Friday, May 27, 2022

Puttering with Sympy

sfactor_1

sfactor_2

Sfactor

 

A synergeoist on Synergeo wondered by what factor we would scale the icosahedron of edges one, to give it a volume of 20, i.e. what would the new edges have to be? 

We think of the Jitterbug Transformation and how s_factor = jb_cubocta / jb_icosa (snake case) i.e. jb_icosa times s_factor takes its volume from 18.51... (tetravolumes) to 20 (ditto). 

In other words, the factor in question is a 3rd root of the s_factor, since the latter scales volume, meaning its 3rd root is our linear multiplier.

The s_factor appears again when we morph the icosahedron into a cuboctahedron by a different route. Start with the icosa with faces flush to an octahedron's.  Rotate the tilted triangles to a minimum volume 2.5 cuboctahedral conformation.  Two applications of 1/s_factor does the trick.



Wednesday, May 18, 2022

More About Branding

Today's lunch conversation was about the physics of consciousness.  That's become the field.  I've questioned the priorities there, as a kind of psychologist, as what we need help with, as a faculty, is the unconscious.  Everyday dream time awareness, so-called consciousness, is something I tend to scoff at (just kidding).

Anyway, what kind of "psychologist" do I suppose I might be?  Do I hang out a shingle somewhere?  In the 1980s I think it was, the philosophers thought they might do this, making the claim that what ails people is more metaphysical than merely psychological.  

I could see the appeal.  Philosophy has been on the self help shelves in the past.  Stoicism and so on.

No, the psychology of individuals was my focus in the past, as a reader of Freud and like that.  Adler. But mass psychology, whatever that means, is more my focus today, and that means marketing and advertising, lobbying and propaganda i.e. changing the collective psyche i.e. politics.

Yes, I've called myself a lobbyist.  Once I realized the political process had a hand in determining curriculum, somewhat shocking to realize at first, I jumped into the business of pushing discrete math.  This had to do with high school level topics, and whether delta calculus would maintain its same level of dominance.  I posted tons to Math Forum about it, before the public forums were canceled.

But then of course Oregon Curriculum Network is more niche market than that.  Under cover, I've been an agent for Python Nation, not that our legals at PSF think there is such a thing.  

Guido's term as benevolent dictator was more tongue in cheek, somewhat mocking actual dictators.  That's true of Python Nation as well, similar to Rogue Nation (a brewery in Oregon) in taking the claptrap, the pomp, of nation-states, and using it for branding.

What's a nation-state, or a religion for that matter, beyond a brand?  One could say the difference is immeasurable as a brand is nothing without a substantial subculture to back it up.  Betty Crocker.  McDonald's. 

Exactly.  Ethnicity matters.  You need those subcultures.  The US had its deep believers in democracy.  The flag decals wouldn't mean anything without those old timers.  Other ideologies would adopt them.

Advertisers who believe in the Holy Ghost (a Zeitgeist) have an edge, one might believe, as a matter of faith. Or call them propagandists, as the Catholics do, or did, when everyone important spoke Latin.

Hollywood will tell you it's all show business.  I'm not saying that I disagree.  The show must go on.

If physicists want to be the next priesthood, or maybe that dream has come true already, we should get them involved in the treatments.  Help us with the mental health issues, war a chief pathology.  

That means curriculum development.  That means programming, as in television programming.  

But then television doesn't mean what it used to mean, either.  The internet (tcp/ip) has created the new groundwork.

I work at being a nationalist, a patriot, but for Python Nation, a science fiction virtual nation the PSF doesn't necessarily believe in.  That doesn't mean I've abandoned USA OS (my idea of a democracy, based on the one that died in darkness).  

I think we need practice in re-basing our nationalism in the cloud, more like the religions have done (the more successful ones).  

Cloud-based nationalism helps take the stress off the planetary ecosystem, freeing it from service as a mere backdrop for our nationalist fantasies.

Sunday, May 08, 2022

American Polymathy

This notion that we should divert attention back to the Platonics and sister polys, has a few champions in every era, however the question is what have we new to say about this vista? The theory of Regular Polytopes was nailed down in H.S.M. Coxeter's book by that title, anchoring a consequent literature of n-dimensional graph theory, or topology we might as well call it.  Don't we teach that already?

That a next American pragmatist, literally an inventor, would present with a lot of new chatter about polyhedrons, was not necessarily a welcome development in Europe and/or the UK, except in rarefied circles.  Germany and the Bauhaus School still had a history of architecture to tell, and the geodesic domes had to be part of that, tracing to the Walther Bauersfeld planetarium on the roof of Zeiss company headquarters in Jena.  RBF could remain "an American architect" who popularized dome designs.

The graph of famous inventors in structural engineering had to include the man who patented the octet truss, popularized by other architects and likewise researched by A.G. Bell, the telephone guy.

Peter Sloterdijk, the famous German language contemporary philosopher, embarked upon his Spheres trilogy: Globes, Bubbles and Foams (each a volume), with our American scattered throughout, a vertex oft returned to.  That work, like Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era suggested the architect-only view was far too narrow.  

