Pythonic Andragogy

Roaring 20s

:: ShoeOnHead ::

Mini Summit

I'm back to the idea of a mini-summit featuring game engineers, physics engine designers, and First Person Physics, the latter being a joint project of myself and Dr. Bob.

The idea is of course didactic simulations, featuring forces, such as attractive and repulsive, in some game situation. The point of view may be first person, one it always pays to think about, and one could say is always first person, but in the context of the genre, you'll go third person just as much. We sometimes call it "god mode".

The one I always come back to is the "hexa pent" shell, what Glenn called a Global Matrix (meaning coordinate system and mapping grid), say a buckminsterfullerene broken up into hexagonal and pentagonal pieces. The fit together to form a hollow sphere, plus they attract one another. The force is akin to gravity in not having a repulsive element, as we have in the magnetosphere.

But then these are precisely the hyperparameters our players might vary, in their explorations in systems dynamics. Turn up the gravity, now add repulsion as they come into docking position, now lock them into one mass etc. These are admittedly idealizations, suggestive of how things might be in reality, but our language is that of models and modeling (simulations being of that rubric).

However, my global matrix "test pattern" simulation is only meant to be suggestive. What we're facing is the prospect of mixed-use high rises filling with game pods and students needing simulations mixed with reading programs of various types. Not every discipline communicates through game pods alone, and in fact few do, but the pods help and double as workstations.

Some of these workstations will be piloting physical devices remotely. The level of bandwidth matters, but then some robots have a lot of onboard capability and don't need to be micromanaged. Likewise drones. The pod design has the advantage of offering simulated acceleration along with other haptic feedback, which keeps pilots sensitized to their remote environments.

Schools of Tomorrow

The schools I imagine are visited by away teams, but also source away teams. It works that way in sports already, but think of a Pycon. My school sends tend peeps to a Pycon in Brazil. Another time, we're visited by Brazilians. As we were here in Portland, for that Pycon. I hosted a guest.

When an away team returns, a debriefing happens, meaning the team reports on its adventures. There's real time monitoring too though. No need to wait until the trip is over to start filing reports. The bizmo teams have their road trip reports. The travelogue as a genre is the ballpark we're aiming for.

What might an away team study? Public health policies, transportation plans, ways of providing people access to necessary infrastructure, a skill sorely lacking in many American cities. The Portland school system has dispatched several teams to Finland, thinking PPS has much to learn from how Finnish do school.

Away teams visiting a school might be studying lifestyles that work in conditions of extreme remoteness. The technology begets workflows. Lessons learned.

Free Spirits

:: gypsy nomads (ai) ::

What some of us discover about our fellow humans, which is not that surprising in retrospect, is that indoor-living, so-called, is an anathema to a percentage thereof. 

Whereas I am able to get excited by the prospect of a penthouse or simply an apartment, and have lived in several, I met fellow travelers at Occupy Portland and other places that just couldn't abide being cooped up between the four walls of anything, which doesn't mean they'd eschew all manner of shelter. They just wanted to be free of certain types of restraint.

We don't have to look far to find long-running themes behind this longing for an open sky lifestyle. The crush of cities, especially during the advent of the industrial era, was especially noxious and toxic, and the Romantics rebelled, seeking a back to nature aesthetics that resonates with us today. Although classified a Transcendentalist, a post-Romantic movement, Thoreau's lifestyle at Walden Pond set a template for "off the grid" living.

However beyond not wanting to be cooped up in a high rise or even a suburban ranch style domicile, is not wanting the encumbrances of another system's bureaucracy, where "the other" in this case comprises all those "normies" who want to play-act being members of various nation-states. Some humans take a look at that whole game and would rather opt out.  "No citizenship for me thank you" is their polite enough refusal to go along. Is it that the "right of citizenship" is actually something more mandatory than a right? A duty even? Is a person free to surrender citizenship without adopting another?

