Matryoshka Dolls

:: Simple Tensegrity by Kenneth Snelson (for Tara) ::

Koski and I have developed a conversational habit of sometimes referring to a polyhedron as a "guy" e.g. "smallguy" is shorthand for a certain cuboctahedron in the hierarchy. By "hierarchy" I mean "set of nested polyhedra" and not just any set, but a specific one. 

I don't really expect the "guy" parlance to spread, but it does get me to "dolls" and Chicago, the musical. How do the "dolls" in "Al Capone" world overlap with "flapper" (anthropology hat on)? Perplexity.ai has an answer. 

My cartoon bio of Bucky would have him hanging out with Al Capone during Prohibition, and with rich controller oligarchs who still enjoyed their alcohol. That'd be circa 1927.

The lunge towards Canada provoked a backlash that's great for School of Tomorrow, as our story has centered on parts of the Anglophone world feeling colonized and oppressed by other parts. The UK feels somewhat haunted by those Menwith Hill monsters (giant domes) whereas Canada is always sensitive to its imperial-minded neighbor. 

I remember hanging out with WUSC volunteers, and picking up the vibe way back then. WUSC was in Bhutan, but not the Peace Corps, as the Network of Unaligned Nations (NUN lets call it) was suspicious of siding with any polarizing "superpowers" -- with good reason.

In our curriculum, the University of Toronto types were feeling oppressed because the Defense Early Warning system, while Canada-based, was claiming exclusive use of classified US IP (intellectual property) and was therefore closed off to alien intelligence, even allied. 

Likewise much of the IP wrapped up inside of AI (aka "pseudo-intelligence") is of Canadian origin, yet egomaniac pundits in the USA will blithely take credit, meanwhile accusing others, such as Chinese, of theft (as if it were somehow theirs to begin with).

The fun science fiction around DeepSeek is it trained on Chinese characters, a bigger data set, and the vectorizers were just that much tighter already, accounting for the decreased training energy costs. When you start out Anglophone, you pay for overhead and a lot of GIGO, hence the orders of magnitude bigger training farms with brute force chips.

You may recall (if you fish in my pond) that I draw from the Siobhan Roberts Donald Coxeter bio, The King of Infinite Space, when telling the story of the H.S.M Coxeter - R.B. Fuller relationship, most obviously memorialized with Bucky's dedication in Synergetics. They were employing entirely different disciplines I'd argue, but with overlap. 

Bucky was more running a business, with himself shopped out as faculty to contracting universities and teams of architects wanting unfettered access to his IP. That's more where I've been coming from as well, keeping it a self employment proposition, with School of Technology a welcome exception on many levels, and a resume perk when it comes to teaching Python.

My network has brought me back into LinkedIn thanks to tightening my curriculum a little more in the K-7 arena, whereas I usually pick up around eighth grade and roll forward, building out with more coordinate system experience, continuing Portland's practice of using MIT Logo in the elementary years. Along those lines, I'm studying to what extent artists have already anthropomorphized the polyhedra. Sure "hedron" means face, but how often does our iconic cube (emblem of Neo-Rome) come with facial expressions?

You might think I'm trying to sneak in Quadrays at the 8th grade level, and you'd be right, although I might quibble with "sneak" as the right word, as there's nothing especially sneaky about pointing to one's own research, when in a teacher role. I'd argue it's expected. Quadrays are an XYZ lookalike in some respects and therefore reinforce what we typically teach anyway.

The lunge towards Canada was also a new Golden Age in US history, which connotes / connects to the Roaring 20s, already a focus on my end, given the ladies farm and Great Gatsby connection, back to flapper, back to doll, as in Guys and Dolls and the "djangsta pony".

G4C 2025

G4C: a Gathering for Carol. 

One of Carol’s TRC associates in Lesotho reached out some time ago for some links. Maseru folks have been processing her passing, two years ago yesterday, on January 30 of 2023. 

She (mom) was born in 1929 and lived to be 93. Husband: Jack Urner (dad); Kids: Julie (my sister) and me.

We were of course aware of the date here, with Tara visiting. Sheila Goldberg called, well-knowing the date, and sending a well-meaning heads up regarding the active volcano some 300 miles off the Oregon Coast.

