Ruminations

The Fuller Projection is by design borderless, but that doesn't change the situation on the ground one iotum i.e. we don't have borders as geographical features of Planet Earth, but we may have walls that define where these borders would be i.e. walls that follow the property lines.  We have different words for property lines and borders in that the latter are more a subset of the former.  "Walls" are a stand-in for barriers of various types.

The point of showing the bare stage, minus the marks and lines necessary to the current plays and dramas, is to remind ourselves that we live through theater.  We express ourselves through our characters, which are in turn defined in terms of attributes, such as citizenship in one or more nations, or refugee status.  We need to keep all that political data front and center, or risk changing our character.

Could someone join a roster of citizens minus moving to that very territory?  What if there is no such territory, only a smattering of facilities around the world?  Yet this network offers citizenship?  Could a golf club offer citizenship as another form of lifetime membership?  If not a golf club, then a virtual nation?

Instead of knowing the answers to such questions, I toss them out there to help shape the conversation about what's in need of ongoing design.  These concepts were passed down through many generations. What did it mean to be a citizen of Rome?  Of Athens?  How has the concept of citizenship evolved?

Using television to show us exactly what is going on in various borderlands, in terms of barriers, defenses, drug dealing, would be elucidating and feed the computation.  Is the Canadian border somehow less permeable to fentanyl?   How might the medical profession take over the drugs problem from those into crime and punishment?  Does the wall in Judea-Mesopotamia define the borders of a nation state?  Define "nation state". 

Again, I'm not the answer man.  I just know the humans alive today have responsibilities to keep working out their differences.

Anti War Warriors

One of the ironies associated with recent geopolitical maneuvers is among those most empathetic towards the Russian mindset, partly projected of course, are high ranking active duty and/or retired military personnel.  

Such is the case on all sides we might say, but in Smedley Butler World in particular, wherein the slogan "war is a racket" is well-known, we know that soldiers see how they get to be pawns in someone else's grand strategy great tragedy.

Insofar as West Point helps cadets see what the cosmic computer is seeing, that war with outward weapons is obsolete, it helps keep the cold war cold.

Anti-war activists, including a military that knows something about logistics, intuit the world could be a lot more promising and encouraging of the freedom-loving, were tomorrow's players not saddled with today's working misassumptions.

The challenge of protecting the Constitution remains at issue.  Was it protected, or have we entered a post constitutional age?  If the latter, then the US military has actually failed against its undermining.  Upholding and protecting does not mean passively looking on as civil liberties are eroded.

Smedley Butler stood his ground, but when he exposed the Business Plot, few took him seriously.

Pi Day

An expected blog reader type is a teacher, looking for was to pass on the culture.  Yesterday and today are a bit of a bonanza for me in that regard, in that we're shifting to Daylight Savings Time, and today is Pi Day.

We had a Zoom meetup last night.  The segue from Daylight Savings Time to a world map is a great way to slip in time zones in the Pythonic sense e.g. jump to the date, datetime and time documentation and remind students of the intricacies of calendars.  Our proleptic Gregorian is no joke, in turns of curve ball twists and turns.  Imagine if imperial presidents raided the months for more days the way those Roman guys did.

However, the World Time Zones map, picked at random, was of course a Mercator.  A great interim next map has been floating around Facebook as a meme for some time now, and shows the true size of countries, inside of countries as outlined on a Mercator.  Tiny Greenland set within monster Greenland, and so on.  Russia is really not that big, compared to some other big ones.  Nor is it small.  Africa looks about the size it is.  Antarctica was all together missing from the time zone Mercator.

This is an Algorithms and Data Structures class remember, and there's nothing more algorithmic than a mapping, nor a data structure more familiar than a globe.  From a quasi-spherical globe (a tad oblate) we map to a screen on a flat surface, to create a kind of dashboard.  We call the resulting instrument a "world map" and it's easy to search up a bunch of them, which is what we did.  This was all by way of intro, reminding students we're in the age of GIS / GPS.

On the Pi Day front, I mentioned Vihart, the Youtubist, and had I not got into a mouse fight with Replit, I might have again demonstrated the technique for embedding Youtubes inside of Jupyter Notebooks.  As I explained once again, this is a "school of the future" where I'm pretending "this is how it is" for a lot of us, whereas really we're just an elite few.  Not many underprivileged have even heard of a Juypter Notebook. We're considered an elite school for a reason.  But that just means prototypical, ahead of the pack, experimental without being iconoclastic.

