Agricultural Studies

Continuing a story... the old propane tank had not been swapped out yet. I wanted to have the owner in on moving tanks around. 

Indeed, I'm working closely with the owner on the whole "Boeing production line" we call it (complete with quality control) whereby each section of the wheel line gets a five point inspection:

(a) the wheel itself (mid-section) is ready for service, with the spokes and cleats all in order
(b) new sprinkler with leveler assembly installed, with tightened nozzle (also called nipple)
(c) new drain (from a box in the Gator)
(d) new gasket (old removed, grooves brushed, new gasket glued in)
(e) pipe section is obstruction-free

You've seen these wheel lines I'm sure. They must be advanced from riser to riser in most setups, a riser being where the irrigation system pops up with like a hydrant. Each section of pipe, used, recycled, presents its own set of problems, in terms of removing the old hardware and replacing it. The owner and I would yellow tape any section passing the above five point test.

For R&R, I got to ride in the backseat as a passenger in this three wheeled EV that easily navigates the backroads amidst farmlands. Tomorrow: we'll try the burn pile. Again, I'm a sorcerer's apprentice, not an on-my-own master, on this particular totem pole. 

My model is: you can be a big kahuna in your special circles, and then you're just another WalMart shopper stuck in traffic everywhere else, except that's to extreme. You'll rank higher and even have speaking parts in some "theater" (a military term). 

Out here in the flower fields, I'm a trainee, still learning the ins and outs of irrigation. I think and talk a lot about simulations, like SimFarm, SimAnt, SimCity, when I'm doing this work.

A tractor going back and forth, seen from above, is one of my computer science topics as well. The field is a data structure, most conveniently tabular, of rows and columns, and the tractors are read-write devices, especially write devices, able to inject permutations, seedlings, into the dirt.

In my Python implementation, I have a generic Field type, and a Tractor type, and a kind of mutual awareness between the two in that each tractor introspects its Field instance and vice versa: the Field knows what Tractor instances are on (or in) it.

TrimTabbers Meet: American Dreamer

I came across American Dreamer by Scott Eastham as if in a dream, as here was a new book about Bucky yet I thought I'd seen them all. What parallel reality was this? That was some months ago, and by the time TrimTab Book Club was ready to read it, I had lost my copy. 

That was my excuse for taking a break from the meetups every other week. 

More specifically, I've been feeling called to tie off loose ends that only I can tie off, such as around Quadrays as I've implemented them, in Python, and so forth. I should prioritize projects on which my presence could be critical.

Besides, Trim Tabbers have privileged access to digitized versions of syllabus assets.

What book will we read next? I tossed The House of Tomorrow onto the queue, but not necessarily for any time soon. More likely, we'll tackle Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth next, which surprises me, only because I'd assumed this group had already taken that up, as one of the core classics.

After that, I sense a lot of interest in CJ's book, newly available. His practical guide to comprehensivist studies is based on his own experience of being a trim tab in this respect, i.e. steering a course that would optimize whatever free energy (Subgenius: slack) was available.

Energy is a function of frequency, when it comes to light, we should remember. Super high frequency lasers are the "new thing" a lot of photonics experts are taking a look at (although not directly -- laser light tends to be hazardous to one's eyeballs).

We talked about the eclipse quite a bit, even watching Nathan's 7 minute home video of the experience.

Me in chat, interacting with my peers:

Book called Polyhedra by Cromwell documents how the concept of polyhedron has become more ephemeral over time moving from “solid” to more like “wireframe”. Synergetics is certainly consistent with this trend, but then there’s the Zeitgeist as a whole, of which it’s reflective.

“Tetrahedron” is a long-winded word for “thing”. Turns out the etymology of “thing” is a “meeting” (in Finland?). “A thing is a meeting of things”.

Important to remember that XYZ in physics has no gravitational or electromagnetic presence. It’s ghostly, there for reference, not to participate in the chemistry. We have to allow Bucky’s concepts the same pre frequency freedoms i.e. it’s not like all of a sudden we have to imagine literal metals just because the IVM is under discussion instead of XYZ. That’d be double standards, a fallacy.

Equal and opposite is an ideal in physics. “Ideal” usually means “never happens, really”. Perfect circle. What’s so perfect about what never exists, right?

Fuller’s thought experiment: look around and decide if every feature you see is: a face (F) a corner (V) or an edge (E). Can’t these interconvert? Can’t we see a corner as a whole ball, with many faces? Of course, we do this all the time. V + F = E + 2. Etc.

 

Social Media

Likely a lot of think tanks have already published findings regarding the new face of war, given social media, and global telecommunications. The curtain went up on "networking" back in the early 1980s, in terms of what people are up to. Didn't you know? We network now.

When they say "a military trains to fight the last war" that's not a criticism so much as a statement of what there is to go on and extrapolate from. When a new war starts, one finds out then if the training was apropos. Usually a lot of it is, and feedback from the theater helps the training get better.

My impression is that more people than ever are casually following world affairs at a level even State Department officials would have had trouble engaging with, at the speed of yesterday's media. 

Even while riding a city bus, one can lurk in on the latest secret discussions between German military planners thinking of ways to take out that bridge in Crimea. The stamps commemorating that event are already printed, with the celebratory cakes going stale in the fridge.

I was listening to a Canadian mercenary last night, talking about his motivations for joining a unit fighting Russia, only a few weeks out of uniform, and after fifteen years of service. He wanted to continue with the lifestyle and he had a simple ideology: to fight an evil dictatorship. He went to the front voluntarily. That's the kind of theater he felt drawn to, now that he'd tasted combat. Some guys relish the flavor. They like the bonding, the sense of a team.

Civil War History

In a strict Quaker jargon, one of my own rolling, but based in the lit, we have: ranters and quietists. The quietists typify the practice as Silent Worship is our central ritual, yet spoken ministry or sharing is also allowed and expected, which is where the ranters come in.

However, that language, of quietists versus ranters, is somewhat misleading in that these are roles more than persons. A given Friend will get more ranty, or move towards a quietist aesthetic. Quietists still talk, we're not Trappists. Neither side feels forced to concede as the tension is perennial.

Translating back in time to the North versus South in the northern Americas (Mexico and Canada played roles), Friends were often farmers and many could use the help, so when Friends in London passed a minute declaring slave owning off limits, those in the new colonies felt obliged to obey or jump ship, which was easily doable in the sense that many brands of Christianity accepted slavers with open arms.

Being in the minority, as not slave owning, Quakers started to feel the evil eye of their neighbors, as slavers saw their own way of life as moral, ordained, reflective of God's plan. "Who are these Quakers amongst us with their uppity holier than thou attitudes?" 

Much of the prevailing ideology was rooted in ideas about Noah's sons' families and their offsprings: the many races. Which was best? Or as Darwin had taught us to say (somewhat tautologically): the most fit?

Many Friends upped and left their properties in the east, especially in the southeast, and migrated west. This was still a feasible strategy for average families, but with a catch: it continued to pitch the whites against the reds (as seen in racial terms by those living the dream), shorthand for the differing genetic lines now attempting to coordinate the sharing of resources. 

Humans often do this thing called "war" when attempts at coordination fail. War is a kind of helpless flailing but with lots of lipstick and dress up (especially for guys). Other times, humans succeed in remaining coordinated.

I tell the story of Sam Hill as one such post Civil War refugee. The practice of slavery was now somehow encoded in the Amendments as prohibited, and society would find workarounds, other legal forms of forced labor. Debt is always a primary motivator, as we learned in the first five thousand years.