Certainly many people would love citizenship in a "real country" that gave them rights to visit other countries besides the real one. If you don't have enough documentation to cross any border whatsoever, then the game of borders will likely seem awfully onerous. You're denied citizenship and therefore even the human right to go somewhere else, where you won't be a citizen either.  Once a person reaches adulthood without citizenship in any country, it's no piece of cake to finally find one.

What the United Nations might have done is come up with a catch-all default nation that anyone could choose if falling through the cracks otherwise.  Plain Vanilla Nation (PVN) would at least provide enough documentation, e.g a passport and ID card, to merit taking out loans, buying property, booking passage. But no, that would have been too easy.

However, even with a PVN in place and/or much easier rules, a percentage of my fellow humans will prefer not to become citizens of any country. I'm thinking as a matter of human rights, their preferences should be respected. 

However, the flip side is an individual does make waves and thereby builds up karma and it's unreasonable to grant a cloak of invisibility to someone who is going to be impacting planetary history, even if only in a small way (who's to judge?). That's why we give each other names, titles, roles, credentials: to keep records and let others predict what they're getting into, if they let so and so join their ranks.  

So whereas I empathize with those wishing to escape citizenship in any nation, I'm not seeing "incognito mode" as a basic human right on the same level.  Just because we don't record your nationality doesn't mean we can't open a file and register events along your timeline.  You'll want a timeline too, for your own protection in some scenarios. You may work harder than most to not show up in files or on radars and I understand that's your preference.

Prompt: Gypsies sit around campfire, enjoying guitar. Some children are wearing VR goggles. HDTV screens glow through the windows of gypsy caravans. Moonlight. Horses.

:: ibid ::

On Color Blindness

I was never a big fan of “color blind” when applied to “race” as a concept. But then I admit up front to having a lot of suspicion of, and bias against, those ethnicities that aspire to teach us about their various “races” (is this a sporting event?).

I accept the kind of “blindness” (we call it) that makes what most would see as two colors seem the same. But then someone had the idea to extend this ophthalmological usage into the realm of eying skin color, making it a be virtue to have a kind of blindness to color, versus an illness or disability.

My views are more statistical:  it’s easy to picture a world wherein skin color really is a reliable guide to ethnicity and who knows what else, maybe extreme correlation in other attributes. After centuries of eugenic breeding, we probably could create the racial regime we (faux “we” as in “not me”) wish we had. Speculative fiction has shown us some of the ramifications. 

We’re good at creating mono-cultures. Sucking all the imagination out of something is one of our specialties. We could have a world wherein everyone was a card-carrying white, brown, black, yellow or red (pure races) with recognized admixtures as “mixed race” impure. If you’re into racism, that probably sounds like heaven.

However as more migrants wander the world, growing to adulthood as itinerants, they learn that skin color in itself is not a reliable guide to much of anything, until maybe one starts to localize, in which case this white guy standing next to me in the supermarket probably is carrying, they all do in this town, people of any color. 

Like duh if she’s wearing a uniform, the kind designed to advertise one’s state supported right to exercise violence against others (talking about “police” but exactly what that means varies widely).

I’m just saying as a matter of self interest and self survival, don’t leap to conclusions based on a facile, unconscious manner, regarding other attributes of a person going on too few clues. And how many clues are too few is what statistics is all about as a subject. 

How small and efficient a data set might I rely on, to predict the future? 

That’s like asking what dashboard of what instruments. You need a temperature gauge (let’s say) and a sense of altitude (aloofness?). What instrument panel would you dare fly by?

I’m saying “skin color” as a dashboard instrument likely dates your dashboard i.e. I can assume more about you if you jump to more conclusions than you should about me, just because I act and look “white” in some sense (including skin color). 

The clueless hick in some movie, most benignly a harmless clown, will behave in a stupid manner towards someone he incorrectly and absurdly concludes he should diss. The crowd roars with laughter.

