Xmas Eve 2023

This morning, some kind of water main burst, blocks away, unleashing a torrent. Danny had to step over or through the rushing curbside rivulet to bring in the groceries, delivered by a cutely painted Kroger van. I later headed out to take some pictures but streets were blocked with yellow tape. The water was stopped not long after, once the utility vehicles arrived.

Whenever I travel, my habit is to notice the franchises, the brands. We have Kroger in Portland, but in the guise of Fred Meyer. We also have Chick-fil-A, but not on seemingly every other block like here in Atlanta. I haven't seen any White Castles. Mellow Mushroom, a pizza place, was pretty fun, as was Fire Maker, the microbrewery.

Tara and I went to the Center for Puppetry Arts a few days ago, where I pushed her around in a wheelchair. I'm a big Jim Henson fan and this museum devotes several rooms to his Muppets. Another room reminds us of the whole history of puppets and of the fact that they're not just for children, cartoons either, as Walt Disney well knew.

In contrast to my cozy scene with family, I'm glued to my social media. For decades, I was pretty devoted to CBS as a source of news and even sent letters to its writers, suggesting various no doubt bizarre-to-them storylines. I've always been engaged with world events, and don't consider myself that unusual in this regard. These days, I live in my echo chamber of self selected most-watched Rumble and YouTube channels, which slowly evolves.

Wanderers had their traditional Winter Solstice Celebration at the Linus Pauling House on Hawthorne, back in Asylum District, my home neighborhood. Some friends who were present sent me a few pictures and posted others to Facebook. Social media also keeps me patched in to my peeps. 

Wandering the streets of midtown Atlanta on a misty day, I connected with friends around the world, sharing somewhat blurry phone pix (blurry because of a chipped plastic lens cover).

Design Science

Once something complicated and new becomes more of a known quantity, then it gets distilled into an icon planners use in a next iteration. For example, a fulfillment center. Slide the icon onto a grid, with the accompanying fleets of delivery vehicles.

Catalyzed by the global pandemic, many have migrated to a new lifestyle involving working from home and getting most supplies delivered. In complementary fashion, many have migrated to delivering for a living. A given individual may go back and forth between staying home a lot, versus keeping the products and people moving.

Remote work tends to be cloud based, where the cloud consists of office work, now virtualized. Replacing the current workforce (an ongoing challenge) means grooming a next generation of people comfortable using cloud services to create infrastructure.

It’s not like construction jobs are going away. What we build is changing though. Designing for remote workers means integrating work / study with sleeping and eating. How is this done? Tech companies generally have a cafeteria and recreation spaces, even gyms, but because of zoning, they’re not also residential. The mixed use building is moving into the foreground, where instead of driving your car to work, you take an elevator. Or you simply stay put.

A lot of work requires special facilities, such as factories, body maintenance shops (clothes, nails and hair, dentistry, tanning and massage, gyms, general healthcare). When many companies co-locate, you have the makings of a village or a city. This is what we see today.

We should not neglect the institutions involved in metaphysical disciplines, including the ideological ones that require the killing of other humans. Humans seem to have mostly resigned themselves to the fact that mass murder is necessary, to keep their living standards high. A few countering ideologies promote the idea that we’re capable, as a species, of largely ending our dysfunctional and pathological ways.

These countering ideologies are sometimes stereotyped as Luddite and/or back to the land, as if the best way to end the butchering of humans by other humans was to “opt out” of a mainstream lifestyle. However, some schools of thought embrace combinations of technology and metaphysics as potentially capable and effective enough to obviate the need for WMDs. They emphasize reshaping, more than violently disrupting, a pre-existing set of lifestyles.

When I talk about the metaphysical disciplines, what do I mean? Religions? Cults? Philosophies? I mean all of the above. Humans are not finished creating these. “The best religions are yet to come” might sound sacrilegious, but on the other hand, it might sound like a promise from God, prompting a kind of hallelujah response. Amen.

All Nighter

I'm pulling an all nighter, which doesn't mean I avoid tiny naps. I'm wide awake right now, and it's only an hour before the dog's breakfast anyway. She's nudging my elbow. 