Whereas Sam got all the way out to Seattle and the Columbia Gorge, many Friends halted their westward journey in Indiana. 

As one might imagine, the ranting that went on within Quakerdom was often fiercely delivered and strongly felt. The whole nickname moniker of "Quaker" alludes to their excited tremorous state when "infused with the Spirit" as they might describe it, and not meaning alcohol.

The Religious Society of Friends as it is formally named, is not Pentecostalist, meaning "speaking in tongues" (the whole practice, popular in other denominations) is not encouraged, but sharing from the heart certainly is. 

Many a Meeting for Worship is broken up with remorseful sobs or quiveringly principled rants, as it's what the format allows and is designed to withstand.  People shake hands and go their separate ways, or stay for coffee or tea. A more affordable form of group psychotherapy would be hard to come by.

In pre Civil War days, when owning slaves was already grounds for being read out of Meeting (how Quakers got disbarred), the ranters were often abolitionists. They would make their true feelings known amongst other Friends yet perhaps remain mostly quiet by day, tending their farms, minding their own businesses. At night though, underground railroads were happening, as fleeing slave families were passed forward, towards prospective freedom.

Such abolitionists were also labeled immediatists, because their rants were to the effect that the abolition of slavery was long overdue, not only among Friends but amongst the populace in general. Otherwise, the hypocrisies and contradictions of going forward as a democracy, one with a Constitution, would result in the latter's demolition. 

These abolitionists were a type of unionist then, wanting to preserve the nation state as one, not fated to become two. To this end, the non-immediatist, non-abolitionists were willing to grandfather in the practice of slavery where already legal, but not extend it to new states, already foreseen as far west as Lewis and Clark had taken their survey, at the start of the 1800s. 

Other more quiet Friends were, like Lincoln, thinking that once the slaves were freed, they might move en masse to a homeland, in order to be far from their former owners. Liberia? Belize? These were among the fantasies common in that day, and some freed families and individuals did flee to these places, as well as to Haiti.

Some Friends could say to themselves they had no dog in the fight. Many unionists were quite happy to return runaway slaves, countering the underground railroaders with more respect for the autonomous region.

Much of what helped end slavery came about because humanity was industrializing, having harnessed the power of steam, fossil fuels, sun and wind in new ways. Humans had less need to rely on other humans for their calorie output and horsepower. Horses faced retirement for the same reasons. 

Humans professionalized and refined their practices around "power tools" and ages without slavery became possible, even if in practice, enslavement persists. Sociologically speaking, the planet is not free of slavery, even if the arrow of civilization points in that direction. Alfred North Whitehead held that it did, almost tautologically, as a matter of grammar. Civilization is the opposite of tyranny and oppression.

A 1900s American inventor, R. Buckminster Fuller, pointed out the positive benefits of industrialization in terms of "energy slaves", units of caloric output that represented what a hard-working human might do in a specific unit of time, in comparison to a horse. Horsepower is energy per time, not just energy without a time dimension. 

Humans might eventually do the work of a horse (e.g. plow a field), given days extra, but their horsepower is rated less because of the extra time taken. 

This "energy slave" writing proved too "hot potato" in the early 21st Century, at least among some groups I encountered in American universities, as too many racisms were still simmering, boiling over in some cases, and any use of words such as "master", "oversight", "slave" were considered too triggering on the face of it to admit within polite conversation, and academics often strive to be polite (why what they hand out is called a diploma). 

Many Meetings, frequented by academics, did away with their "Oversight Committee" nomenclature. No contemporary would want to serve as "overseer" (i.e. "supervisor") the thinking went, as the old timey language sounded too slave-owny.

One ongoing conversation within General Systems Theory (GST) -- cite Boulding -- is whether mechanization is inherently at the expense of, or is optionally a booster of, higher living standards. Of course so much depends on what counts as "higher". 

Having a bleaker history, more nightmarish, is certainly a way to lower living standards. What will we have to look back on? Consider policymaking in the light of future hindsight. Practice "anticipatory design science" (Fuller) as if your lives depended on it.

Summer Jobs

first published December 10, 2023

Diaspora Nations

Where I start with New Palestine, or Palestine for short, is it's a Diaspora Nation to begin with, as was Israel in the sense many people give the word, even through it had no existence as a jigsaw puzzle piece on the UN game board at first, much as Palestine doesn't today. 

Sure we see those maps of shrinking land areas, but those never belonged to a bona fide state, or people wouldn't be clamoring how we still need a state.  I'm seeing "Diaspora Nation" and "University" (global network of campuses or bases) as essentially synonymous. 

US citizens, counting expats and those deployed to bases outside the US, likewise comprise a Diaspora Nation of sorts. Citizens intermingle. The planet is such that Chinese, Guatemalans, Koreans and Irish Catholics all live in the same cities, even if having, in some cases, their own small and large businesses, schools, travel and real estate agents, restaurants, journalists and so on.

Imagine a Palestine, not typecast as "Muslim" (yet serving many Muslims), not an "ethno-state", that owns a fleet of cruise ships, has skyscrapers in many great cities, scattered farmlands, hotel and rental car chains. 

The idea of a "government" owning these things sounds socialistic, but let's talk about a mix of public and private sectors, and let's have no large militia given no extensive borders to defend, but lots of holy sites and many lands to develop (e.g. Guantanamo Bay if the Cubans buy in), so we need an army of engineers.

The same facilities might be shared among several Diaspora Nations in many cases, as when we place new stadium-shaped Old Man River style bases around the world. 

We might make these agreements without waiting for big wheels to turn slowly, in the UN or wherever. As private entities, we're free to get on with the formulation of our global states university system, our Promised Land.

The Nonstop Love-in

That's the title of Johnny's new (and first) book, in all caps. Johnny Stallings, a veteran of these journals (blogs). Nick Consoletti, a premier networker, made me aware of this guy, who could memorize entire Shakespeare plays, and perform them, as one man shows. His stamina is that of a high athlete. Whatever's the mental equivalent: he's in shape that way too.

The invite popped up on Facebook, with his picture on the cover. The event was at a neighborhood coffee shop and grocery store, after hours, in one of those hard to navigate niche neighborhoods, wedged between main arterials and made maze-like with one way and blocked off streets. I used to work in this neighborhood, for CUE, by then back with EMO just down the street on Bancroft.

The venue was packed, with folks queued to get their signed copies. I took a seat right away, assuming I'd get my opportunity to buy one later, and I was right. Johnny read excerpts from his book amidst adoring fans. The guy is a renowned playwright and thespian, and poet, in these parts. He's a Whitman aficionado. and I'm join him in celebrating that guy, in chapters past, when Nick was with us.

Stallings spent thirteen years doing workshops in male prisons, with the work spilling over into the women's prisons, as we later heard from the audience. Sometimes he'd stage plays, but a lot of the time it was just to gather people and do scripts or whatever. I was not part of his inner circle of volunteers and have only bumped into him randomly, on Mt. Tabor, at the bank, a few times in recent years. But I follow from a distance. This was a great opportunity to reconnect.

I only just bought the book last night and haven't sat down with it, but based on his readings, I'm already sure I'll be loving it. He well knows the book might come across to some as pollyanna, artificially upbeat where life is more complicated. Here it helps to know his audience: that prison population, already maxed out on misery, deprived of freedom, and not needing an education in how to be down and out. Johnny was that little dot of yin in a yang world, or of yang in a yin world, providing hope it'll all turn out someday, the wheel of life.

