Spiralling Forward

NATO's Inevitable Decline | Andrei Martyanov

The Alphabet algorithm suggested I might be curious regarding the above YouTube, which I watched over coffee. I'd check in with Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, later. He's another coffee fiend. To watch X does not mean to agree with X at every turn, we all know that right?

In my echo chamber, we don't lavish love on NATO, that spearhead of Russophobia. NATO was way too bloodthirsty / bomb happy, in the Balkans, in Libya, in Afghanistan... 

However what's salient in Andrei's rant is how much he despises an Ivy League education, granting some  exceptions. His thesis is NATO would never have trespassed so egregiously and out of its depth had the children in charge of it (now "grownups" of a sort) been better informed about their world.

As an Ivy Leaguer myself (Princeton, Class of 1980), I should note the US Army General Mark Milley, recently retired, 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is of that same class from that same university. 

Obviously we went forward on different tracks. 

I became more the contrarian, and the closest I've gotten to the US military (not counting times on base in the Philippines, as an expat civilian teen) was my occasional visit to the Center for Defense Information (CDI), which was likewise contrarian vs-a-vs many of the long term trajectories that landed us in the current iteration of World Game.

chatting with a Princeton peer, 2009

My own rhetoric has taken up Future Shock type memes to insist that a high school education in the 21st Century cannot afford to simply replicate that of the 20th, and that our curricula have evolved way too slowly. 

That led me to the position that "high school" and by extension "higher education", should be perpetually reoccurring phases in a single lifespan. We'll need to go through high school more than once in other words, just to keep up. 

That doesn't mean squeezing back into old facilities and reliving the same teenage years. We have to invent what it looks like to keep our learning going. Obviously the internet will have something to do with it.

In studying futuristic literature, including science fiction, I've come to what I'd consider not so much a new Future Studies but a future Basic Studies. From my point of view, we have an adult population, say the Boomers, that never got to go to high school again, in order to retrain for new careers. 

Or rather, many of them did, but under what felt to them like forced circumstances. The Boomers' expectation was still: go to school, learn, and then work, rising through the ranks, until retirement. Those reading the futurist literature knew even then this expectation was somewhat unrealistic.

What I'm wondering is whether we're entering a period akin to the one I was born into.  As a 1958 baby, I popped up in the middle of the so-called Cold War, but during a period when the USSR was pulling ahead in aerospace, in the form of Sputnik. 

Educators realized they could now justify their reforms as a national security priority, by suggesting the curriculum was out of date and we risked coming under the thumb of the technologically superior. Have we come full circle?

April, 1999

Game Pods

I keep mentioning Game Pods as a feature of my Schools of Tomorrow, in ways I'm sure other teachers find too cavalier. What evidence based research drives my eagerness to experiment with this technology? Aren't computer games the ultimate distraction and therefore the antithesis of what we'd call a "school supply"?

The game pod comes in many shapes and sizes, but is primarily designed to be immersive. Immersive needn't mean "isolated" though. A learning program might include one-on-one and group calls. One is often immersed with peers, many of whom are geographically distant.  These pods were designed with computers in mind. There's no reason a cubicle worker might not find a pod a big step up, remembering it's not an either / or proposition.

Sometimes I'm in a "booth" (i.e. pod), scanning documents, or mastering specific games designed to teach chemistry. Other times I'm at a desk, or in a meeting room.  I visit the gym. I shop. All these activities may occur in one building. That doesn't mean I'm stuck here. I cycle through a long list of such buildings, in the course of designing these schools in the Global U context.

You'll remember from Math Forum my emphasis on simulations. We make models to help us conceptualize the many inter-gearing workflows, in an airport, in a shopping center, in a hospital, in a mine.  A dollhouse is a simulation.  Childhood features simulations.  I'm not breaking engrained patterns so much as reinforcing them.

Wanderers Fall Equinox Celebration 2023

Over the years, I've come to connect "wanderer" with "flaneur" i.e. someone with a sketchbook drawing time going by in ways many don't notice, in getting on with their lives, but chronicling differences that really add up. 

Some people had enough time on their hands to step back and observe, getting into the headspace of geological time, understanding "this will someday be seen as an industrial revolution, if it isn't already".

Wanderers come from many walks of life, however this particular group is heavy on the science and engineering side, given origins in ISEPP (isepp.org) which includes those with practical experience working with machinery, engines, boats, motor vehicles. We include artists and musicians.

Having a degree in something specific was never a requirement. We never had much in the way of requirements. Our only bookkeeping was the coffee fund, which Jon Bunce took care of.  We haven't been brewing much coffee lately, now that (since the pandemic) we're down to four meetups a year.