The day before, we celebrated Chinese New Year. Dr. DiNucci joined us. He played a big role in Carol’s care, especially when it came to those blood tests, home administered after awhile.

Fortunately, said submarine volcano, while quite likely to blow, even this year is, not of the kind likely to beget either an earthquake or a tsunami, Oregon being vulnerable to both.

TRC: Transformation Resource Center.

Playing with Patches

Whether to "chalk it up to coincidence" means anything, or not, I found it interesting to come across a ping, someone pinging me, with what looked to be a matplotlib figure. 

That prolly doesn't make much sense; lemme explain: getting good-looking plots, like bar graphs, histograms, pie charts, more exotic yet expected other statistician-invented forms (KDE plot, HeatMap), and having them be data-driven i.e. painted by numbers you're studying, is the job of a few open source tools such as matplotlib.

But then matplotlib can do so much more, providing general purpose geometric objects and control over their attributes and relative placement. A subpackage even gets into 3D (rotatable) 3-way renderings. One may enjoy hours exploring the ins and outs of this fascinating free package. Most users learn just enough to get by, as is true in my case, so I was letting Gemini shoulder the burden and boost the coding proficiency, which it did, dutifully.

The guy pinging me was on Facebook, Esteban again, regarding a narrative he has, regarding a point and/or ball and it's Flatlandesque transitions through some stairway to heaven dimensional ladder, only to start back at the beginning, somehow transformed. I'm referring to Flatland by Edwin Abbott, a satirical work about the varying degrees of awareness enjoyed by strictly dimensionally-defined beings.

Geometry in other words; we're comparing notes about circles 'n stuff. I take Abbott to be taking us through Hilbert Spaces, each rung of higher D. 

Esteban shares this graphic of mechanically perfect circles, shaded by color, semi-transparent, while meanwhile, on other nights, I'm leading a class in precisely this area: a how-to vs-a-vs matplotlib and related packages within the Python ecosystem.

I should digress and remind readers how each computer language is like "of a tribe" in that an ecosystem of users and developers emerges to staff positions and administer tribal governance. Maybe it's an inhouse language that belongs to an academic department. If you make friends there, they let you use it. Circumstances vary.

My trajectory was to see a Perl culture somewhat suffused with Python, and then with Ruby. Then Java took off. We've enjoyed a design science Renaissance, with a plague and everything! 

My portal into these undercurrents was via O'Reilly's open source conventions in Portland, Oregon. In some of those years, I was even helping staff an O'Reilly School booth, long story. Nowadays we're up to Rust and Zig. Which isn't to say some of the old die-hards aren't still around.

Open source is an umbrella term for a lot of such languages, and accounts for how they've become widely spread. Right now "open source" is in the buzz because of DeepSeek's splash debut, causing another "Sputnik moment" in the 'Murican Psyche. 

When Python takes off in Brazil and South Africa and no one is confused about why: smart language, smart peoples. The language was a product of Dutch brains in the first place. EuroPythons predate Pycons. 

Many representatives come to Pycons, which I'd also go to (in addition to OSCON). 

In the course of doing all this, I'm passing out some of the latest AI write-ups about me and what I've been up to. I know of cases where individuals have been displeased by stochastic gaffs. In my case however, with Perplexity at the helm, I wasn't disturbed by the results. Predictable. As the doctor ordered. I'm interested in curriculum and education, and have worked on some examples, such as on what I've called Martian Math.

Anyway, to continue with my story, I went onto colab.research.google.com, like I do in the class I'm leading, and asked Gemini to write me a matplotlib-using Python program that'd blend together shaded semi-transparent circles and thick black dotted lines. I prompted for that in the Gemini prompt box and got back a complete program, that ran correctly unmodified.

The result was not diagrammatically significant, given how much it depends on random numbers, but then I wasn't aiming to produce something significant, so much as in the style of, a similarity in one dimension, we could say a tenuously narrow one.

So here's the resulting Gemini-generated graphic, in response to my prompt:

 And what was that prompt again? 

Use matplotlib to draw a figure containing several partially overlapping circles of different colors and partial transparency, along with assorted dotted thick black lines at various angles.

Of course if I wanted it even more perfect, I could omit the spines, labels, tick marks, and take manual control of Circle placement. 