About Quakers

[an excerpt from a math4wisdom post]

In my post-military and/or slightly para-military asylum city refugee camps, we keep the fun parts (helicopters) and lose the dumb parts (e.g. murder, mayhem...)

Quakers, eventually a business-oriented bourgeois sect, evolved as a part of the trend away from organized religion and the oppressive tyranny of the English caste (class) system. Per Quaker lore, we invented fixed pricing which made wholesale / retail catalogs possible (it didn't matter what your title or position in society was). We owned Barclays Bank, Lloyds of London, Cadbury Chocolate... (but never the Quaker oats company).

A newish book called Quakernomics (not by Quakers) documents their middle-class capitalistic utopianism, which was centered around the idea of a company town, with jobs, health care and education for all. Most industrialists didn't care for this socialistic model, but it's part of New England Transcendentalism as well, this impulse to form egalitarian communities that are also prosperous (not unlike the kibbutzim in some ways, although I'm no expert).

We (the Quakers) reached our apex in power during the industrial revolution in England. Pennsylvania was to be our utopia but we were quickly outnumbered by other Anglo-Euro immigrants eager to engage in Indian Wars and other forms of awkward jerkiness characteristic of their clans.

Quaker Rufus Jones helped establish the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as the Quakers' social action arm. I've worked with AFSC quite a bit over the years, in various capacities, lots in my online journals.

Founder George Fox, popular in some military circles, advised worshippers to escape the "steeple houses" (everyday churches) and join him in talking to God directly, yet collectively, in a silence imbued with a sense of expectancy, and from meetinghouses instead (no steeples).

Religious Society of Friends is the formal name, and comes from a passage in John wherein Jesus says he wants friends, not servile servants and sycophants.

Show & Tell

What are the dynamics of learning a practice? Draw your experiences from any and every corner of your life.

What I come up with is we need to talk about the role of peers, how to work with them, in addition to who and what are they.

Let's go back to a classic classroom of kids at their desks, teacher up front, like we see in so many movies. The peers are the students, and they check each other out, for looks, for behaviors, for cues, for clues. They also check out the teacher, and learn from student teacher interactions. How the adult in the room behaves with peers one's own age, is of interest, in addition to the subject matter.

Suppose the teacher encourages show & tell, meaning she or he sets aside time during meetups for lightning talks, meaning students showcase their own work for minutes at a time. Perhaps these sessions get recorded. Perhaps students have access to the raw recordings and edit together their own works, in turn topical in show & tell (like in a filmmaking class).

A core purpose of Show & Tell is to give peers a way to assess their own performance relative to the class material, and not just relative to classroom theatrics, which I reiterate are not irrelevant. They do this by comparing their own increasing level of mastery with that of others. 

Some life coaches will butt in to say one should never compare. I say always compare but not in the judgey way of "who's better?" because in a multidimensional space (most of them are) there's no obvious "better" dimension. Develop your tastes. Learn to articulate them.

If I all walk into the same class knowing nothing about sculpting with clay (the "even playing field" metaphor), and within a week, three peers are showcasing the realistic-looking busts of famous people they've made, then I might feel motivated to practice more, to make my Show & Tell likewise interesting. We call that peer pressure, but that's only one form of it.  Call it "I want to be a star too" pressure.

Perhaps I'm a Python teacher online, and my students are all adults with jobs in IT. I'm recalling my real world experience with Saisoft here. What we did some, but what we could have done more of, is schedule lightning talks every other session, perhaps for only 15 minutes, enough time to get three show & tell presentations. 

This would have been equally applicable when I taught data visualization (histograms and like that) for Clarusway, although in this case we had whole separate practice sections as distinct from the content lectures (which I provided).

I've also been a Python teacher in person, going from school to school after school, providing content in the programmable period between "classes over, teachers done" and yet parental pickup is still at least another ninety minutes away, as they're at work. 

What to do with this time, pre rush hour? 

Greater Portland schools provide a smorgasbord of optional electives, provided by various providers, from nonprofits to for-profits. My entree was through a for-profit, Coding with Kids, and we stress show & tell for the reasons above, and more.

After some coaching in Codesters, an online Python learning environment sharing many features with MIT Scratch (a curriculum prerequisite one could say), students would try stuff on their own computers. We aimed at one laptop or desktop per child (OLPC).

I'd actually bring Chromebooks if the school had no computer lab to lend us -- but usually we used the school's lab, in which case Windows, but not always. 

After playing with Codesters for awhile, some student would raise a hand to get enqueued in the next round of Show & Tell. The student took control of the projector, and screencast their own work. It didn't have to be a work of art. 

They could also show off work they'd been doing in the meantime, meaning at home, in case the magic was working and they felt motivated to program "off the clock" as it were, during free time (we had no formal homework in this program). Occasionally a student would become "an addict" but in a socially approved way that had them rocketing up our "Coding Ladder" of coding abilities.

In sum, whether you're teaching online, or in person, if you have a cohort of students we might call peers, given them opportunities to show off their own work, in terms of what they've been learning. I realize this is not a novel suggestion. In a creative writing class, people read from their own writing. In a creative coding class, people run their little demos, be those games or animated greeting cards, or even musical numbers (both Codesters and MIT Scratch allow for musical composition, another kind of programming, to some level).

[enhanced version on Medium via LinkedIn ]

Pattern Matching

I've been continuing to explore my own ignorance, by filling in holes, so to speak. Regarding the US Civil War period for example. 

But I do so searching for patterns that match our own time, such as around the topic of forced migrations, attempts to escape, underground railroads and so on. Yes I'm talking about Gaza and the NPU.

Judging from what ChatGPT says about me, one might imagine I'm engaged in many high level discussions with peers regarding our emerging new 4D paradigm. I'd say I'm engaged in only a few such interactions. 

Even within the pro Bucky camp, the stalwarts like to throw in talk of tesseracts and n-dimensional Hilbert Space, to remind us they're math savvy. Although there's nothing wrong with doing that per se (showing off is one's prerogative), there's a corresponding risk of further diluting the Synergetics namespace.

I hope to accomplish similar ends (evincing math savvy) by merging my operations with various M4W machinations, thereby helping to buffer and mediate my relationships within academia, via a network of independent thinkers (including some PhDs, other nimble ninjas).

We don't have to once and for all time resolve this chatterbox debate about whether I'm "really" a mathematician. The LLMs take their cues from the past, which continues to aggregate, providing a continually changing picture with hindsight. I deserve a peer group regardless.

From my M4W memo of earlier today (shared on Medium):

I’m anticipating chatbot writeups about me will change over time as more journals of repute decide to include more of the math memes I’m into.

Like I keep thinking MIT Technology Review or one of those will drop an article featuring our ongoing “tetrahedral thinking” subculture, this many years after Bucky, maybe even picking up on the Martian Math angle, now that ChatGPT has spilled the beans.

Maybe I'm more like a Martin Gardner figure, playing around the edges with some intriguing language games?

I would count Quadrays as one such language game, a vector machinery that only makes sense in the context of the Synergetics volumetric hierarchy, and that perhaps explains the overall attitude of indifference towards this topic: people simply got tired of listening to RBF's "disciples" over the years and tuned out that whole subculture, which didn't seem to be getting much of anywhere (a self-fulfilling prophecy).

Of course I think that's unfortunate because much of the world was looking to Americans to define a bright future for Spaceship Earth, the Apollo Project having been a promising start. Rule by threat of violence is so comparatively weak as a strategy as to not really count as one.