What happened this time is people started gathering on the porch of the Linus Pauling House, on Hawthorne, only to realize no one was inside the building, so getting someone to answer the doorbell was not an option. 

We had come to rely on Glenn to know the combination, as he was connected to the building on many levels.  We lost Glenn in October of last year. He made it to the Fall Equinox gathering of 2022.  

Don called Terry but his phone was turned off (direct to voicemail) so... we moved the event to my place, and taped a sign to the door redirecting anyone else who might come by.

Dissing Unity

The algorithm snagged my attention, as it often does, on this Unity / Disunity story. Unity is the name of a big bucks on paper stock market (virtual bulls) venture made valuable by game developers, and to some extent academic modelers. They make an engine, which in this case means a software framework, which developers use as a basis virtual reality.

I’m prone to see intellectual history as a roiling melting pot with schools of thought (invisible colleges) adding ingredients, hoping to make something yummy, but we all know the “too many cooks” adage. I’ve seen the legalese speakers feeling triumphant over their mastery of the reality principle, but then engineers can be that same way, as their disciplines boil down to the reality principle as well.

The lawyers are ascendent in many dimensions, as they’re the ones who see themselves applying a living corpus, their law talk, to the unfolding of history, in terms of who are the real criminals. Which presidents were likewise gangsters, in the technical sense? That’s the game show on TV now, as infrastructure is more neglected, with engineering considered “sexy” only if it’s about launching phalluses towards space, ala Apollo. The oceans are still mostly militarized such that thinking about submarine infrastructure is largely discouraged in the tabloid opinion papers.

However I’m not seeing LAWCAP as farsighted enough to plan the phasing in of more science, with its independent grasp on reality. Competition from the engineering minded is fended off more than welcomed, leading to the disconnect foreseen and satirized by H.G. Wells in his Time Machine. We get the Eloi (pudgy) and the Morlocks (chthonic), a Martian Math theme I keep coming back to.

Fall Term Begins

:: readings ::

:: homework ::

Low IQ Valley

Speaking of rebuilding, and low IQ periods resulting in gross destruction, I woke up to a guy on YouTube in England, bemoaning some aviation shutdown owing to some miss-entered record, and how it took a long time to debug the problem, resulting in chaos and cancelations system-wide. His worry is less capable people are filling the shoes of their progenitors, and leaking away organizational knowledge and skills. He’s seeing a brain drain, in other words.

I’m in my own IQ valley, having misdiagnosed a basement plumbing situation and only awakened to the reality this morning. I had been blaming outside rain, versus a kitchen drain. 

On top of that, I may have fumbled a transaction yesterday, and left a Visa card in limbo. I’ve got it locked and have a place to check when it opens, before I declare the card lost.  One could say such valleys represent everyday mundane challenges and when one is looking ahead towards a task, there’s always that self assessment that goes on. Am I up to it?

I have optimistic stories too, about the world’s IQ. Our level of self awareness “as humanity” has improved, thank you National Geographic and other architects of global consciousness. The airlines for sure. 

Aerospace did end up integrating our intellect in a major way, though marred by psychological complexes associated with Ken World militarism. Perhaps my readers have a different diagnosis. “Conditioned reflexes” is an umbrella term, for those mental habits that serve one well, until some no longer do. 

There’s an ongoing process of self rehabilitation (self healing), best undertaken oneself and voluntarily, in one’s capacity as an autodidact. I need to keep doing my homework, along my work-study track in the Global U.

The Rebuilding Channel

From a zoomed out perspective, a Rebuilding Channel might seem pretty awesome, including as a recruiting tool. People with relevant skills like to get involved in rebuilding.

But why "rebuilding" in particular instead of simply "building"?  Some of the deeper lessons come from learning how a particular rebuilding was needed. What happened? A natural disaster? An industrial accident? A war? Exploring these questions requires entire episodes, as we jump around the planet.

Another reason we theme it "rebuilding" is to remind ourselves how much running it takes to stay in place. We have to completely repopulate the planet, with new people, within every one hundred years or so. The epigenetic logistics involved is mind-boggling and yet we've been succeeding in getting it done.

When I say "channel" I might mean "genre" as we'll see imitators. "So what happened after those great floods of 2023?" Our genre provides more continuity and followup than your average newspaper or even magazine. Or call it a magazine channel, which is what many of them are (magazine-like in format, yet streamed).

Clearly I'm back to the themes of My Bizmo Diaries, as MBD forecasts these scouting and reconnaissance fleets, vans and minibuses (some full-size buses) that scope out and monitor, provide admin and coordination in some cases, with regard to Global U projects. A lot of these projects connect into the Coffee Shops Network (CSN) back end when it comes to fundraising.