On class the night previously, we were not considering Circles at all, but Rectangles, which were used to construct the data-driven count and bar plots, even histograms, of our dreams. 

I'm harkening back to the coincidental juxtaposition of this content, with the schematics of another Facebook artist, Esteban Trev.

By the way, Circles and Rectangles are both in a taxonomy with a more umbrella term: Patches.

 

Pilot Study

MLK Day 2025

Did DT mention MLK anywhere in his inaugural speech today? Follow-up: he did. Did many, if any, commentators mention his taking advantage, or not, of this coincidental convergence or church and state? 

My schedule had me working through the speech, walking the dog Sy etc. but I’m taking in the postmortems. Yes, I think of MLK as standing for “the church” side of the culture. He was martyred. But then the church has been an agent of secular apartheid as well, in other chapters.

I’ve been somewhat focused on the TikTok USA story as it has a lot to teach about network dynamics, what with the short Sunday ban and the migration of many TT USA refugees to RedNote (more Yelp like than TT), to try it out, and to raise a finger to those with a “war with China” agenda. 

Those who wanna use the game board for juvenile Superpower Wars oughta settle for simulations, complete with retro skins. I’ve already got my Planet of the Apes sims going, modeling present reality (wave to Bibi).

Beyond that, I was back to rendering around Matryoshka Dolls, the polys, which I’ll sometimes call guys as well. 4guy rhymes with 4eye, the latter being a term Struppi (German connection, Telegram) uses. For tetrahedron if you need some decoding. I’m part of an inbred cliquey elite that does “tetra-volumes” or — tvs, complete with old fashioned “rabbit ears” (that’s a pun on the Quadrays apparatus).

In IVM world (vs XYZ world), we have a couple diamond faced dolls, the RT and RD, R for rhombic. The polys show up in Casino Math as dice, blending into the decor as more bling. Crazy Diamond combinatorics: those Coupler builds, of As and Bs.

I’m picking up on “Golden Age” (a meme) as echoing “gilded” i.e. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world of high income inequality but with giddy hopes, pre the 1929 Wall Street crash (another ponzi pop) and the rise of Military Socialism as a means of defeating a Reich, and depression bailout. Social Darwinism took on new forms, given its strong roots in Angloterra. 

Military style base-centric development has its perks, as the Russians are experiencing today. But it’s a myopic strategy over the long haul, to focus on killingry (decay) over livingry (cay). Uncle Sam became a decadent addict and passed away, after prescient warnings. USA OS survives in the underworld, still a figment of the  collective unconscious.

:: curated usa os iconography by daf w/ ai ::

Oregon Fever

Prompting Perplexity: Sometimes the word "fever" has a positive connotation. What can you tell me about that?

Response:

While fever is typically associated with illness, the word "fever" can indeed have positive connotations in certain contexts:

1. Excitement and enthusiasm: "Fever" can describe a state of intense excitement or enthusiasm, as in "football fever" or "election fever"[3]. This usage conveys a sense of heightened energy and passion.

2. Creative intensity: In artistic or creative contexts, a "fever dream" can refer to something wildly imaginative, surreal, or bizarrely captivating[7]. This usage suggests a positively intense or mesmerizing quality.

3. Intense focus or dedication: Phrases like "gold fever" or "spring fever" imply a strong, often positive obsession or desire for something[3].

4. Cultural phenomena: "Fever" can describe widespread, enthusiastic interest in a trend, event, or cultural phenomenon, as in "Beatlemania fever"[3].

5. Beneficial bodily response: From a medical perspective, fever can be seen as a positive defensive mechanism. It stimulates the immune system, potentially preventing the proliferation of pathogens[2].

In these contexts, "fever" metaphorically represents intensity, passion, and a heightened state of being, often with positive associations despite its primary medical meaning.

Citations:

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7717216/
[2] https://straightbamboo.com/purpose-meaning-fever/
[3] https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/fever
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Febrile
[5] https://healthmatters.wphospital.org/blogs/got-a-fever-find-out-what-it-may-mean/
[6] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2367118/
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/p5w9kc/what_does_the_phrase_fever_dream_mean/
[8] https://www.dictionary.com/e/denotation-vs-connotation/

Hiker Paradise

That's the PR anyway ("hikers' paradise"). I've been sampling the YouTube genre of "hikes gone wrong", a lore passed along by hikers themselves as a set of cautionary tales. Sometimes they're just reminders: you can do everything right and still lose out. Taking along a device with the new "rescue me" button, which sends an sos signal over cell, is often recommended, but even one of those won't save the day in all circumstances. I think we all know this, but the details still matter.