So I can't say I blame the next-gens for tuning us out. In retrospect, we didn't attract enough strong readers from the humanities side of the fence. People treated Synergetics like a literal physics, and as permission to dumb it all down. True: Synergetics contains speculative content along with alternative concepts, relating to physics. But it's also about psychology and death. It's hard to read, in the way a difficult writer like James Joyce or Ezra Pound is hard to read.

Fuller considered Freud a pivotal figure, along with Einstein, as both these thinkers taught us to attend more to the unconscious and invisible side of things. Through Fuller's writings, one comes to appreciate how we act automatically (robotically) from past conditioning, with mindfulness (an optional attribute) inducing greater awareness and less awkwardness over time. He distinguished mind from brain.

Chatbot Gossip

I got a screenshot from a friend showing how the first thing ChatGPT said about me is I was a mathematician. 

ChatGPT: 

Kirby Urner is a mathematician, writer, and educator known for his work in promoting innovative ways to teach mathematics and computer science. He is particularly interested in leveraging technology to improve education and has written extensively about integrating programming and mathematical concepts. Urner is also known for his contributions to the Python programming community and for developing curriculum materials that explore the intersections of mathematics, technology, and philosophy.

 

One of Urner's notable contributions is his work on "Martian Math," a curriculum that explores geometry and other mathematical concepts through the lens of Buckminster Fuller's synergetics, which is a philosophical approach to understanding the geometry of the universe. Urner's work often reflects a deep interest in Fuller's ideas, including the concepts of geodesic domes and the efficient use of resources.  

Urner has also been involved in discussions about the future of education, advocating for more open and flexible learning environments that can adapt to the needs of diverse learners. He has contributed to various online forums, blogs, and conferences, sharing his insights on mathematics education, programming, and the potential of technology to transform learning. 

Given the broad range of his interests and activities, Kirby Urner is recognized as a thought leader in the fields of mathematics education and educational technology, with a particular focus on making learning more engaging, relevant, and accessible to students of all backgrounds. 

ChatGPT can make mistakes. Consider checking important information. 

I wondered what else the chatbots might be saying about me behind my back (as it were), and another friend sent some eye-opening answers:

• Persuasive
• More Tepid

I'll have to keep my eye on these robo-reviews.

BEAST: A Particle Zoo

I can't claim I'm breaking much new ground here, but I do profit from knowing my material and not getting lost in the woods. 

Those looking for a way to lace up Synergetics would do will to pull tight on this topic of modules, or "particles" as he calls them earlier. Leaving aside their importance, at least they have a definite shape and place in his little sculpture of nesting polyhedrons.

Fuller continues with his research past the publication of his two volumes, although it's a somewhat lonely endeavor. Some of the continuations we've come up with, would come later. 

However when it comes to the B, E, A, S, T modules at least, he nailed them.

Americana

From hanging out around the US Embassy in the Philippines, I developed an appreciation for how the State Department shares American culture overseas, at many levels. This enterprise involves scouting for quintessential Americana and packaging it for distribution in other cultures.

Along these lines, the international schools, rebranding from American, with some reverting, have a role in showcasing the latest curricula. Even if your kid is not American (your family is from Greece or Singapore) you might still admire the quality of an international school education, and so seek out this opportunity.

Buckminster Fuller has at times been a poster child for what's positive and promising about the USA. That his thinking is making a comeback, this time with more geometry savvy (beyond the domes and spheres) is going to help with America's reputation. "No, we're not all neocons" is the message, i.e. we don't all think like knuckle-draggers from some cartoon Stone Age. We're not the Flintstones.

Of course the sad truth is a lot of bedrock Americans are Flintstone types and march to the tune of the propaganda drummers. They're hooked on cable TV and the drugs pushed thereon. They've been programmed, more or less in the Quaker sense (where we value "unprogrammed" as an option). Putting a best foot forward need not mean covering up the truth, that we have other feet.

Of course everyone comes with programming. The question is whether one is still capable of auto-updating. The curriculum itself is a good example. Looking back from 2024, it should by now at least include Occupy and talk about BS jobs ala Dr. David Graeber. 

Or it might still be stone age. 

International school parents form a valuable test audience and focus group, given their above-average cultural sophistication.

Ironically, given what here sounds like anti-caveman talk, anti-Flintstone PR, we have these wedge-like objects (cite BEAST) that might be called "arrowheads" i.e. they have a sharpness to them, these A&B, T&E, S particles, ephemeral spatial partitions we practice our fractions with. 24As make a Tetra(D) and so on. 

The primitivity of the concepts (partitions in space) has a neolithic flavor and is suitable for initial uptake via elementary school, with further elaboration in higher grade levels. Bring on the surds!

However, we cannot always depend on a preoccupied, militarily-obsessed USG to take full advantage of its soft PR talents. Here, in this connection, Hollywood has been known to pick up the slack i.e. distribution networks in the private sector have their own ways of marketing curriculum content, if only tangentially in the form of commercials and product placements. 

If Zometool is taking off in China, this may have less to do with the American schools (for embassy brats, like I was to some extent), and more to do with the Chinese equivalent of QVC, the televised home shopping show. 

The Fuller stuff is potentially faddish periodically and independently of what the education schools are currently teaching (or more likely not teaching, if dinosaurs).

Village Tweeter

I'm in a first meeting of our Steering Committee, M4W (math 4 wisdom), based in Lithuania (but I'm in Oregon).https://t.co/qiynNmqhGZ

— Kirby Urner (@thekirbster) February 20, 2024

Network Nations

I took my usual virtual nations talk to Thirsters, and felt cued when Barbara brought up Tibet in connection with the forcible displacement of some of its people, the administrative institutions most of all, as these were seen to be in conflict with those of mainstream metropolitan China. 

Not all Tibetans were pushed out, not by a long shot, and Lhasa remains ethnically very Tibetan to this day. Yet Tibet itself is a Diaspora Nation, with headquarters in nearby India in Dharamshala.

I said diaspora nations were more futuristic in not insisting on seeing themselves projected on some world map as a large contiguous body of territory. A nation might be more like a powder, a spice, than a cut of meat, with campus facilities dotting the globe. Supranational corporations, religious sects, and some universities, already follow this discontinuous discrete design.

So what about a New Palestine, with facilities and subdivisions all over, including in Mesopotamia? What should be its policy towards the various religions?

My vision of New Palestine mirrors the old Palestine: Jews and Muslims living peacefully together, along with Christians and people who practice other religions. The Parliament of World Religions would hail New Palestine for sharing its ideals.

Jewish heritage individuals, as well as Christians, will be able to apply for citizenship and a passport and participate in the design of the state itself, side by side with the other social engineers. New Palestine will therefore not leave itself open to the charge of being just another "ethno-state" versus an "unum-state" as in "e pluribus unum". Islamic Studies will not be neglected, nor will use of Arabic or Farsi be in any way discouraged.

The Dalai Lama was offering similar visions from his headquarters in Dharamshala with respect to his host nation India. Why not pool the very best from every religious lineage, in a national curriculum that does not itself profess to be any particular religion. Wise advice.

One might call that "secular" but not in the sense of clamping down on the whole idea of religious lineages. What's secular are the dynamisms that frustrate any particular and singular ethnicity from seizing the reigns of power. 

