Saturday, December 28, 2019

From the Far West



Would you like a blog with embedded videos? Many ways to go.

Here's a link to a skills-building video where I take you through the steps that I use.

Saturday, December 21, 2019

Apologetics?

Sounding like a Bucky apologist again.

From:

Bucky Fuller 2020 Revival Project

Public group

Kirby Urner Per Critical Path he said "realist not optimist" meaning from his point of view, from 1970s onward, humans had the wherewithal, technologically, to succeed as a species, but there wasn't a "given" we'd work out, ergo "touch and go", "final exam" with expressions of hope. If humans continue squandering their opportunity, it won't be because Bucky was wrong. He wanted to accentuate the positive and show we had the capability, so from 1970s onward he was like "any day now". That's how he needed to be. Seems that way today i.e. nothing is keeping high schools from dropping his "concentric hierarchy" into the middle of an American literature class (the schools wouldn't have to be American, just Bucky's lineage is New England Transcendentalism), mathematical in nature though it is (talking tetravolumes, A,B,T,E,S modules). But they don't, so yeah, the future remains iffy. A prominent futurist with a strong track record left us a conceptual toolbox we don't use for the most part. Not his fault in any way. Bucky is blameless.
http://grunch.net/synergetics/gst2.html

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Dark Waters (movie review)

My technique on this one was to spontaneously accept an invitation from an old friend, as it's a holiday season and family is around. So I hadn't done a lot of homework beforehand.  That's not unusual for me.  Sometimes doing homework afterward is the better idea, and that's the case here as well.  Around movies, we have a lot of agreement that too much "knowing ahead of time" is a way of "spoiling" it.  That's a lesson we might apply outside "the movies".

The movie I'm talking about was Dark Waters, showing in the historic Hollywood along Sandy Boulevard. Those enrolled in my School of Tomorrow may have already encountered my place-based approach, which translates anywhere, as we're all in a place or base.  Dark Waters is about a place we've all lived in, if driving around, going to movies, enjoying city life with paved roads, suburbs, high rises.  We experience birth, death, stress, and other stuff, in between.

Into this karmic world (aberrational matrix) comes this priestly dressed-up group of older men and sharp clerks, other data scientists, that listen to company stories while drinking wine (or sake if we translate to Tokyo).  Swap casual for suits and maybe beer for wine, give them laptop computers at the speeches, and you have geeks at an OSCON almost (other behaviors might change -- we could express an accumulation of deltas, preferably with calculus).

Once you've poisoned the world with your chemistry (a few lights go on in the basement lab, as one or two technicians get it at first, that a meltdown is underway) you need to cover your tracks, postponing heat death, outliving the enemy (whatever wants to take you down a notch).

Admitting to any kind of crime or wrongdoing could be deadly and would go against the interests of investors, making such admissions seem like fireable offenses.  CEOs have to answer to a board, and are paid to stay answerable.

The story captures that side of things:  people thrive off of jobs with DuPont, including around the poisoned wells, the oasis, and having those ways of life disrupted by "change artists" (maybe "hacktivists" of some kind) is unwelcome, even if they see the writing on the wall.

The science will tell us our lifestyle is unsustainable, like that's news.  Tell that to people in a lifeboat.  You want us to do what again?  Advertise the alternatives.  Engineer our path away.

The deeper question is how do we let medical science help us keep healing from these self inflicted wounds?  We need to confess, as a science-minded culture, that we have indeed poisoned ourselves and our planet and all of us are dying a slow death (and not just from C8).  Since Eden.

We also have the capacity to treat ourselves (in the sense of "by means of medicines and therapies") and use our reason, other capacities (these are occidental terminologies), to improve our lot.  Work towards liberating ourselves from enslaving conditions is the vector of civilization according to Alfred North Whitehead.

Settling on some simple technologies that work and that we completely understand, is a goal of some sciences, having cultivated a feng shui.

The responsible engineers want to alleviate drudgery in the workplace, and the idea of a nonstick pan is not in itself anything evil.  Miracle chemicals come with a downside, is the lesson we keep learning.  If we find an ensemble of technologies that work well, including through recycling phases, we might want to stick with it and experiment more gingerly.