From such cautionary tales, I'm able to feel reminded of life's lessons, which merit going over, even if one is not doing any neck-risking mountain climbing or even skiing. My Seattleite side of the family has the skiers, both on water and on snow. I managed to get somewhere with downhill skiing but haven't tried it since the 1980s after a successful run in New Jersey (I forget which mountain, maybe Eddie knows). That was back when I was a math and history teacher for a small elite academy for young ladies, and in my 20s.

One of the best hiking trips I did was backpacking into Lake Bertha with Tom Connolly. We elected to forge ahead even though hikers coming the other way said the weather was against us. What's a little rain storm? This sounds like the beginning of a cautionary tale, but we made it fine, if drenched. 

My main memory of that sojourn was the little deer eating my T-shirt off the line, like a goat might do. Damn. But it let me walk right up to it (no fear) and yank the T-shirt back out, as a little bit of it was dangling out of its mouth. I hung it up to dry without rinsing it and it turned stiff as a board thanks to deer saliva.

Lake Bertha is in Glacier Park and this was part of a longer trip involving Gutless, my Honda Civic, and our road trip to Montana. The late Tom Connally and his family (whom I'm still in touch with) hailed from Missoula. He wanted to show me his roots. We had a blast.

Yakking on Facebook (continued)

Another tie-in with Wittgenstein is that Part 2 of his posthumous Philosophical Investigations focuses on "aspect shifts" and their importance to "getting the meaning of". Like "gestalt shifts" -- with the easy example of the duckrabbit. 

It's when one is able to shift one's perceptions somehow, that it all clicks into place, and one might even say "ah hah!" or "eureka!"  

Going from "5+5=12 is nonsense" to "5+5=12 makes perfect sense -- in base 8" might be like a light going on. 

That's more likely to happen if you're already primed to know about bases and just need a little reminder from your post-Sputnik 2nd grade New Math or whatever. Or you went into computers and learned octal and hex.

But if they've not self-consciously studied "number bases" as a topic (as the Common Core recommended dropping, making Americans dummies again) then explaining the punchline is like explaining a joke. If they don't smile and chuckle right away then you face the ordeal of explaining about position notation, carrying, powering and all that (yawn). Not worth the effort maybe. Save your jokes for those who might get them (hard to know in advance).

Cubes may fill space, but if we wanna start by closest packing same-size marbles, and filling in space that way (with gaps), then the cubes lattice might not be where we want to end up. 

In going for maximum ball-to-space density (~0.74) and omni-symmetry, we end up with one ball to start, 12 around it (6 squares, 8 triangles), then bump up the frequency (between ball intervals) to 42, then again (92), then again (162) and so on: 10 * F * F + 2 where F = 1, 2, 3, 4... See HSM Coxeter's remarks to that New Yorker fact checker, verifying Bucky got it right.

Anyway, that's where we get our skeletal frame, our iconic ghost ship (cuboctahedron) adrift in the IVM ocean. Always 12 balls around 1. 42 around that... 

Said lattice is all tetrahedrons and octahedrons, of relative volume 1 to 4 (no matter how long each edge, just keep them the same) and relatively twice as many 4eyes as Richard Katrinho Rasteirinho Haileisela shows in his video, with the omni-triangulated space-filling rhombohedron of volume 1+4+1 = 6, same as the space-filling RD.

I suppose there's a chance Bucky invented "allspace" as a term, however the practice of filling space with uniform and/or complementary space-fillers, the volumetric analog of tiling a surface (without gaps), is a game played since ancient times (since Archimedes at least). Within that scope, there's the game of finding shapes that do so all by themselves, like cubes and RDs do, without need of left and right handed versions. 

Some tetrahedra do that, if not the regular ones, and Synergetics does a lot to map this territory, overlapping work by mathematicians such as Sommerville and Goldberg. 