RBF was in fact a polymath whose cross-disciplinary forays were a way of unlocking new synergies.  A pure mathematician might look askance at the tensegrities and wonder at their entanglement with physical forces.  A physicist might wonder how RBF could be anything but a crank if he actually believed in ESP, which he seemed to.  The risk was opening the philosophy department to ridicule, whereas it had already settled on its particular risk avoiding canon.

On the other hand, history moves on, and in the rear view mirror we have more thinkers to accommodate. What looked too embarrassing to include in one era, becomes embarrassing to exclude in a next. A survey course in philosophy without Bucky, is getting to seem like a survey statistics course without Bayes. The priors have changed, as the machines keep learning.

What was new about the polyhedrons had to do with the simplex, the regular tetrahedron in particular, and its ability to divide evenly into the others, volume-wise, even more successfully than the cube, the new "volume three" in this system. 

An octahedron with the same edges, is four times the unit volume, a rhombic dodecahedron six times, with its long face diagonals our unit tetrahedron edge.

Although the logic was there, and the context (closest packed geodesic spheres in a lattice, the octet truss), it was elementary, more like Wittgenstein's remarks on the foundations of mathematics.  Words like "concave" and "convex" and "spin" came in for grammatical investigation within a growing web of semi-tautologies, metaphorically cast.  Synergetics would have the hallmarks of a philosophy, and that would take some grappling with.

However the Continentals and the Analytics were both averse to this new American Pragmatism -- a lineage uncoiling forward through Rorty's work (one of my profs) -- but for different reasons.  

From Europe's point of view, America had outlived its role as an exotic upstart, a revolutionary presence, and was settling into the familiar mode of Roman imperialism, a model dear to many UKers but not one to admire or take instruction from. 

Why rock the boat with a retreat to Transcendentalism, with which this new flavor of pragmatism was blended?  Why think like Thoreau or Margaret Fuller, and question an expanding empire?  

Phrases like "legally piggily" (a whole chapter in Critical Path) melded with critical attacks on lawyer-capitalism and specialization itself...  how could such writings be good for the establishment?  

The mythos and ethos here, questioning authority at every turn, was more hippie-bohemian, even if somewhat engineering-savvy, and therefore too counterculture for any aspiring button-down corporate culture, what many universities aspired to be at the time, and still do to this day.  Yet Bucky always dressed like a banker.

Had the new language games with polyhedrons been buried in a jocular Scientific American article, say by J.H. Conway or Martin Gardner, and filed under recreation, then the spark might have more easily spread, but perhaps fizzled much sooner.  

The problem people had with this philosophy is that the new casting of the polyhedrons in a nested arrangement was supposed to be significant to children and to the future of humanity.  It was supposed to be important, and dared to clamor for attention.  

Teachers did not want to positively reinforce this message as it was subversive to their ongoing dismissal.  "Don't encourage disruptive behavior." "Ignore attention-seeking behavior."

The prospect of introducing some positive futurist science fiction within the core curriculum would have many implications and the easier course was to keep the lid on these developments.  Elon Musk proved disruptive in this regard as well, even if his plans were less grounded in a philosophy.  People were dreaming about the future again, and contrasting that with what the politicians felt able (i.e. unable) to deliver.

The chief advocates for introducing these education reforms no longer had their charismatic leader and their army seemed tiny and unimpressive, almost invisible.  The juggernaut of mainstream philosophy could afford to dismiss this new philosophy as irrelevant, therefore, at least for the time being.  That seemed to be the thinking, looking back.

Wednesday, May 04, 2022

German Pseudo Science?

Is racism a holdover from German pseudo-science?  People try to make a race out of everything, confusing DNA with ethnicity.  The two could hardly be more different.  Hardware is one thing, software another.  But then software makes sure hardware counts for a lot, in terms of how the sorting algorithms work.  "What race is he?"  

It still sounds out of line to reply "I don't keep track of races" as people think that's a claim to color blindness, as if one were literally unable to pick up the RGB value of someone's skin tone.  Well, put in those terms, maybe I am color blind, as I'm not "perfect pitch" going from an observed tone, to the actual catalog combo.

"He's what people call Black" is better, and for sure he has dark skin.  But then so do people considered "not Black" by some.  The use of the word "colored" never really went away, but became People of Color.

Anyway, the short answer is no.  German pseudo-science was bolstered by the eugenics movement, which was strong in North America, to the point of making laws.  Insofar as "racial purity" might be a thing, the eugenicists and the KKK had a leadership position.  

As an elitist, I might say the bottom half of the Bell Curve believes in races, but that wouldn't be an IQ curve.  A lot of people who do well on standardized IQ tests nevertheless believe in races.  One's ethnic conditioning is "orthogonal" to one's IQ, is how someone with a high IQ might put it, using an ethnic (as in niche) way of talking.

Some ethnicities obsess about race more than others.  To obsess about race doesn't mean admitting to being racist.  Few people I know would go with the definition:  a racist is someone who believes in races. That sounds as wrong as: a nationalist is someone who believes in nations.  "Of course we believe in races and nations.  That doesn't make us racist or nationalist."  That would be the mainstream view.