The title is with reference to a famous Hermann Hesse novel, wherein intellectuals in the future, in our future too, play an academic game that generates the rest of culture, I don't remember to what radius, i.e. was this a whole planet, a global culture that GBGers created? Rather than reread the book, I've been enjoying "3rd party" (i.e. critic) YouTubes.
Probably FSI comes closest to a GBG play Castle with respect to my own weekly routine, a HQS for glass bead game playing, a Hogwarts. Was this Hogwarts under siege in the book, or otherwise threatened? The very term "Castle" implies an continual fighting off of entropic forces, an effort to maintain a dynasty, some continuity in culture. Castles require a lot of maintenance I bet.
Yesterday I skipped out on being in the audience, not for lack of curiosity (expecting a YouTube), but did join TrimTab (these are Zoom calls). FSI = Field Structure Institute, with the central conversation pieces being like intersecting twisted inner tubes. Their twist patterns hold significance.
You might picture a tumbling tetrahedron inside each loop, to get more of a sense of the animations we've been sharing.
I'm immersing myself in older mathematics these days. Glenn's aura of intense scholarship now haunts the building, in the form of binders, sculptures, collected buckyball dog toys (chew toys). This gives me a boost, the influence of his Global Matrix.
Skeptics don't think dividing math into Casino, Supermarket, Martian and Neolithic is sufficiently sensible as, for example, how do we see Bernoulli math as "Neolithic" when so much of it is still state of the art, vital circuitry? I'm talking about my Silicon Forest concoction.
The short answer is we don't; we slide the Casino+Supermarket slider back to then, the time of Bernoullis, and look at their service to contemporaneous modeling, approximating, predicting, anticipating: all Casino Math with Supermarket implications for what gets to the stomach, figuratively but also literally speaking. Bernoullis (a mathematical family) remain in our future as well, I anticipate.
Relative to them in the past, looking forward, we're the Martians. "Neolithic" is just a direction i.e. "in the rear view mirror" with respect to some now. Looking forward: the word "Martian" evokes strange and alien, maybe threatening, but also within reach, already being touched and probed: the future is almost tangible, and will be, as its onrush has that air of inevitability. The past may become stranger as well, as it recedes, or perhaps we just never had much time to explore it.
The study of history is a luxury we should all be able to afford, InshAllah (إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ).
Here in the Matrix, our "daily bread" may be insufficient because others have risked our demise and deemed that a risk worth taking i.e. we were expendable in their eyes and now we have no bread. Or maybe no others were in any position to save us. That seems unlikely given the rhetoric. So we die of starvation, or maybe they're aggressively hunting us as in wartime. I've been watching some Philip K. Dick (adapted) scifi on the telly. People are on the run from oppressors throughout The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime.
Picture another situation: being in a casino and running out of any more options. Leaving broke is your next step. There's a supermarket on the block but you have no money to buy stuff with. Welcome to Las Vegas.
However, thanks to mathematics and its ability to give us models and more rational choice making, we steer clear of obvious money losing Ponzi schemes in the first place, by anticipating correctly what will more likely be a winning strategy.
Of course all that seems very remote from Bernoulli Numbers and how to compute them. That was algorithmic knowledge i.e. step by step one could generate these humongous fractions. Nowadays, in SymPy or Mathematica, you might just ask for the nth one. Were Bernoulli Numbers what Ada was aiming for in her Babbage machine inspired notebooks?
The Data Center (Casino) is humming with tools, from Wolfram Alpha on down. Wolfram is a good example of a Hogwarts or GBG HQS perhaps. On the timeline, from ancient past (Neolithic) to alien future (Martian) we have this axis populated with star mathematicians and their rational constructions, partially overlapping and feeding our appetites for automation.
To be more concrete, today I was working on Py4HS_Bernoulli, a Jupyter Notebook, where I tackle this idea of generating functions, and the coefficients of so-called Bernoulli Polynomials. I am in no way expert on these topics, and my goal is to exercise the mechanics of specific tools: numpy, sympy, pandas.
Why? In the background I'm reading about Sheffer sequences in the context of a discourse also hoping to bring healing to warring regions, in this case the region in Eurasia currently experiencing tank and trench warfare, with missiles and drones.
Casino + Supermarket again; risk versus likelihood of survival, as whatever one considers oneself to be. The word "existential" is often used. So there's a connecting theme: how to more successfully wire Planet Earth going forward, literally, as well as figuratively.