New Palestine could be synonymous with a university. New Palestine University (NPU) has a ring to it, but if it allows for citizenship and issues passports, then it's clearly more than a typical U of today. It might have to stick with a conventional UN bureaucracy under the hood, but remember the UN itself issues recognized passports. 

Why not give every Palestinian a chance to self document and get a UN passport out of the deal, as well as expedited access to NPU facilities?  This kind of intake is of course difficult to carry out under conditions of siege and bombardment.

Nations that self aggrandize by engulfing territory owe a lot to the Doctrine of Discovery in some cases, and that rug has been pulled to some extent, as the Vatican repudiates it. 

The upshot may not be that "jigsaw puzzle piece nations", as I call them, get overthrown or trampled upon, so much as they dissolve to become more like diasporas themselves, meaning more dispersed, distributed, non-contiguous, and more inspiring of member loyalty because less dense and less slow.

We may soon become a world of network nations, amidst networks of other kinds. In the minds of some, we're there already.

NFL Day

The more correct name for today is Super Bowl Sunday. The big teams, having duked it out all season, have winnowed it down to two. 

Derek is coming over, a University of Oregon grad with a lot of knowledge about athletics and football. He's a former track star, long distance runner, now a veteran of the food business (from many angles). He has a lot of cool possessions, including flat screen TVs, and let me borrow one, a more contemporary alternative to my yesteryear's Sony Trinitron CRT (still hooked up to VHS).

Although I'm a typical first worlder in having screens all around the house, I'm not connected to a cable TV service e.g. via Comcast, but only to internet via CenturyLink (formerly Qwest, following US West ). 

But what does "internet and not cable" really mean in this day and age, in terms of contet? Internet means streaming and streaming means a lot of the same cable TV content simply piped in by a different infrastructure: optical fiber bearing tcp/ip packets versus whatever cable uses.

Dave, on the other hand, will be at a swanky No NFL party, in other words an alternative happy social event (one day after Chinese New Years) that caters to people with no patience for stupid Super Bowl stuff. 

That's a whole other demographic in need of snacks and beverages, carbohydrates, cigs, sugar and alcohol. Both the NFLers and anti-NFLers are equally likely to be helping the snack food empire remain in ascendency with their antics.

And then Overeaters Anonymous is ready when you are, to help you deprogram and re-brainwash.

One might think the pro NFL American football watching crowd would in general be in better shape, but that's not so obvious when one looks at the data. The stereotypical former football star dad, all beefed up in college to be mean on the team, never learned how to scale back, once back in the bleachers. 

Let's see if Ozyempic does a commercial. Not yet right? Although there's a lobby to get the government paying more for anti-obesity drugs, slimming down with that one is still too off-label a use right? You can't yet push psychedelics either, just mood altering substances and of course your own mesmerizing programming.

OK, gotta go, Derek is here and it's National Anthem time.

Remembering Nord Stream

I'm subscribed to the Seymour Hersh substack feed, so I'm reminded we've come to an anniversary of sorts regarding the attack on infrastructure known as Nord Stream, a set of pressurized gas tubes designed to feed the economies of Europe, especially Germany's. Hersh's first report appeared a year ago tomorrow.

Hersh believes Norway was involved, based on his sources. One wonders how many Norwegians believe that hypothesis, which, if true, takes away from the value of the Nobel Peace Prize. Why would Norway, an historic US ally, attack the United States? 

But then why would Biden or Sullivan or anyone with any loyalty to the Stars and Stripes commit this kind of treason? The outcome of the NS sabotage has been to make the USA look weak and untrustworthy in the extreme, like it's covering for somebody hellbent on destroying any international rules based order.

I know my USA would never have been so reckless or off the charts dumb to have undertaken such an action and quickly said so. 

I realize I'm a nobody and no one cares about my USA (RIP Uncle Sam) but I thought at least one loyalist, one patriot, should step forward and declare in no uncertain terms that the USA would never undertake the covert industrial sabotage of a Russo-European energy project costing billions. 

Such acts of war are done overtly, by definition, if true states are involved. Slinking around, trying to stay undercover, is not the MO of a true state. A true state is proud of its great decisions and defends them publicly, even when these decisions turn out to be misguided. 

My USA is working to barf up the perps and expose them for what they are.

Only a pseudo-USA, one propped up and used as a PR shield by unethical gas monkeys and other retards, could be behind all this coverup nonsense.

But then the trope of a "pseudo-USA" is hardly a new one, the real USA having been declared "bankrupt and extinct" on constitutional grounds by its foremost prognosticator and OSS affiliate, way back in the Reagan-Casey era. 

Public schools have been too chicken to share this chapter with student debaters, along with anything resembling RBF's geometry, a valuable piece of Americana: proof positive that a fake US has totalitarian control over public schooling. Teachers are leaving. Students seem out of control.

That's why we have our underground, our School of Tomorrow, to give students more meaningful homework. USA OS is chugging along in the background.

Do I believe Seymour Hersh? 

I'm in no position to double check him or his sources. I'd like the Nobel Peace Prize to still mean something. I'm hoping he's wrong and that Norway sticks to its guns in saying that this act of sabotage was an act of cowardice and depravity (which it clearly was).

Convergent Trajectories

:: CJ Bridging Portland and Philadelphia ::

In the Euclidean belief system, it's not a problem to assert that two parallel trajectories might stay that way forever. What's to stop them? A Newtonian force? In the Platonic realm, as colonized by these true believers, these metaphysical lines have no mass or energy and will not be affected by the quanta of quantum mechanics. No "forces" to worry about in other words.

So do we still have the freedom to change channels and jump outside the jurisdiction of these Euclidean axiomatic truths? Sure we do. Non-Euclidean geometries abound, and where they beg to differ is likely right here, among other places, at this Fifth Postulate about parallelism (the dogma).

I'm going to switch topics, now that I've introduced non-Euclidean geometries. Let's talk about SNEC, the Synergetics Collaborative, a 501(c)(3) and another somewhat parallel "think tank" centered more on the Pacific coast, where BFI was headquartered at the time. Russ Chu convened a summit in WDC, where he'd moved from Seattle, with his family. Lots of us converged: Bob Gray, Ed Applewhite, Joe Clinton... That's when we booted the colab for real.

I'm thinking specifically of all the time we devoted to the question: should the BFI move to Smalltalk for its internal programming needs? Russ Chu purchased a motherboard to help make that happen. A guy named Hal was the chief promoter, not just of Smalltalk, but of object-oriented languages more generally. Bonnie Goldstein (BFI archivist) and Robert Orenstein were on the team (Robert favored a computer language named Dylan at the time). That's where I first met David Koski, then a denizen of Santa Monica, also J. Baldwin and Yasushi Kajikawa.

The west coast version of SNEC did not have a name per se and did not solidify as a specific nonprofit. Sam Lanahan hosted an event in Portland, at the Laurelwood Brewpub on Sandy, that included a lot of us, including Glenn Stockton (Global Matrix) and Trevor Blake (archivist, Synchronofile). 

Sam would later, in 2019, co-produce Lattice Gallery, a popup in the art district behind the art school along West Broadway near the Pendleton building (Kenneth Snelson was from Pendleton). The gallery featured several versions of flextegrity, a term that both connects it with and distinguishes it from tensegrity (per Snelson's sculptures). I'd been Snelson's first webmaster by this time, as well as house guest and personal friend.

Once Zoom happened in a big way, with the concept of meetups more formalized thereby, it became easier to organize at the meetup level, which is where 52 Living Ideas came in, already anchored around CJ, a founder of SNEC. CJ helped run the Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society, which overlapped with Shrikant's New York based channel, in terms of geography and membership.

