Thursday, April 21, 2022

HB2U Carol Urner

My mother Carol is sleeping most of the day away in the living room.  She slept through last night in this chair, me on the couch.  We talked at around 4 AM.  I sent an email to Alex and went back to snooze mode.  She knew it was her birthday at that point.  I'd also wished her a happy birthday at midnight.

As the day has gone on, she has had well wishers come through.  Eileen Gannon, Beth Read, Lucinda by phone.  Julie, Carol's daughter, is here for the occasion.

I'm on the hook to dive into numpy and pandas this coming week.  I'd started out hoping I could warm up with my 8th graders, but when they say "algorithms + data structures" they mean CP (competitive programming).  Anyway, I've filed my flight plans elsewhere, like on edu-sig.

Carol has been a lifelong peace activist, ever since she found out about radio-toxins in the milk (Strontium-90?). Her life, like mine, was against a background of endless wars.  Being a peace activist feels like working against the gain, and yet humanity seems to yearn for an opportunity to express itself with greater glory.  Maybe not against the grain of human nature after all.

I inherited a belief in non-violence as a way to go.  I stayed with Quakers, although I resigned membership in Multnomah Meeting at one point.  I wanted to pioneer the role of attender, and took it all the way to clearing people for membership.

I left a message with Sonya Pinney regarding it being Carol's birthday.  She called back a few minutes later. We had a good talk.  The Pinneys and the Urners were among the original families to express themselves in the form of Multnomah Meeting, some generations ago.  The meeting overlapped with Electroscientific Industries (ESI) in terms of facilities:  ESI sold its old factory to the Meeting for a dollar.

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Machiavellian Country

On my end, the Orwellian Memory Hole theme (see previous blog post) resonates with the "verboten math" meme i.e. a strain within STEM that we'd maybe be better off not considering, if we want a career with the big guys.  Whom to salute?  In civilian life at least, that's not often so clear. 

Actually, I'm not entirely sure how to characterize the threat, or call it the risk, to one's reputation, and then there's always the other side of it:  what risk is one taking by overt obeisance to some status quo rule makers?  Will these be the administrators going forward?  Much to think about.

Academics might rib each other for past citations i.e. if Mein Kampf was a book you cited often, approvingly, in service of your own views, there might come a day when your peers gave you flak for this chapter.  I'm thinking of how professor Kaufmann was pretty unmerciful when it came to interrogating Herr Heidegger, while standing up for Nietzsche as having nothing to do with Germanic fascism.

Back to those toeing the line, being good minions beyond a safe pull date: a published disavowal might have helped notify the world of a change of heart.  But maybe you weren't sure at the time that it would help, and so on. 

In retrospect, you (not pointing fingers, if the shoe fits) played your cards rather inexpertly, but then so did a lot of people.  Factored in to one's playbook are one's predictions of who the winners and losers will be.  One gambles.  One might be wrong.

"Throwing one's lot in with" another is like "hitching one's star to" in terms of comparable idioms. 

Then there's "riding the coattails of" which comes off as more minion-like.  

The winning team appoints its own to the coveted desk jobs around town.  That's not scandalous or unusual, but evidence the system works as designed, assuming the power to overturn administrations was a built in feature.  

Monarchies may, in contrast, may have a hard time scripting their own demise, lets admit the obvious, not that orderly transitions haven't happened, in cases of an heir apparent.  Dynasties are certainly a thing.

Allegiances and loyalties, expressed or implied, are what we're talking about here.  Machiavellian Country.

What's true in our case is our subversive author was never entirely purged from respectable publishing, thanks to some anticipatory efforts by the Bohemian generation, in collaboration with Boomers in many cases.  

I'm thinking about , for example, still actively tapping the "verboten" roots of our counter-culture (cite Private Sky etc.), continuing to bring a positive futurism to light in fresh ways.

When I talk somewhat tongue-in-cheekily about our not indulging in "EU metaphysics around pi" i.e. concerning the "real numbers" (their theoretical foundations), I'm circling the wagons, so to speak, and protecting my West (the Americas) from the undue influence of Continental beliefs, religious and otherwise. 

We'll study their beliefs, sure, but not necessarily at the expense of suspending our own.  Our practice of globalism need not imitate theirs either.  

As an Oregonian, I'm not into picking elective fights with my counterparts in the Stans, for example, let alone in Persia.  The Pacific Rim is pacific for a reason.  We don't behave like we're a part of some Atlantic alliance, nor would it be a dream come true if we did.

Friday, April 15, 2022

Monday, April 11, 2022

Snow Day

Asleep

I just assumed we were having school as usual and somewhat stupidly set out for Bethany Village.  Yes it had snowed overnight, but that wouldn't stop the economy in Minnesota. 

I-26 was blocked.  Detour signs pointed every which way. I finally thought to check with the administration. We had all been notified on Whatsapp: fall back to Zoom mode.  I'm new here, and didn't get the message.

We started fifteen minutes late, when I got back to my office.  I'm a caretaker for my mom in addition, plus I have other duties.  I'm keeping busy.

Our topic today was USA Computer Olympiad past problems and training challenges.  This school attracts families looking for competitive opportunities in this cerebral realm.  

I'm expanding out that section of our (dynamic, electronic) textbook on Github.

That same textbook has some sandboxes dealing with unconventional topics, some might judge, in an Algorithms and Data Science class.  I'm chalking that up to time marching on, i.e. they didn't have such as R's and Python's DataFrame objects until recently.  They're data structures for sure.

Then there's the sandbox on Synergetics, a more right brained and philosophical seeming offering, however the link between Graph Theory and polyhedrons, not to mention Group Theory, are already non-trivial. We're mainly supplying an alternative swap-in volumetric system of some interest, an American invention, still being fine tuned.