The Dymaxion House, on display in Dearborn, Michigan, where an auto industry had its own side effects, was meant to make housewives happier and better company for their children.  That sounds ridiculously stereotyping on purpose, a 1950s Norman Rockwell, but with that retro futurism vibe introduced by a metallic yurt on a pole, equipped with all the appliance amenities, these days HDTV and lots of bandwidth (not necessarily 5G).

The mass market mentality treats the end users as "receptors" as the bureaucrats had come up with. Those were us.  Engineering has this way of objectifying that's really offensive unless we're doing it ourselves to sustain our families.  The protagonist family in Dark Waters is not ostentatious and blends in with the rest of America, as wanting to have a life beyond slime.  A life other than some nightmare is what we all want.  How might we raise living standards on Ghetto Planet?  Even if you own a fancy yacht, if it's just more trash in the dumpster...

My homework so far has suggested what I think a lot of us already new:  the whole corporate personhood thing and surrounding game of incentives isn't working that well.  New engineering is needed, new circuit designs for motherboard earth.  The permutations for "social organization" are endless and we already have the priestly suits doing "social engineering" in the guise of law.  Add code.  That's us in the 21st Century going forward.

Speaking of "social engineering" etc., the movie is especially good at reviewing the decades and rolling us through time, vis-a-vis office technology.  We see a first search, on something other than Google, and a first boot up of Windows 2000.  The cars change.  The characters age and get sick.

The legal process drags on, and on. That's not fair though, as it's really science, and a huge epidemiological study, that's showing us once again: we have poisoned ourselves.  We need help.  But government belongs to "them" (the fictional zombies, the corporate persons, the gods the suits serve).

Today's Teflon, a brand, belongs to some corporate cutout, which assures us the C8 pans have all been replaced, though not at garage sales or in your old waffle iron.  You're going to continue to poison yourself, throughout the day, in a variety of ways.

I'm not saying you'll need reconstructive surgery.  The monster parts that develop might be psychological, and treatable in an asylum-sanctuary sense.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

Wanderers on the Move

Given changes around Yahoo!, our little coffee clutch, which frequents the Linus Pauling House, has revectored a lot of its conversations to other social media.  As a listowner, I've busied myself with downloading the archives, pre shut down.  I've been going back over some of the communications, just to assure myself we still have a record.

I randomly opened a deeply buried example, zipped within zips (the downloaded structure is elaborate), and came across a posting by Brian Sharp.  He was questioning the ISEPP president's controversial stance, which was par for the course in our subculture (cult).  You might think the president of a science organization would hold to mainstream views in academia.  On the contrary, his style has been to take a radically unpopular stance and stir up debate.  That's kept our discussions peppy.

Fast forward to 2019:  here's a link to a similar conversation happening today, but on Facebook instead, and hence with a different audience.  Instead of a smattering of other Wanderers, we reach a random audience determined by Facebook's algorithms.

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Updates from OCN


OCN (Oregon Curriculum Network) has invested in Rust, a computer language. I'm showing the work on Github via Youtube.

I've got a service call this morning, turning a dumb home into a smart home with 4G IoT, i.e. the security and heating systems both talk to (update) and take commands from the owner. I have no idea how many sensors may be involved, eventually.  Today is about getting the basics working. 

I was out of my depth with the Blue House furnace right away, despite "homeowner trainings" galore on Youtube these days. I may have learned a trick or two by watching.  The heating system was installed by former owners and is showing signs of age.  I've been an occupant since 1995.  You'll see Blue House in a lot of my videos as the OCN C6XTY sculpture out front is a neighborhood attraction.

Connecting the CCP to Avogadro's Number seems an unobjectionable curriculum dot connector (a scenario) in our CSN hypertoon reveries.  Hypertoons and hypertunes are taken up elsewhere in greater detail (see CSN blog).  You'll be talking about a "mole" of something and depict that as a CCP packing of known radius, say cuboctahedral.  I've blogged some calculations on that score.