Fuller's A & B make an AAB (left and right A plus a left or right B ) the so-called MITE (MInimum TEtrahedron), an important space-filler that ends up with no outward handedness.

Sure we can throw the door open to other iconic representations of surface and volume, beyond the square and cube. There's the hexagon. There's the sphere. 

What's true about the triangle and tetrahedron though, is they're each more minimal than their respective counterparts, nor is it clear that either might be undercut. 

In that sense, the tetrahedron makes a strong case for being primary: the simplest cage, the fewest edges to carve inside from outside (the sphere being a complex membrane relatively speaking). The tetrahedron beats the cube at its own game so to speak, with only six edges instead of twelve. Now that it's finally had a chance to strut its stuff, as unit volume, the cube feels a bit on the ropes these days. Some qyoobists are circling the wagons already.

The cube-minded orthogonalists are very much not accustomed to having their authority challenged and I enjoy seeing them get so annoyed, as they don't have a leg to stand on, if their goal is to make us go away. 

Even if I have more tolerance for imaginary "fictional" structures (prefrequency) that do no load-bearing, I'm still able to appreciate the many advantages this new brand of 4D talk brings to the table. 

It's a privilege to question the authority of the hypercross dogmatists, even from the perspective of another ghost ship captain.

Yakking on Facebook

Esteban Trev HNY ET. I studied philosophy in university with everyone saying “whaddya gonna do with that?”. They predicted I’d end up in IT, which is fairly correct, but I also kept doing philosophy as a hobby, and that ended up adding to my net worth.

Anyway, the philo guy I zoomed in on most was Ludwig Wittgenstein, wondering if you’ve grokked him. I live until the 1950s. He came out with essentially two famous philosophies with an interim in between. From a very rich Vienna based family, fought for Austria as an artilleryman, made a prisoner of war.

But he skipped out on being rich, ironically because his family put pressure on the siblings to really succeed, make a name for themselves, and since he was born into a rich family, becoming rich was not an option, as he was rich already. No fame and glory down that road for sure.

So he lived like a hermit so he could pal around with other philo guys, like Bertrand Russell, and investigate the meaning of language to its logical (or illogical as the case may be) core.

When it comes to your example of 5 + 5 = 12, his later talk was of “language games” and he’d give examples of simple games in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations (book) which overlapped his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Some guy says “slab” and another guy brings him a slab. He sketches these actions, sometimes involving color coding and lookup tables.

It’s branching off the latter philosophy that I’d bring up the game of Quadrays and the Alternative Volumes Table (AVT) that goes with.

Games as a concept come with rules, fouls, but also innovation, and maybe episodes of ambiguity, when people just aren’t in agreement on how the rules should extend in some special case situation.

Speaking of which, this will seem tangential: I’m interested in sports wherein someone does an amazing move that’s not explicitly against the rules, but then it’s banned right away after.

I learned of two such examples recently on YouTube. (1) A figure skater does an actual flip on the ice, heals over head. She lands gracefully but the sport’s judges don’t relish all the neck-breaking and cleanup that’d stem from many imitators failing, on and off camera. Similarly: (2) a long jumper dude set a record by including a flip in mid air. Wow. Banned. Same reasons I imagine.

A lot of people aren’t familiar with what a contrarian Cantor was. I’ve read some of his original stuff and found out he took on our notion that “space is three dimensional” big time. If you ever allow your space to be both finite and discrete for some reason, i.e. let infinity drain away, then Cantor will say: hey, I can visit all your points in sequence, like we do in computer memory, so why do we say your space is “3D” even if XYZ works for ya?

At which point the mathematicians get defensive and say “yadda yadda” and innovation occurs.

A lotta layfolks will answer “space is 3D because I only need 3 coordinates, x, y, and z” (Cantor: you sure you don’t need less?). But then an athlete stunt man comes along and says “space is 4D because 4 coordinates works just as well and the minimum inside-outside made of edges faces four ways when enclosing a center”.

At this point, I could add: 5 + 5 =12 i.e. if you make your base different, a tetrahedron instead of a cube (different base shape), or 12 instead of 10 (arithmetic base), you get new moves, new rules, and therefore new truths. You get new truths for new games. Language games. And sometimes there’s confusion about which game we’re playing.