Before these events in Portland, we held a summit at the Kasman-Chu residence in Seattle, Russell Chu having overlapped with David Koski in those BFI-in-LA days. Now he had moved to Seattle, closer to me in Portland. He had married Deb Kasman and they had two kids. 

Several of us converged for this event, including Ed Applewhite by phone, a liason with SNEC one might say given he was calling from Georgetown. Others attending in person: myself, Alan Ferguson, Karl Erickson, Gerald de Jong, John Braley. This same network had a life online and included faraway figures such as Peter Adderley in Australia.

This summit happened around the same time a different Applewhite was in the news over some cultic ritual suicide relating to the Hale-Bopp comet. Heaven's Gate they called it.

Another "think tank" I'll now introduce (again) to the scene is Wanderers, associated with the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy (ISEPP) here in Portland, and run by one Terry Bristol (with Dawn Wicca and Associates in an auditing / bookkeeping role back then, Dawn Wicca being my wife and running the other half of our business). 

ISEPP helped get me a better rate at the First International Conference on Buckminsterfullerene in Santa Barbara, organized by Elsevier, where I met Harold Kroto. I rented a convertible and drove there in the company of on-the-road networking pro Nick Consoletti, an expert on both Bucky and Linus Pauling.

I started having Wanderers (a subset thereof) listen in on CJ's meetups based in Philadelphia, connecting through by backyard WiFi. I was also a member of TrimTab Book Club by this time (closely tied to BFI), as well as Field Structure Institute (FSI) so more overlapping there.

Tying this blog post together: once we allow trajectories to diverge from remaining parallel, we may find them criss-crossing all over the place, like so many intersecting great circles.

Not only do the think tanks co-orbit, but so do individuals and families. The Applewhites and Lanahans inter-wove in the District, leading to Sam's getting to be Bucky's sidekick on a trip to Manila, at the invitation of the Marcos family, and at around the same time I was in high school there (but we didn't know of each other yet). Later, the Applewhites visited the Wicca-Urners here in Oregon.

Gathering for Carol

Our Gathering for Carol at the Stark Street meetinghouse, was expertly produced by Multnomah Friends. Some attended over closed circuit TV, including from Whittier. Carol Urner was a lifetime activist who believed in collaboration over angry confrontation. Many of her citations and awards were from US officialdom. Her last paying job was with a US embassy (the one in Maseru).

Jack and Carol (dad and mom) were idealistic Quakers with a strategy: Jack would take the high level technical job, as a planner, and Carol would work with the poorest of the poor, usually considered a subversive activity. The two would complement one another. The strategy proved pretty effective in retrospect.

We'll have more G4Cs, and had some while she was still with us in person. Her network was and is global, her friends and followers many. My thanks to everyone who participated in this one.

Teacher to Teacher (T2T)

I noticed yesterday (First Day) that Multnomah Friends, the Adult Religious Education Committee in particular, has instituted a new practice of pairing any visiting minister, with a local anchor, a peer.

In the example I witnessed, a visiting minister from another group came by to express a leading, one might say to do some market research, some field testing. Quakers encounter "leadings" as in promptings from God (superuser, root) and feel a need to respond in some way.

The visiting minister, let's call him Bob, has a background in journalism and knows the power of words. The exercise he proposed was to have participants randomly pick a card, but not turn it over to see the word printed on the face until cued to do so.  There's more to it than that of course.

In cahoots with Bob, one might put it, was our local minister, a Friend already embedded within our Multnomah Meeting and familiar with its ways. Lets call her Alice.

What if Bob were way out there, in terms of expectations? The concept of "outside minister" might extend to become ecumenical to the point where our visitor is quite exotic in the context of Stark Street. The anchoring minister, Alice, might then play an active role in achieving some equilibrium, to the point of pushing back (figuratively under normal circumstances).

Think of an invited teacher, such as myself, prattling on about triangular and tetrahedral numbers to a math class. Their regular classroom teacher would most likely be the Alice. 

Alice knows her students and provides me with guidance and direction, both beforehand, during, and perhaps in postmortem, regarding how I'm likely to get a best reception, given we're all hoping for good value, and what modifications I might make before next time (hypothetically).

In this particular case, our Alice was not required to intervene so much as dovetail with the flow, because our visiting minister was an old hand in our midst, a former clerk of the meeting. He heads up a satellite worship group these days, but could hardly be considered exotic.

Speaking of Stark Street, I remember one night standing in the middle of it, next to this same Bob (then clerk) and gazing up into a darkened tree next to the meetinghouse. A would be mayor of Portland had climbed it in protest. The police and fire departments had their equipment on the scene and were trying to talk him down.

The card game consisted of 30 "Quaker words" (such as truth, light, silence, integrity...) such that (30)(31)/2 = 496 pairings were possible (a triangular number). The impromptu interest groups would pair randomly chosen words to extract new meaning, a "gift" one might put it, to share with the whole group later. The name of this exercise: Between Words [as I'm reminded by a postmortem email from Bob].

Neither Bob nor Alice participated in the exercise; they were "overseers" (a term present day Quakers tend to shy away from). The market research angle was to offer Bob some feedback on how to maybe fine tune the exercise. Example feedback: many card games let us put a card back in exchange for a different one; might we incorporate such a step?

Given Bob and Alice, you might be asking about Eve, the theoretical 3rd party in any communication, and potentially able to disruptively penetrate a private channel between Bob and Alice. Here I might say that Bob and Alice have a common investment in keeping their channel secure and protected from disrupting factors, such as environmental noise.

The Biblically minded may find it distasteful that cryptography makes Eve be the bad guy again, as if she hadn't already suffered enough since the talking snake chapter. Think of Eve as a pun on "eavesdropper" and lets give her the power to listen in and not be disruptive at all i.e. she too is supportive of Bob and Alice, who may not realize she's even there.

Another innovation of the Adult Religious Education Committee, as a preamble to the exercise, was to talk about the importance of language, including language preservation, especially native languages such as that of the Multnomah people, for whom the meeting was named. This theme resonated with what I'd been learning through the Tulalip Cultural Center during my recent north circuit car trip.

Curriculum Norms

If you're at all aware of the syllabus we're using here (School of Tomorrow), then you know we're interested in electrical grids and power plants, as well as in off grid village communities that supply their own power locally. This focus inherits from a "lense adjustment" some call World Game, wherein we're "brainwashed" (deprogrammed) to see the whole earth as a single campus, versus a set of fenced in areas in some grave battle for world domination.

Consequent to said viewpoint is our awareness of an emerging set of local networks increasingly interconnected by high voltage lines (HVDC). We don't stop at pipelines, or shipping lanes, when it comes to studying energy networks. We look at grids. Even when discouraged from doing so by misinformation campaigns.

Where do we find teenagers getting schooling similar to ours? Sometimes through the Speech and Debate subculture. Past teams have taken up whether the GENI agenda makes sense: eventually hooking the east and west hemispheres in a power sharing scheme, a global grid. We already know of some Chinese companies expressing an interest in this idea, given engineering projects they've already taken on. The plans have been in circulation for decades by this time.

However, the better way to pass the torch on these topics to a next generation is through the internet more generally. We start in middle school with the Fuller Projection and the controversies surrounding projections in general, a politically charged topic. We start in STEM with ball packing exercises and the short computer programs that serve as sequence generators. Whole earth visualization starts with a Jupyter environment in many cases, has we're pulling in data sets, and displaying them geographically.