I have my reasons for burning the idiomatic midnight oil (although not so idiomatic in my case as the heating system in this house is literally burning oil, day and night). Given differences in time zones, it's not such an obscure time (4 am-ish) elsewhere in my reality.

One could fill one's later years with study of what one just went through, over most of a lifetime. I'm speaking not just of a personal timeline of foreground activities, but a shared background marked by public events.

I think we tend to do that anyway, those of us of grandparent age. Nor do those of younger age necessarily fail to reflect and look back either. 

Along those lines I've been sampling several new media analysis channels, going with generations younger than Boomer (my cohort, roughly speaking), each engaged in retrospective summations in some dimension. It's by looking back that we see trends. We may sense what's trending going forward, but as the blockchain teaches, not everyone's block is the one added.

"Boomer" refers to "baby boomers" i.e. a bulge in the US population occasioned by a period of prosperity and relative peace, post two World Wars. As a boomer, I was starting to tune in world affairs, from television and adult conversation, during my early years in Portland (having been born in Chicago). Airlifting supplies to West Berlin was a thing. I preferred cartoons. I'd get more into reading later.

The geek in me sees all these internet video channels engaged in serious processing, both on and off cable, on broadcast television and radio. We're computing, as quickly as we dare. Cutting corners may be dangerous.

Marshall McLuhan saw the tsunami of TV and wondered if the printed word would survive, or rather, those who could really relate to it. The convergence of TV and text in the form of computers was just starting to happen in McLuhan's day. The senses would rebalance and remix.

We were seeing a quick evolution of hypertext media (http, https), a new form of tension in the world, but also old hat, as scholarship had always been about making these kinds of connections. 

Computers made it all go much faster, the better to keep up with the CERN stuff. 

Dr. Vannevar Bush of the National Science Foundation, was seeing search engines in the 1940s.

Oscillations

Today's chatter on the FSI and TrimTab calls was useful to me. 

I did a lot of Show & Tell, with the Snelson sculpture (Barrel Tower), with Flextegrity (floating icosahedrons) and with a Vector Flexor.

On TrimTab we were asking: "What is dynamic equilibrium?" We were reading Ideas and Integrities.

The animation that came up for me was the gentle swaying of the Jitterbug as it oscillates to and fro through cosmic zero, hitting a turnaround at each extreme, an icosahedron.

An icosa-what? 

A core animation in this metaphysics is a mathematically explored geometric transformation that causes many an onlooker to roll their eyes, because Bucky's disciples seem to inevitably produce it at random times, to make some point or other.

Bow-tie Universe is like a dorji, somewhat dumbbell shaped, marking an "eye of the needle" inflection point where the camel turns inside out, if it could. Extremes of asymmetric aberration pull against one another, as left versus right, as positive versus negative. 

We get that meme with the meditator, inside his vector equilibrium frame, open minded, receiving. I've reproduced one of the best of those above, by Casey House of Syn-U.

The twist-contract terminus might appear to be an icosahedron superficially, whereas we're able to envision a doubling (of edges) and quadrupling (6 x 4) in the octahedron then tetrahedron that define "the gate of plunge-through" at a deeper level. 

Picture a tyger leaping through a hoop (cosmic zero), landing on one side, then the other. 

Add a beat: 4 - 0 - 4; 0 = 9 (nine is none).

Brain --> Mind --> Brain --> Mind... "Brain" connotes electronic bot-like reflexing, the latest twist, 31 great circles, icosahedron. 

"Mind" connotes openness if only for an instant (a glimpse), an equilibrium of 25 great circles.

Keyword Searches

Some may wonder to what extent all this focus on and interest in UAPs (UFOs a subset) is impacting our spreading Martian Math curriculum, within our Silicon Forest context. 

The focus on legit Mars explorations, anchored from Earth, were already a deliberate tie-in, i.e. during class at Reed College campus, we would watch YouTubes of the Mars landers, taking into account their findings. The science-to-fiction ratio was meant to be bully for science i.e. > 1.

But then remember, around a scientific core, we weave science fiction, consciously simulating, or simply exercising our powers of imagination for both didactic and recreational purposes. We play fantasy-based games sure, but look how hard those make us think, as game developers. 

We stay buff with matrix algebra and everything, even quaternions in some game engines. We’re flirting with universal algebra (UA, Grassmann) even as we project those Pokémon.

