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.