By high school, we're used to the idea that RBF was one of the great American pragmatists, also a realist. I'm not saying that's a high school you remember, or have in your neighborhood. The normative standards I'm promulgating, as a principal, probably seem exclusionary if you're in a corporate run state school in North America. You may think my international school focus is elitist and inappropriate per the standards of your community. That wouldn't surprise me one bit.

Tetrahedron Year

:: visiting The Attic ::

The current year, 2024, is a Tetrahedron Year.  We won't be having another one until 2300. 

By "tetrahedron year" I mean any year with a tetrahedral number. These latter go: 1, 4, 10... 2024 (I skipped a few). Tetrahedral numbers get spaced further and further apart, as what separates them are consecutive triangular numbers: 3, 6, 10, 15... A tetrahedron of 22 layers is what we're talking about.

Ed Pegg posting to Mathematical Tiling and Tessellation on Facebook

I was thinking, going in, that I had a head full of novel ideas they'd not heard of at The Attic. On the contrary, the faculty is well versed in the latest trends e.g. they're already using Jupyter Notebooks. Have they tuned in the concentric hierarchy and all its whole number volumes yet I wonder?

This was a quick visit while Sydney waited in the car. I was glad to finally see the place, having heard about it for so long. I was reminded of Sunshine Elite Education in Bethany Village, likewise ahead of the curve.

Here's the curriculum I put together (a Github repo) during my teaching time at SEE. I make use of Jupyter Notebooks, sometimes with sympy, just like The Attic does. 

I've taught Python in other ways too (e.g. for Coding with Kids). I'm not recommending a diet of Notebooks only, when working towards mastering Python.

Which reminds me, this just in from Terry Bristol:

I've used VPython a lot over the years!  I learned about it through Arthur Siegal at first, and then through AAPT. "3D programming for ordinary mortals" is their slogan. That's me!

Refugee Programming

A big question we’ll be asking is “did you show them cartoons?”. I’m talking about the refugee kids, new to the Americas in many cases, or maybe just new to the northerners and their ways. They’ve probably heard of Loony Tunes and thought maybe that’s what they’d be getting.

That’d be kinda like being an Iraqi kid and thinking Uncle Bush was gonna bring Sea World from Florida. Don’t tell me “no theme parks were planned” as I just wouldn’t believe that about my country. We’re like Disney bots. 

Maybe that’s why I think of Mickey Mouse when I think of the “evacuate Gaza” project. We’re talking about the volunteers. Some choose to stay and fight, much like in the case of the Ukrainians, the Syrians, and so on. I’m imagining a flotilla of cruise ships showing toons and documentaries, opening doors in a global university that was never confined to west Asia. Go back when they’ve rebuilt your campus. They teach us.

Seriously, refugees (students and professoriate) are not going to disappear, as peoples falling through the cracks of the nation state system (only so many jigsaw puzzle pieces work as one). I’ve been suggesting the religions and the universities provide a next layer (safety net), and they have been doing that to some degree, and not because motivated by my suggestions. My suggestions are more for me, a nobody, notes to self, about how I need to keep perhaps anonymously busy. I have some experiences to draw upon. I’m another player.

When I call us “Disney bots” I’m not being supercritical or mean, and yes I know about the crisis in believability, the incredulity, which has surrounded Epcot in many dimensions. The corporate sector was apparently never serious about the future, witness hyper-loop, witness colonies on Mars, condemning us to retro lifestyles centered around dead end science fiction. We feel our own useless obsolescence, and that’s not pleasant necessarily — a kind of metaphysical arthritis, a stiffening. They’ll say we were time wasters, i.e. out of sync with Mother Nature.

Yes, I’m talking about dealing with the mass migrations of human beings that have not abated, by land, sea and nowadays air. The idea that we’re all settling down and staying put might be a comforting myth in some craniums, but we can’t organize human affairs around security blanket fantasies. People seek to counter tyranny, pestilence and wars, and we know from the anthropology manuals that “fight or flight” remain the conventional options. Flight is still one of them. Fleeing is another way to countervail.

The Friends, known as Quakers in the vernacular, have always recommended finding ways to root out the root causes of outward wars, focusing more at the psyops level, seeking to resolve and dissolve more than further polarize and mindlessly escalate. 

Sometimes it helps to have the kids draw, or make cartoons, as a kind of working-through, as a therapy. One might blog for the same reason: to process (cite Process Work). We also show them cartoons made by others, their peers. We let them know this world still bullies and abuses humans, and that we’re working on it, and that we could use their help. 

Am I talking about some kind of government brainwashing then? I’m talking about leaving favorable impressions from first encounters. Americans greeting Americans. We get off on the right foot. This isn’t about “fighting Indians” or anything so misguidedly juvenile.

Looking Back

My view is Donald Trump won the 2016 election fair and square, without any significant help from the Russian spy services. The discovery of the Epstein network and a sudden groundswell of interest in pedophelia as a topic, had a lot to do with millennials coming of age and assembling a picture of the world. No, sixteen year olds did not vote in 2016, but their concerns were shared by many older and younger people as well.

So am I saying Pizzagate tipped the election? I find that more probable than any story involving Moscow, concocted by the losing political camp. "Pizzagate" is simply code for an existential distrust of the privileged ruling class on the part of youngsters, of the outgoing Boomers especially. 

Hostility to the crime family aspects of being in power was a function of increasing financial literacy and a less Victorian, post Freudian attitude towards repressing stories involving pedophelia. Consider how much has trickled out regarding the Epstein network since 2016.

Those seeking a more healing rhetoric, seeking to unify a divided body politic, would probably do well to acknowledge Trump's 2016 victory, even as they continue to emphasize his loss in 2020. That someone as controversial as Trump would only survive four years in office is hardly surprising. His handling of the global pandemic scared a lot of people. 

Also, because of the pandemic and all the focus on holding an election regardless, the bureaucrats in charge of running elections had an interest in keeping it transparent. The plan to unearth all kinds of irregularities backfired big time, as we experienced less corruption than usual given the freakish circumstances of needing to implement vote by mail etc. That's my read on 2020: this time Trump lost, also fairly and squarely. In neither case did the Russians play a critical role, but in both cases the DC-based intelligence community (IC) certainly did.

My recollection of the Reagan years was the lid blew off on much of the secret behind the scenes shenanigans perpetrated by said IC. People began to tune in that layer in the bureaucracy as a political actor starting especially in the wake of 911. The way 911 got spun into an attack on Iraq upped that intergenerational distrust that would later boil over in 2016. 

School of Tomorrow: Orientation 2024

As I say in the video, I do work to keep focused on the problems, such as how to care for ourselves amidst some kinds of plenty, yet with scarcity too. Abundance doesn't mean an endless, affordable supply of everything. It means relative abundance, compared to benchmarks. 

Computers equipped with GUIs (graphic interfaces) are relatively abundant, as they were non-existent not so long ago. Now every smartphone is such a device. We might call them smartphones but they're computers, with telecommunications, GPS and all the rest of it. These were not a feature of my teen to young adult years. Nowadays, iOS and Android among the most run operating systems.

I've been thinking of a type of city, perhaps based on a military base conversion, keeping the runway and warehouses, that specializes in routing humans but also helping them get sorted. The assumption is that disasters remain inevitable and helping humans flee deleterious circumstances will be an ongoing need.