My ethnicity may not be readily apparent even to me. In novels and movies, those of a certain type, raised by those of another type, are finally reunited with others of their own kind. These make good animal stories sometimes. The chosen all converge, having been seen as strange in their respective villages.

I’d like people to be pleased with their skin color and looks more generally, as I tend to benefit to the extent the planetary population experiences a satisfying enough level of happiness. My living standards drop to the extent everyone around me is miserable, as I’ll feel miserable too in that case.

I’m all for others having happiness, starting with being OK with themselves. But all that is easier said than done as people may have unrealizable ideals for themselves and thereby experience much frustration if there’s no clear progress happening towards that end. Sometimes who you want to play is not how you’re cast. Many could characterize their situations in these terms, whereas a few claim to be living their dreams.

In such a happy world, getting a read on your skin color in RGB terms (it would vary around your body) would not seem surreal or creepy as you would not be thinking in paranoid terms, any more than when you color match a paint to the color of your house. 

You have the eye of an oil painter with a canvas, brushes and pallet. With such any eye, you’d hardly wish a form of blindness upon yourself. You’d wish for the contrary. Skins are beautiful, eyes too. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not into color blindness.

To be fair, I could translate the so-called virtue of color-blindness into terms I’d more agree with. We want to be able to tune out the irrelevant given finite bandwidth to what’s relevant. We all want the sense to sense what’s important and that includes schooling our senses to overlook, marginalize or otherwise deprioritize what’s not germane. 

Sometimes metaphors, like mattresses, need to be turned over and lied on their other side. To overturn and air out is not an implicit criticism of those who went before and flipped them from where they were. Every generation begets its flips or tries to. Some ethnicities pretty much specialize in flipping (or “revectoring” as I call it).

Media Campaigns

To label the above TV test pattern a case of “cultural appropriation” is one gestalt one could apply. My view is closer to: oh good, n8v America has taken over television i.e. the “appropriation” is going the other way and now maybe the weather reports will be more bioregional, not cutting off at these arbitrary “white man” borders, not that I believe “whites” form a race e.g. the Aryans, the Pueblo of the Caucasus, with me somehow a member of their tribe.

My “media campaigns” don’t tend to have a lot of voltage behind them. My Pirate Party doesn’t rake in the dough, given the esoteric nature of our planks and platform. 

We support new forms of public schooling geared towards building democratic institutions and training future diplomats. As it stands, private prep school alumni remain over-represented in the diplomatic corps (including the Peace Corps) and under-represented in the rank and file military i.e. the Smedley Butler racketeers, employees of USSA-style military socialism with capitalistic characteristics i.e. privatized profits.

In another campaign, I poke fun at the Qyoobists (hint: “Cube-ists”) and no one has a clue what I’m talking about. I like to denigrate and lambast a pseudo-ethnicity, science fictional at best, that no one believes in: people who worship the cube as their golden calf, and make it their symbol of rationality. Sure being “against” these people sounds surreal by design. Talk about straw men!

Another campaign involved taking a test pattern such as the one above and replacing the steady tone soundtrack with something more auditorily interesting: Azan. Why not immerse any viewers tuning in a test pattern in some American heritage of that flavor, Islam having been present in the Americas for some centuries, as a consequence of slavery especially although not exclusively?

However the TV stations mostly eschew test patterns these days and viewers are forgetting what they are and how they would appear in the wee hours of the morning, when a station had no other programming to offer. 

At least we’re free to publish share those Azan segments on YouTube, perhaps unlisted, and perhaps with creative modifications of the test pattern design.

Reflections on Racism

Perhaps to more clearly register my disdain for ethnicities which indulge in race talk, I’ll revert to “Caucasoidal” and maybe go back to “Negroid” and “Negroidal”. 

I was listening to Candace Owens going on around whether candidate Harris was truly black or just colored, and whether she was a deplorable horrible person for cooking collard greens in the bathtub, and sharing a recipe online. 