The relationship is precessional. Journalists are not generally interested in the Math Wars per se, and only a tiny clique of debaters keep those alive. 

Adopting Drug War nomenclature, we have the various math curriculum pushers and enablers, who stand to benefit from large armies of addicts. Calculus’s Invisible Army is an especially big one, participating in the four year college racket. 

As Andrew Hacker describes in his controversial book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions, high school and college calculus play a serious gatekeeping role when it comes to entering some professions.

I’ve been a trooper and later officer in the Calculus Invisible Army myself, slightly on the fringe maybe, but that’s not necessarily a disadvantage in a market that tolerates, even encourages, some diversity.

Martian Math is fringe in its emphasis on computer programming (versus only calculators), object oriented in particular (setting up functional as a sister paradigm), tying types and objects to instances of polyhedra. 

We might have the coordinates for the Archimedeans all pre-stored in some exercises, with the student’s job being to write the SQL to extract them, one at a time, from a relational database. We’ve had all this in place for a couple decades by now, while continuing to field test, reflect, and improve. Once a polyhedron is extracted, many parameters remain (play with em or accept the defaults) before composing a scene and rendering it e.g. in Blender or POV-Ray.

So it’s pretty likely that a journalist searching for “Martian” or “flying saucer” is eventually going to stumble upon one of our storyboards, involving hidden government facilities in contact with ETs. We use frameworks like that to couch our teachings about AC and DC electricity i.e. the Earthlings and Martians are collaborating on hydropower dams, using slightly different maths (reconciled within the curriculum).

So do I get a lot of inquiries from journalists asking if I’m a source regarding the UFOs people are talking about in WDC? Not really. It’s pretty obvious from the context that I’m more the high school level math teacher, networking with academics and administrators at various levels to usher in a more fluid form of mathematics teaching, more literary in many dimensions. 

We may use a lot of the same tropes in our storytelling, but unless you hear them say “tetrahedron” rather more frequently than average, they’re likely from a different subculture. Look for other signs. Our Silicon Forest stuff has many differentiating characteristics. Private schools have more freedom to prototype.

But the assumption should not be that journalists are confused, or need to ask me much of anything. They bump into Martian Math online, and realize it’s something tangential, and then go on to pursue their UAPs down a different rabbit hole. 

The net effect is increasing awareness of Martian Math, even if there’s a ships passing in the night aspect to the encounter. Maybe a more junior journalist, looking for something to write about, will return to the Math Wars scene and seek to pry out a cogent story. Start with Sputnik?

Napoleon (movie review)

Cutting and pasting my thoughts to a friend in Cyprus...

Good morning. I’ll say something good about the movie: just screenshots of the film, an album of stills, each surrounded by a fancy frame, would have its place in an art museum.

For example the coronation scene. It looked like a tableau by a Dutch painter or something, almost too staged to be real (in that shot, we got a brief glance at a court painter, making this same point).

Of course it is too staged to be real. It ends up being cinematic and archetypal, at which point it feels free to dive into some new Freudian vista that doesn’t echo any historical accounts already on file.

It’s all about Josephine and his own mother. People who study this period don’t like this kind of “fooling around” as if what’s being told is the accepted wisdom.

Once one suspends disbeliefs and enters speculation mode, then the story hangs together by a different glue. He abruptly returns from Egypt, or escapes Elba, for the same reason: he wants a word with his wife. Hah hah.

You could say he’s an early feminist, wanting to hold up his end of the bargain as he sees it, with corresponding counter-demands. He esteems her highly to the end and in the fade out, her disembodied voice suggests they try it again in a next life, and maybe get the balance right this time.

I can’t help but see this telling as one in contrast to King Henry VIII and how he treated women who couldn’t bear him a son. Napoleon takes a more scientific approach (for the day), seeing if the problem might be him, and even when it turns out to be not, he wants the divorce so he can legally marry and have a legitimate heir, but without wanting to punish his wife. She’s to be treated very well, and he still wants to be her best friend. 

In a way, it’s quite a touching story as told, and I don’t find it to be anti-French. He’s not just some brute from Corsica. He has a deep sense of chivalry.