What happened after that big earthquake in Syria-Turkey? Or after that war that destroyed Aleppo?

Study Habits

online puzzle, solved by Dr. D.

I was talking about "frame of mind" over on Coffee Shops Network (CSN), suggesting "detective mindset" as a good one, not too judgemental or prejudicial, open to findings. Omnitriangulating.

Somewhat continuing, in the vein of "disciplines", I've been keen to marry personal scheduling and prioritizing, with insights into the generic importance of scheduling more generally, an excuse to foray into operations research, which, through computer science, has become systems science or something like that (design science in some cliques).

Here's an exercise: roam through your current habitat noticing tasks you might realistically undertake, tasks you're even tempted to do right now (while you're thinking about them), but the point here is to enqueue. 

Make a list and report back. No side tracking. Let the candidate tasks pile up as you take inventory of your domicile or PWS (personal workspace, GST jargon (general systems theory)) but don't engage in doing any of them during this exercise.

An advantage of the above exercise is you may engage in it as a meta exercise i.e. instead of physically roaming through your home, you imagine doing so, and even so, come up with some thoughts about tasks, such as doing dishes, vacuuming, baking a cake, walking the dog... (fade into a cloud of memes colored by some ethnicity fusion). It's that much easier not to engage in imagined housework, when you're kicked back on a jet plane to Hawaii or somewhere.

A payoff is not to get you slaving away on a bunch of tasks (although you might be in the mood to tackle a few, or you had them enqueued anyway, with or without some stupid exercise), but rather to engage the conceptual machinery, the contextualizing grammar, around data structures, such as bag, queue, stack, tree, network.

Bag: just throw the things into it, with unique handles or addresses (hash table)
Queue: line up, first come first serve, FIFO
Stack: stack up, last in first out (LIFO)
Tree: store in cul de sacs addressed by forks in the road (binary or more)
Network: a directed graph, polyvertex ball, wireframe, may contain cycles

We don't need all the details or implementations right at this juncture (e.g. a bag may be implemented as a tree), but rather an appreciation of context: that of simultaneously developing computer and logistical literacy, in association with mundane thoughts about cleaning house or whatever. 

Connect the day dreamy world of up close logistics with some abstract topic you might encounter in some cryptic notation, in this case parallel programming, multi-tasking. But then we're just talking about taking out the garbage.

Charting Great Circles

In math world, I'm scooting around the edges of what there is to know about the above chart, from Synergetics 453.01. Where did Bucky get those numbers? How did he compute them in other words, way back when?

David Koski was wondering if he was using primes in some way, to work with minimum integers, e.g. the arcsin or arctan of what n/d ratio would agree with the above to the digits computed?  In every case, he found a match.

More background:
Great Circles of the VE on Synergeo

City Planning

:: remote campus ::

I'm back to the Asylum City meme, my rubric for talking about human settlements and their planning, maintenance, decommissioning. We may not think in terms of decommissioning normally, but I'm thinking of Burning Man in this regard. Camps. Many cultures (we call them "nomadic" sometimes) are good at making villages, even towns (campuses) come and go.

The giant warehouse, possibly a dome, is where people send their garage full of excess belongings. "One garage" is roughly one shipping container. A truck comes to haul it away and your stuff is there when you arrive, and so is the stuff from many other families. This is your opportunity to share, swap, let stuff go. Our center may actually be in the export business, once this excess is sorted through.

"Woah, are you saying my middle class belongings will all be confiscated? They'll take my pets?" I hear the FUD already. Asylum City is for volunteers wishing to engage in specific social experiments, researched ahead of time. Come check us out. Visit. Roll your own. This particular scenario involves recycling vintage stuff, giving families opportunities to both discard, and to keep.

"Do you have some beef against single people? What's all this family stuff?"  I'm working to stay economical with my imagery. I'm talking about a place that's inter-generational, cradle to grave in terms of age representation. That's not quite the same as a rock concert like Woodstock or Vortex 1, although some brought kids. We've got grandmas and grandpas here. The families may not be "nuclear" (a sociological term).

The giant warehouse is about continuing to mix it up, as new stuff keeps coming in. The campus needs to have policies. Do we want a lot of couches? If the rule is "fill a container" then it's really up to the participants to decide what to ship. Many of them are hobbyists and plan on both pursuing, and sharing / teaching their hobby to apprentices. This will be the basis for an economy.

Long time readers of these blogs will be able to connect the dots to my "EPCOT West" modeling. We're in a "tiny house" phase at the moment, a genre featuring lots of innovation these days. The idea of a rigid shelter that's more than a tent, takes us to "tiny house" as well as to "yurt".  Dymaxion Yurt. That's being economical (with concepts, with imagery).