The wear and tear of wartime grief has been a constant feature of my life since birth.  The property values really aren't that high when life gets so bleak.  There's nothing like knowing life could be less stressful but for our programming.  

One shoulders responsibility and yet the inertia is so heavily in what's collective.  The wars represent continuations of themes we keep beneath the literally violent surface, when psychology is working right. War is a breakdown in decorum.

The cruelty of man to man is heart-breaking, which may lead to hearts hardening and further cruelty.

I'm not ascending a soapbox in order to be preachy here.  This isn't a fire and brimstone sermon.

I imagine jumping back on Youtube and narrating an update.  I could toot my own horn some. However for years before my multi-year spate of Youtubes, I had my journals to look to and share from.  

Maybe it's time to get back to a more linear medium?  I suppose it's not either/or.

Friday, April 01, 2022

Frequency in Synergetics

Frequency is a subtle concept in Synergetics, unlike in geodesic dome & sphere architecture, where counting struts from pentagon to pentagon, along a geodesic, gives the number, i.e. the frequency of said structure.

But what about Bucky Fuller's "Eureka!" formula 10 FF + 2, where FF is a growing / shrinking triangle of edges F.  There's a cuboctahedral and/or icosahedral number sequence around here somewhere, which takes us back to the icosasphere of paragraph one.  When F=1, that's 12-around-1, a signature starting point once adjacent spheres become involves?

What?  That all sounded way to complicated.  Consider the sequence 12, 42, 92, 162... those are successive layers of balls around a nuclear ball.  The picture is one of growing outward, though one might just as well hold radius constant and say we're subdividing, getting more meticulous.

Once inside the nucleus itself (inside the atom) i.e. once a single CCP (= IVM) ball becomes the core focus, we cross a line.  Now we're in subfrequency or even zero-frequency territory in Synergetics. The super and sub scripts start using 0 a lot.  There's even a 0/2.

This is all because whereas the XYZ origin is inert, and pretty much the same anywhere, as good as irrelevant, in terms of where it is to begin with, the "Cabal of Polyhedra" that Bucky is vested in has a singularity at its center, a zerophase novent where we don't pause, anymore than Universe itself is unitarily conceptual.  Not in Synergetics it isn't.  There's a pass-through no stopping zero, surround be a vector equilibrium that's half not of this world.

  • Page -109-
311.18 We may logically assume that the intellectual cosmic integrity of the timeless, sublime integral of absolute perfection must continually test its integrity of eternal regenerativity; wherefore the integral that we inadequately identify as god requires a plurality of local sensing monitors to be omnideployed in the time-distance-differentiated, nonsimultaneously conceptual, serial Universe to continually observe the local Universe events, while also being progressively advantaged with an ever larger inventory of the discovered laws governing cosmic regeneration integrity, and thus equipped, to cope metaphysically with each of the profusion of unprecedentedly unique regenerative complexities that we speak of as problems. In effect god differentiates cosmic integrity into a time-distance-differentiated plurality of limited, local, metaphysical, intellectual experiences with which to test the capability of "god" to reintegrate and restore its timeless zerophase unity.

By "this world" I mean "this side of the dumbbell or bow tie" -- we're picturing a symmetry that's reached "through the middle" on both sides, a singularity or sorts and pulses in and out between two worlds, "this world" and this "other world" that share a transformational out-of-time inside-outing inflection point at their common origin.

What all this means might be put on a shelf as an abstract model.  Any time you need two worlds linked by a singularity, call it a Narnia Lamp, here's a candidate model.  It pulses outward as a jitterbug and reaches an extreme and continues on back to a point of origin, goes through an eye of the needle, then pulses outward in a symmetrical fashion, in this inside-out space.  Fuller symbolized this "bow tie" shape with a "bow tie" symbol.  I also tended to wear a bow tie.

Again, the language is one of generic patterns, one that sets the stage for a drama without specifying the drama. The programming comes next, as Frequency.  The subfrequency discussion is more about Angle, i.e. the structure of logic as if logic were a purely right-brained affair, best symbolized by shapes.  The left brain wants nothing of it.  The security of a strong symbolry, a lexical anchor, is not enough.

 Enter Q-rays, maybe, at least as an alternative to XYZ with its passive / dormant origin-center.  Q-rays are free to take on the volatility of Synergetics, the fire, and shoot out in two worlds, one positive, one negative, but without privileging either as more than the other.  Equanimity is pinned between them, as where going in becomes and outwardly expansive movement.  We shrank to nothing in order to be reborn in a next space.

Q-rays, if you don't know, are {a, b, c, 0} permutations, only positive scaling required to span space.  The four basis vectors shoot outward dividing the world into four quadrants.  XYZ, in contrast, uses six rays to subdivide space into eight octants.  Negative scaling may be used to hint at a singularity inversion point of a type we don't find in the conventional Cartesian model, although we do find a cogito in the same field, going inward meditatively to discover the most general of generalizations.  Cogito ergo sum and all that.

  • Page -137-

    440.09 Zerophase: Being the zerophase of energy the vector equilibrium is inherently invisible and non-empirically-discoverable, which accounts for its having been for so long unrecognized as the spontaneous equilibrious model. As specialists, scientists seek only the somethings. The vector equilibrium is the only model of nonbeing zero-inflection at the nonmoment of omniintertransformabilities, where anything can happen and must happen single- atomically within and multiatomically without. Specializing science...

  • Page -138-

    440.10 The vector equilibrium is the most abstract of all the always-and- only abstract scientific generalizations, for it is the heart of all interrelationships existing between — and not in or of — any of all the empirically apprehended intertransforms of the ever-and-everywhere intertransforming Scenario Universe. The vector equilibrium is the zerophase — ergo, inexpressible— interrelationship of all Universe events.