Diverging from established orthodoxy sounds risky until the new orthodoxy we're converging to comes over the horizon.  One's impulse is to not jump ship, even if it's going down, until there's at least one other ship in the picture.  Pick one and swim towards it?  In my case, I'm pretty much right back where I started at the International School of Manila and/or the Overseas School of Rome.  The tools have improved immensely however.  I'm able to take advantage of much more engineering.

The Vihart Youtubes I'm thinking about have to do with Pi versus Tau and a kind of mock political battle that's like a model UN, a sandbox for later, when you enter center ring.  Check 'em out, we're talking about a whole genre.

For example, with a computing surface in the picture, say a Replit in the cloud, you're able to casually dialog with an implementation of Permutations, which form a type, a math object.  The Group Theory ideas come through loud and clear, to the extent one skates through the concepts without getting bogged down in too much tedium.  But there's enough concreteness to keep it real.  A P-type object maps letters to letters as shown by its ability to encrypt and decrypt.  Yes, just a simple Caesar code.  The point is not to encrypt securely at this point, but to understand something about Algorithms and Data Structures.

Homework Marathon

My teaching schedule is intermittent and like any professor, although I'm not claiming to be one except in jest, I'm doing lots of homework and prepping for upcoming classes. My life is that of an anonymous academic, although I would not say cloistered.

That homework includes a trickle of RT still (post a sweeping shutdown) but with most of that cast dispersed to other venues.  I still remember when Air America Radio went under, which is from where some of this talent came in the first place.  Randi Rhodes foreshadowed Tulsi Gabbard, a female fluent in military matters, questioning the common wisdom.

I also solicit debating partners on Facebook and compare notes.  Study involves discussing and debating, not just passively reading and viewing.  That's what friends are for.

Scott Ritter has gotten a lot of words in edgewise amidst other chores I've been doing.  I've watched at least three recent interviews. Readers might remember I was tracking Ritter closely from the newsgroup alt.politics.org.cia (did I get that right?) during the post-911 attack on Iraq, wherein I still connected through Teleport as pdx4d.  

I had my usual focus on keeping up supervisory or "oversight" mechanisms (interesting double meaning there), involving webcams and whatever i.e. arms control, trust but verify, the verify part.  But this wasn't my specific training, just my focus, so I was mostly there to learn.

Then I've picked up a couple new independent journalists wandering about on the outskirts of the hot spots.  There's that American who grabbed a train from Kiev to Kharkov, even deeper in the conflict zone, and now making selfie shows (as I do too) from his hiding place, giving his strong opinions. He's no Zelenskyy fan, but doesn't speak Russian either.

The story I'm getting is political actor Zelenskyy ran as a peace candidate and even at this late date would like to deliver, but fears the youth groups to which many in government owe their current positions.  The "Inca brain surgery" Russians hope to pull off would deprogram the little sister (an analogy I've been using), delivering her from the Cult of Otan.

That's similar to Washington, DC's fear of anarchic insurrectionists who came out in support of Trump, but don't seem inspired by this new older guy as much.  DC knows how it feels to feel cornered by a hostile constituency on the brink.  Trudeau thought they were coming for him and acted out, but they weren't really.  They just wanted to have a conversation.

I suggested in my recent video that any truck convoy heading for DC do a 180 and head for Hollywood or somewhere where they make television and social media.  DC is providing a lot of the talking heads, for sure, but the screenwriters tend to work remotely, some maybe from bunkers, believing their own science fiction.  Not that bunkers can't double as luxury apartments and what not.  Facebook and Twitter deplatformed a sitting president, albeit the lamest of ducks by then.  That's our Grunch in the high chair.

Saturday Workshops

The regular tetrahedron, not a space-filler, may seem a disappointing shape when taken alone. However, given a whole mess of them and face-bonding an operation, we get those spirals, or tetrahelices (a word my spellchecker dictionary does not have).

The spinning vortex at the core, might be a good title for Bonnie's presentation, which helped us bring the patterns in question into focus.

The discovery that an icosahedron does not actually consist of twenty regular tetrahedrons, with a common tip, comes as a shock to some.  That nature would offer such nuance... and that's but the tip of the iceberg.

The Jitterbug Transformation is the opening lotus flower, whereby the tetrahedrons regain their regularity at the fleeting moment of cuboctahedral satori-hood. 

As you may be able to tell, I'm coming down from the high of being in on a virtual meetup featuring vZome, Scott Vorthmann's tool for pretending one has Zome for real.  

David Koski joined us, as well as an official rep from the BFI.   

First Bonnie DeVarco's trans-disciplinary tetrahelix talk (with lots of focus on virus morphology), then Paul Hildebrand's vZome workshop.