Until now, we've seen a lot of emphasis on tent cities, refugee camps, that get stuck in a narrative where no one really gets resettled. What were conceived of as temporary facilities become semi-permanent. The cities I'm imagining, based around port facilities, air and/or sea, or even road and railways, form a network of high turnover centers, more like universities.

Universities function as pipelines with respect to their students, with another class of administors, lab technicians, janitors and so on, who may have a career that extends well beyond that of a typical student. And then of course we have faculty. How do these tiers map to a network for handling refugees and what qualifications does one need to go through intake?

As soon as the infrastructure is in place to work on resettlement, the risk is around getting swamped. Many families would like to escape their current circumstances. Any institution which encourages immigration and emigration, even perhaps all inside a nation's lines, may have disruptive effects at the community level, as now more people have more of a choice as to whether to stay put or not.

Gravity's Rainbow

Synergetics looks at "lagging media" (previous post) through the lens of the Doppler Effect. RBF has passages about events happening all over, but our news of them is coming in somewhat out of order relative to some more absolute calendar timeline. 

The way history shows things panned out is not necessarily the order in which any one particular person received news of them at the time, i.e. the so-called objective viewpoint obtained by history is not one inhabited by any contemporaneous human.

In the est Training they told a story about some old couple out in front of the trailer, perhaps a luxury travel trailer or a destination model, with a missile already launched in their direction. Subjectively, they're oblivious, enjoying an adult beverage, and yet it's already certain, by the laws of probability, that they're gonna be hit. 

It's a troubling picture, designed to remind us of our own obliviousness. Worse than the tree falling, with no one to hear it, is the one that hit by surprise.  

I'm reminded of a giant walnut tree falling behind me in my neighbor's property and not hitting my or anyone's dwelling (could have been so much worse); I watched the action reflected in my computer screen.

The bitcoin algorithm faces the same issue: how to develop a trusted verifiable narrative or sequence of what follows what, without needing any objective viewpoint for a human being. Accomplish the objective by means of cryptography. We call it the blockchain.

Solution: many blocks chronicle what happened, in terms of transactions, each of them possible continuations of existing threads in previous blocks. Think of ferries set to cross the river, which one gets to go next?  It looks somewhat random. 

How do we pick a bitcoin block at random? Pick one that wins a little 10 minute mathematics contest requiring brute force approaches, and reward (in bitcoin) the more muscular processors. These would be the bitminers, those who strive and also drive the blockchain forward by expending brute energy.

There's a kind of particle physics analogy wherein we chain Feynman diagrams together regarding what actually happened, imagining a benignly simple particle zoo of expected transformations, Tao of Physics style. 

One doesn't actually need a specific cast of deterministic players to show off partially overlapping scenario processing. The atomic objects might be entirely software creations. 

We might be watching a game of chess. The rules of chess constrain transitions from state to state. The rules include winning as an objective, providing a probability gradient into which strong players have deeper insight (we might say “by definition”).

Around my rain forest region (Cascadia) the controlled flood of water is such that excess capacity remains, which grid management doesn't mind trading for paying clients i.e. it's still often affordable to bitmine in regions with cheap power, as long as bitcoin itself remains worth harvesting.

Again, the point here is we're looking at a generalized Doppler Effect, wherein broadcast sources are coming and going, changing frequency, leading any given "me" to really have to puzzle through a lot of accounts, many storylines, to gain sufficient perspective or overview.

How much overview is enough? You tell me. I'm not in the business of gratuitously imposing upper limits. "Let's find out" is a better answer.

Lagging Media

:: happy new year ::

Let's say media are by definition lagging, yet there's still "relative lagging" as in further and further behind.

We feel it in math class sometimes: some critical bridge was crossed and you're still on the same side apparently, left behind. Then the rest of the lesson makes no sense and so on. Are there ways to catch up? Not always.

People drop math in droves, and if they don't, the learning curves get exponential, as in straight up. The principle of least action says we do what we can i.e. we minimize the difference from our potential. And yet we still experience gratuitous kineticism sometimes. We overshoot, overbuild, otherwise make life harder than need be. "Why so?" we wonder.

The media don't want to lose us. To have an audience, a news show needs to carve out an audience, and find a way to thrive off this following, most usually by selling advertising to businesses likewise craving a filtered audience. We see the dynamic multiplied a thousand fold (shorthand for a million) thanks to YouTube and such services.

Connecting these two themes: a storyline is a computation, in the sense of one needing to follow the logic, track the characters, get their motivations and so on; we might not be able to follow. How this works out in practice is producers will see where things might be going, and start to work on the story deltas. The deltas, the shifts, the attitude adjustments, might result in a smoother landing, on the next established plateau.

We all know events are moving quickly these days. We're in a rapids. The audience is as usual hoping for guidance and many take queues from professional politicians. We also have those certified (oft self certified) public thinkers, influencers, who manage to win a following on social media. Networking occurs, as guests host one another.

Some of us take naturally to a social milieu, ducks to water, as if born for this time. Others fit in more awkwardly at best, at least at first, and need to work on getting the hang of whatever. The very same person frequently ends up in both camps, as an expert over here, a beginner over there, and places in between in the middle.

When you get to grow in directions you're used to growing in, we might call that eigen-growth, just to sound pseudo-scientific about it. These are the lucky ones, But again, one is "in one's element" only sometimes, running one's preferred racket. Other times, you're a rat in someone else's maze. A smart rat perhaps (lots of potential), but not native.

Knowledge Graphs

Dr. Steve Mastin is well-known in some circles for his exquisitely detailed presentations on gems and minerals. Right now, I'm awaiting to join a Zoom meetup regarding garnet. We might be having some technical glitches.

Speaking of technical glitches, I've got so far got one corroborative post regarding an outage on Github: the pictures I've embedded, mostly imported from Flickr so as not to overburden the Github server, are now failing to be rendered by Github's own Jupyter Notebook server, which only has to display said Notebooks, not make them interactive (that's more colab's job, or Binder's).

Still no hint from Steve... OK, I've just seen his message: he's waiting for the host to start the meeting too.

I've been taking in some Hegel today, over YouTube. I've been going over some of these grooves on Math4Wisdom recently as well, and on my own YouTube channel. 

By "these grooves" I mean the conversations connecting philosophers, such as Hegel to Kant and Nietzsche to Hegel. We call these "knowledge graphs", mainly dots with arrows, but the arrows may come with additional attributes such as "was critical of", "was a fan of", "is a disciple of" and so on.

In my own YouTubes, I'll maybe show pictures of philosophers and others and not bother with arrows, with the nature of the relationships being a part of my narrative. I talk about Nietzsche being an admirer of Emerson, but later in time. The overall timeline remains important. Where does Napoleon fit in? How about Ada Lovelace and Margaret Fuller? Sam Hill? These have all been prominent in my stories, as I rounded out 2023.

The host messaged Steve asking where he was. A confusing situation. Glitches happen. Links break.

During the Rose Bowl yesterday, at the sports bar, this random guy joined our table and started giving us a lecture on arcane units of distance, such as the chain (66 feet) and the link (1/10 of a chain). Quoting Wikipedia: "The chain (abbreviated ch) is a unit of length equal to 66 feet (22 yards), used in both the US customary and Imperial unit systems. It is subdivided into 100 links. There are 10 chains in a furlong, and 80 chains in one statute mile."

What all this had to do with counting cards I wasn't sure, but he wanted us to know he was good with numbers in various ways. I brought up phi (after a discussion of pi) which he hadn't heard of.