In the previous (lengthy) post I took up the data layer containing sovereign nation border information. Different schools preach different maps. Stanford shows one Ukraine, whereas a Chinese "Google Earth" might show another.
Does that mean we're planning to use geography (the subject) to brainwash students? Most definitely, if one means by brainwash: learn by heart, make native. The very image sounds threatening though. Who wants their brain "washed"? Brains are delicate and need to stay in their casings.
But yes, we're schooled early to see the various political borders, if only to later see them shift around. That's part of the training. Not my invention. I got the same training. I'm as brainwashed as you are, presumably.
However lets think about oceans, about water, which cover most of the Earth. Long before we get to undersea or more floating cities -- which take time to emerge organically, from a requisite mindset, which we may not be up for -- we get cartoons.
Artist conceptions, computer renderings, may seem arbitrarily realistic in the dimension of social media, i.e. as long as they're framed and on Facebook or whatever.
I'm as guilty as the next guy of sharing "fake building" memes, these amazing architectural feats of the imagination, many of them rather impractical once you think about it, not to mention impossible to pull off affordably, and/or implement for real, without making headlines.
"Spot the Fakes" is a tricky game though, as architects have indulged in showing off what the new software can do, in the form of blueprints for real structures.
This was Bucky's game as well, to wow us with blueprints, and the artist conceptions, but then, from time to time, to actually build it for real, as in Montreal in time for the Expo, to make the USA seem really on top of its game. But lets not forget the Union Tank Car domes either. Or the Climatron.
The point is not to bicker over whether Bucky took too much credit for all this Grunch business, and just revel in the sheer existence of EPCOT's Spaceship Earth, or the MSG geoscope in Las Vegas, its exterior skin especially (the internal skeleton is not classic geodesic), or the "giant golf ball village on Menwith Hill in England, or the Eden Project in Cornwall.
Disney was able to stand up to Bucky and pay homage without paying royalties. The patents had entered the public domain by then. The engineering firm was named Tishman. I followed the story in the early 1980s, from my personal workspace (Magnolia 284) in Jersey City.
But they're not really fake when not pretending to be real, are they?
Their realistic renderings, what architects are often especially good at, need not be that deceptive.
Ditto in the movies.
We know there's no place called Narnia where the director could talk the camera crews to film fauns, no planet called Pandora with camera crews in submarines. These places have to be created artificially, like we do at Universal Studios.
Verisimilitude, not veracity, is the goal. But there's a fine line. Cite WestWorld. Cite the AI chatter boxen.
I'm wanting to use the deep ocean as a setting for animations, wherein we do what crystallographers do: we partition space (the water) into lattices. Shall we use Kepler's Bricks (rhombic dodecahedra) or Descartes' unit cubes? Both obviously, and more besides.
We have transformations between lattices, which may amount to conventions vs. God-given, meaning we are not aiming to impersonate angry fathers and act like jerks, making tyrannical prisons out of bead games.
Kepler's Bricks fill space such that a sphere in each one of them is tangent to twelve others. Radiating outward, from any ball (any IVM sphere as we call it) are these layers of 12, 42, 92, 162... balls. The growing cuboctahedron. The Vector Equilibrium in Bucky's parlance. And also lattice-defining.
Both Kepler's Bricks make a lattice (repeating pattern), but so do the rods running ball center to ball center, connecting adjacent centers through the twelve diamond facets and perpendicular thereto.
This dual lattice ends of carving space into two types of container, four sided and eight sided, with twice as many of the former type (2:1). Volume-wise: four-side : eight-sided = 1:4.
The above animation, encoded in words, form the "scenarios" of a "hypertoon spaghetti monster", meaning the tangle of animations converging to switch points where random segues, smooth transitions, happen, taking us from one scenario (spaghetti strand) to another.
In one scenario, we might fade from an IVM skeleton (akin to cubic close packing and face centered cubic in other namespaces) to an actual ocean, with schools of fish.
We pan around to find dangling sensors, each held in place relative the others, fixed by some flextegrity placeholder stiffening scheme, and each uniquely addressed by computer using (a, b, c, d) coordinates.
The sensors might also be colored lights and by programming them, we make more spatial animations.
These are what I call reveries, and string together through hypertoon necklaces. They take place "off shore" we could say, beyond the concerns of men, outside the jurisdiction of wanna be sovereigns with their pomp and circumstance.
In the ocean depths, where we're free to dive into pure geometry, without the claptrap of nations, minus the political sphere.
Again, you might call this a brainwashing. We're deviating from purely XYZ (Descartes' Bricks) and moving to a different set of boxen. That's not the standard North American curriculum for sure, not the usual Anglo-Saxon stuff. Is the Kremlin behind us then?
Parents might come to the town halls and sound off, because we're not emphasizing right angles enough. We're operating outside the established orthodoxy. How is junior ever going to get a job as a high priest within the XYZ church? How will the little darlings get their Ivy League educations, and proper manners?
Although I've been in the role of high and middle school math teacher more than most, on average, I've always taken a parallel extracurricular "Saturday Morning" approach, which might explain my also working for Saturday Academy off and on.
Saturday is when the kids stereotypically get do what they like, and not what the teacher or authority figures want them to do. Oft times, the elective activity of choice is watching television, or it did in my day. That's when the sugar lobby had them cornered, just as they had the work-at-home mostly moms cornered with soaps. For the dads they had sports bars, and games on the weekends.
They'd market relentlessly. Mad Magazine told us all about it, pulling back the curtain and showing the machinery of Madison Avenue. Meanwhile, communists and totalitarians did propaganda. Our propaganda was called advertising or making commercials, and was much more innocent, sharable with kids. I was sold. I'd go into advertising someday maybe, and psychology (they go together right?).
The advertising of adult drugs (not just beverages) has since moved in big time, even as television has become more powerful. The brainwashing has been intense, and continues to be. Just ask your doctor.
So in some, yes, geography is a topic around which the various subcultures differentiate, in terms of how much attention they devote to what.
A wannabe political science professor or diplomat or high ranking general, is probably going to spend a lot more time with the CIA Fact Book, or pandas data tables, trying to remember which sovereignty exports and/or imports what, than a wannabe math professor.
The math professor is more likely out there in the deep oceans, cavorting with dolphins, engaged in space-filling honeycomb games with Archimedean honeycomb duals (i.e. Couplers and so on).
And it's not either/or is it?
When well rounded ambassadors get together, with their cultural attaches, on a sunny day, to clink glasses, toasting world peace, maybe they show off some their latest and greatest hypertoons on the LCDs, kind of like when Matteo Ricci wanted to impress the Chinese, with Renaissance style perspective painting.
