holidays in succession.

We're coming up on Thanksgiving here in Oregon.  In earlier chapters, I've been in the HOV lane heading to north of Seattle, to be with family friends.  Other times I've been north to meet with actual relatives, dad's side of the family.

This year, however, given mom is not ambulatory (a recent turn of events), I'm likely to stay in Portland, which has its own charms.  We might do something fancy-electronic to hookup with the relatives.  We're also looking forward to a rendezvous with other friends.  That's what this season is about, when it's hardest to travel thanks to weather.

:: teacher accessories ::

More Movie Making

Youtube has a wealth of conspiracy theory videos, I think we all know that. Were I a big time think tank I might have a catalog with at least a hundred pointers (links) per entry.  As it is, as a low budget dude, I have Robert Anton Wilson's encyclopedia of conspiracies, I'm sure by this time dated.  It's pre 9-11.

Actually, Robert (Bob?) overlapped the emergence of the Web, and he looked for links when writing that book, and found my website talking about the Grunch, a Bucky Fuller invention, in terms of terms, one of his neologisms, his successor to LAWCAP (in turn his successor to FINCAP).  So yeah, my website at Teleport is there in print.  Look it up.  This book is not hard to find.

I think in terms of graph databases sometimes, having played with Python + Neo4j some years ago. I'm not the expert.  We've all seen the movie wherein the hero or anti-hero has a wall covered with pictures, with yarn or string going this way and that.  This is called "connecting the dots".  You'll see professionals doing it, but also people spinning out of control, losing their grip.  It's called thinking, as depicted in the semiotics of film.

The semiotics of film is actually where to find the tropes I want to talk about, the dots I want to connect, or not.  A graph is uninteresting if everything is connected to everything else.

I remember having a faxed transcript of testimony by Clair George, some CIA guy, and using one of those yellow highlighter pens.  I ended up highlighting just about all of it, which is goofy, because if everything stands out, then nothing does. I made the mistake of sharing it with The Oregonian, which was doing some articles on me at the time.

Which reminds me: I was amused by how Valerie Plame included so much redacted text in her book.  The joke book would be all redacted, with one or two prepositions (whole propositions?) peeking out.

A dot to connect is the Gambles' Thrive operation to a "zero point energy" discourse, which of course is a link to civilizations off-world.  The GST horizon of opportunity, which Fuller believed crossed a threshold in the 1970s, has to do with whether military operations are a sign of mental illness.

If species success is just around the corner, if we behave in a rational manner, and we behave irrationally instead, then in what sense is our language making any sense?  We've become nonsense creatures, which is interesting to contemplate.  Would the comic books seem any different.  Would superheros go away?  Why use the subjunctive, if we're there already?

Those pushing futurisms are in science fiction ville, making magazine covers for Popular Mechanics, about the anti-gravity machines and flying cars and so on.  Many of those futurisms do seem to promise higher living standards, as they did in the 50s and 60s.  Those were decades of high optimism.  Then came Blade Runner and dystopian science fiction ala Grunch (Grunch of Giants is at once hopeful and dark, very 1980s).

So I've connected to Thrive from the study of exoplanets and their past and/or future interaction with Earthians.  I've made a "big deal" in a low key way out of how my brand of GST doesn't promise zero point energy, nor feature it as necessary to a higher living standard, a better world wherein outward war is obsolete.

On the other hand I explore the panic ensuing from the Orson Welles Halloween Hoax.  My Martian Math dives into that.  I played excerpts of the broadcast during the recent course at Reed College.  The kids understood this is was science fiction.  None were terrified.

Perhaps I'm a mover and shaker in that I've got a tractor hooked up to Synergetics (the Fuller version) and am pulling it from STEM towards PATH, making it a work in the humanities bridging to STEM, coming from the Philosophy side.

Once a bridge is established, the traffic is two way, so maybe it didn't matter which side initiated the bridge.  I'm talking about the C.P. Snow chasm of course.  I've written stories about that elsewhere, as did Dr. Fuller.

If you're not familiar with Martian Math or Synergetics, let me summarize in a nutshell.  A different way of modeling multiplication brings in more triangles and tetrahedrons than we're used to, which suggests a different approach to spatial geometry and relative volume valuation.

A different approach does not mean a replacement approach.  There's emphasis on a conversion constant, as if we're inventing another way to calibrate pressure or temperature.  Perhaps we're introducing a currency.

These polyhedrons inflate to a spherical version, with the spherical icosahedron especially stable, and associated with the geodesic sphere and dome.  Fuller was famous for his work in that area, but behind the scenes, this volumes re-evaluation was going on.

As a way of packaging what might come across as boring and dry, I have my science fiction ETs use the Bucky stuff, which turns my math course into a broader spectrum anthropology course.  We're also thinking about theater:  what would the movie look like?  Think of more than one.