For Owens, this was posturing, whereas for me it sounded like a genetically complex individual (aren’t we all) attempting to convey her ethnicity, which contained this and that in some Venn Diagram. We could call greens a southern food without getting too chromosomal or hormonal about it. Does Kamala also eat crawdads?

Also, in popular parlance, even though the courts had desegregated schools on paper, it still wasn’t happening, because, as Candace points out, people tended to live in segregated neighborhoods because of history. Segregation is a social phenomenon, and even if Apartheid is over, that doesn’t mean the ghetto townships are gone.

Just saying: stuff on paper, through legislation, is not the whole difference and may make next to no difference at all, as when people flaunt the law, or perhaps scoff at it. “Thou shalt not discriminate against Russian speakers”. Yeah right, I can hear the ridicule among an inflamed Russophobic populace (hypothetical). Private clubs (e.g. NATO) might still keep them out, whole gated communities.

I’m happy to see Kamala as a small girl, feeling herself to be in the front line against desegregation even though bussing wasn’t in itself the legal act of desegregation, which happened earlier in her region, through the courts and legislation. 

Or rather, it was new policy aiming to standardize the schools in some meaningful sense, rather than by appealing to some pie-in-the-sky court decision. 

I just didn’t see a need for Owens to sound so scandalized, because in her little book of definitions, the fight against desegregation had already been won by the time Kamala was a school girl in Berkeley. That’s sleight of hand, to make courts the authority, and not anthropologists.

In asking if we really want to go back to talking about octamaroons and race as some kind of blood substance, Kamala is hoping the answer is no, that we aren’t really that fixated on genetic makeup. 

But Candace herself, racially Negroid, says the answer is yes, we want to speak precisely in racial terms (an oxymoron). As a Caucasoid, I’ll leave that to her then, as I don’t believe it can be done.

Day After Halloween Chatter

Without doing any deep dig as of yet, I'm going to speculate the two memes, "flying spaghetti monster" (FSM) and "string theory" have already amalgamated in some memeplex, hither or yon. Definitely hither, in that I've thought of it, but I'm speculating yon also.

In my cultspeak namespace we already have an identifying functor type object connecting FSM to "partially overlapping scenarios" i.e. that's a spaghetti image also, with hypertoons, and the FSI tetrahelix tunnels — all this stuff blogged about already.

Switching gears, we made it through another Halloween, sans many of the formerly living, and we miss them, will sometime join them. We had a drizzle going, plus the west side of Chavez is less homey than the east side, in terms of costume density per sidewalk. At least that was our shared experience, me, Derek and Dr. D.

My job had me teaching Python upstairs, remotely, over Zoom, fiber optic, while Dr. D. and then Derek (aka "Deke") started minding the door. We had Zoltar outside on a cushy chair, not especially able to sense vibrations (the porch is concrete), so kids climbing the stairs would not set him off.

However, whoever was handing out candy only had to tap on Zoltar's orb, and he'd start randomly reciting one of his four routine remarks, always ending in a cackle. Zoltar has been a mascot in some chapters, such as around this time in 2019, when Lattice Gallery popped up full of c6xty et al.

Speaking of c6xty, I have that pyramid out front, that looks like soccer balls stacked up but kept from unstacking by some basket weaving of plastic members. Everything is plastic, which some of my anti-plastic friends are not really into, but that's the Anthropocene for ya. 

So I added new Christmas lights, all white, with a white chord. I got over 68 feet of 'em for about $11 on sale at the Hawthorne Fred Meyer.

They won't last long though. I'll journal when they go out -- they'll be on through the winter nightly, as our neighborhood supports outdoor lighting like that, as permitted / encouraged decor. My plastic pyramid is pretty popular. I'm the mathematician on the block according to neighbors three doors down (we've talked about the pyramid, when I go by with my dog, and she told me neighbors in between say I'm a mathematician -- so what does the chatterbox say?).