Sure, you may come up with a constituent set of XYZ vectors that take integer coefficients, in terms of hitting the centers of CCP balls.  We do the latter in building up the concept of Gnomon, ala The Book of Numbers (Conway & Guy). Triangular numbers are modeled with CCP, as are squares.  It's when we go to the next layer that we might part company, between SCP and a Barlow Packing (CCP a subset of those, as is HCP, anything of that density).

We're all about number sequences (not just Fibonacci type) as something to program around, in various languages. 1, 12, 42, 92... is a sequence revisited in OCN reveries.  Use Python to generate Bernoulli numbers why not?

CSN is about micro-charity transactions originating in fantasy games (as in ordinary gambling, where the player is the beneficiary). Yes, you might donate to a church project which you're currently working on, without scandal.  I'm not saying charitable giving is the polar opposite of self interested. On the contrary, most want their giving profile publicized in various ways.  That's called a track record, and people without one tend to be at a disadvantage (on the other hand, a clean slate is a chance to start over).

Our premise (for some of us, perhaps in conclusion, after numerous studies) is humans with now outlet for freely giving, seen through the Jungian lense of the "hero archetype" are going to suffer, as the economy dries up (drained libido). If you're not giving young and old alike, opportunities to commit winnings to a preferred future, then you have only slaves, who will prefer to sabotage and/or vandalize the current system.  Reserving charitable giving as the privilege of plutocrats, who then shut down competing circuits, is a sure way to get said plutocracy ejected as a viable "planet" (aka "network of frequencies" or "cabal").

OCN is itself the target of charitable giving, by myself first and foremost as I commit hundreds of volunteer hours to its continuing relevance.  Were CSN benefitting from more OCN reveries (hypertoons etc.) we would likely attract more donors.  Having sampled our product, they're campaigning for more.  OCN as a beneficiary of CSN infrastructure is no "conflict of interest" but is rather a paradigm use case and public demo.

Another charity might be ISEPP & Wanderers.  The closing of Yahoo! services (some of them) is setting a fire under our chair.  We've been set in our ways, in terms of telecommunications, for some 19 years. I'm consulting with a professional archivist.  We have over 75K communications.

Friday, December 06, 2019

Project Notes: Zome Inventory

A curriculum piece I'm working on, with project lead David Koski, is the enumeration of Zome buildable tetrahedrons and hexahedrons.  Zonohedra are Zome's forte.

"Enumeration" has technical meanings, and in this context "dissection" is also apropos as in: given this polyhedron X made in Zome, what would its volume be in terms of phi-scaled S and/or E modules?

We lose some of our audience at this point, given S and/or E modules are not a middle school subject, their being building blocks in a little known set, featuring, in addition, A, B and T modules.  Then come the Mite, Sytes, Kites and so on.  Kit and Kat.
Symmetrical Tetrahedron: Syte: Two of the AAB allspace-filling, three- quanta module, asymmetric tetrahedra, the Mites__one positive and one negative__may be joined together to form the six-quanta-module, semisymmetrical, allspace-filling Sytes. The Mites can be assembled in three different ways to produce three morphologically different, allspace-filling, asymmetrical tetrahedra: the Kites, Lites, and Bites, but all of the same six-module volume. This is done in each by making congruent matching sets of their three, alternately matchable, right-triangle facets, one of which is dissimilar to the other two, while those other two are both positive-negative mirror images of one another. Each of the three pairings produces one six-quanta module consisting of two A (+), two A (-), one B (+), and one B (-).

Yikes!

None of this stuff is really hard though, just why would you want to learn it?  Did they think it might help you in art school?  I did.  Design school too.  What's cultural literacy without the Concentric Hierarchy as wrapped in Synergetics?  American literature has its jewels too.

The database would let students retrieve zonohedra by label in some way.  The Koski spreadsheet features a huge inventory of types.  In other records, all 65 tetrahedrons are covered, ala Steve Baer.

I hate to be the bottleneck on this one.  I don't have but a few samples of Zome and don't have the grant.  I'd be bringing some database skills to the equation.  We'd be using vZome.  Build the shape, check its volume.  Again, is working out with E & S modules worth anyone's time?  I'm banking on the venture leading to new vistas.