Greetings from CrowTown

Greetings from CrowTown y'all. I'm reminded this morning, as I've been sharing with friends, of Jim & Patty, valued Portland business owners who've shared many fun chapters with us, through their various enterprises. I often reminisce about All Y'All, the E Broadway smoked meats restaurant with southern cooking (ocra, catfish, stuff like that).

What might've triggered my most recent recollections, actually I'm sure of it, was having pointed out to me a property in the Pearl explicitly named Jim and Patty's by Jim and Patty. Well before that, they had shops all over town branded Coffee People, with clever marketing. Portlanders flocked to the place. We had one in our neighborhood here on Hawthorne. That property has since morphed into a series of excellent restaurants, another one on the way.

During a Wanderers meetup a long ways back, we got a report from one of those Shark Tank events wherein would be entrepreneurs would pitch their plans to would be venture capitalists (VCs), and we learned not just one of the business plans featured technology focused on seniors, improving life quality for older folks. For example: how to combat early onset senility, or any kind of senility? Proposal: pepper life with fun little puzzles, like if you wanna open this fridge, do this cryptogram in your head right now, or starve, only $10.99 a month.

So do I have onset issues at 67? It pays to remember we're all born extremely senile, although that's not the word for it. "Incompetent" would be considered mean also. So when I can't remember how a certain digit sequence maps to something so obvious as a touchtone phone keyboard, I forgive myself for being like that today, because I've always been like that. I'm no superman, let's restate the obvious for the record.

I'd say on average I've been doing pretty well for my age group, in many ways thanks to a generous donor, a good friend, who gifted me with that gym-quality elliptical, a device I've used for many hours in past chapters, as a loyal gym member who took advantage of my privileges. I'd started working out at Princeton, taking their gym class more out of curiosity than anything. I came as an alien, ready to sample what "Ivy League" was supposed to mean. Would their gym class be any different? I'd say the coaches were quite good. All I was doing was working out recreationally, no team sports, no rowing or anything like that. I had no time for such commitments.

Then I got into running, after my hallway-based guidance counselor, an older student, a university-recognized position, pointed out I was gaining weight at a somewhat alarming rate (this would be me in my early 20s, having been thin enough through high school). Thanks to Roberto, I was out the window (literally, not the door) onto the adjacent golf course, running with a pack. Princeton Inn has been drastically remodeled and renamed since then, although its overhaul is nothing, compared to what they did to the dinky station (the dinky being our affectionate name for a shuttle train out to the main Amtrak line, twixt New York and Philadelphia).

Google Earth View: Princeton Well Passed My Time There

Sacred Geometry (School of Tomorrow)

American Pop (movie review)

Talking to Perplexity about American Pop

A Dreamy Day

So if I’m off the glucose meter for good eating habits, why am I drinking straight glucose, 8 grams per can?  Subculture Ginger Beer. What a find. I’m talking about the can, but the content ain’t bad either. I might be a convert. It’s non-alcoholic, for those who don’t know.

Today was MLK Day, and I was exulting about cults in my journal entry, the day before, saying they (the subcultures) should showcase how to get along, echoing the Parliament of World Religions vibe (Cape Town, 1999, Urners present). 

We all got along fine there, even if a few protestors sounded alarmed outside, suspicious that we weren’t at each others’ throats, like their role models.

My work as a World Game photographer took me to one of the protests, a smaller one as I’m boycotting the ICE part of town (no Old Spaghetti Factory for yours truly with gangs like that) and because my friends were among the organizers. 

I’m talking about a tiny protest featuring die-hard oldsters, outside their campus, some of whom I know.

In the middle of it all, I bopped into Thai Kitchen, which I’d been curious about, for some Tom Yum. I had my man purse handy (as did one of the monks), and had the new bio of David Bowie along for bus reading. I plan to pass it along to fellow faculty (we have Bowie fans in our network, other dark stars).

My subculture is really into geometry, which explains a lot.

Mom and dad were living in Lesotho at the time (1999) and that’s where we went after the Parliament, experiencing New Years and the first day of 2000 in Maseru. 

Dawn and I had flown with Tara from Miami and then Dawn went on by herself to Durban to experience a Dalai Lama training. She rejoined us at the home of the Deputy Defense Minister, a Friend (as in Quaker), formerly ANC: Nozizwe Madlala-Rutledge, also a family friend. 

Psychoanalyzing Pythonistas

By some principle or other, the computer languages one learns have a bleed-through effect on one’s psychology. Now that Python is so prevalent, we might as well study its effect on humans, psychologically, meaning psychoanalysis is apropos.

Implicitly, everything has a self in Python, because everything is an object and objects usually have a way to talk about themselves, to themselves, internally, by means of a “self” moniker (a placeholder, not a keyword). They don’t need the usual pronouns the way humans do, as they’re all “its” (keep it simple). We’re free to add attributes (such as gender), either to the “private bag” (self.__dict__) or to the type itself (class.__dict__).

The self, however, is a clone or more accurately “an instantiation” of some “archetype” (we just say “type” in software engineering), so that when we know the type or types of something (multiple inheritance is allowed), we already have a good idea of how it behaves. 

The duck type objects all behave like ducks and so on.

What we learn about these selves is they depend on others to keep them alive. If no other needs them (by keeping at least a token, soft linking somehow) then why waste memory on entities no one will resurrect? That’s when garbage collection kicks in, when a self’s reference count reaches zero.

This “self only because of others” philosophy is very consistent with the Buddhist model, so lets say Python, in terms of psychology, qualifies as Zen-like, Zen being a psych discipline, a technology, not a belief system in the Protestant sense, unless we count Quakers as Protestants.

This type of psychoanalysis will only flower if other languages are subjected to the same treatment, and insights are gleaned. 

Java and Python are close relatives, however the former has placeholder APIs called interfaces when multiple inheritance is called for. In general, Java is a more bureaucratically well-endowed language, not as spare or sparse as the original Python, which is advancing faster in terms of 3rd party packages than in its core grammar, which has more or less settled down (more than JavaScript’s, although maybe JS is finally seeing its end-of-tunnel light?).

In 3rd party world (beyond the Standard Library), Python has a reputation for being general and all-purpose and therefore suitable for web development and data science, astronomy, molecular biology, artificial intelligence (ala natural language processing) and so on. 

What the Pythonista brings to each discipline is a common mindset, based on these entity-selves of various types, keeping each other alive as long as there’s still work to be done.

AI for Janitors

The kind of course I’d lead in recent times, for adults (or I suppose precocious youngsters bored with the conventional curriculum for their age), was what you might call “AI for janitors”. By that I mean we’d learn the data harvesting and clean up steps prior to siccing one of the divinatators on it. By “divinator” I mean “one that divines” by means of specific algorithms we’d pull up inside of sci-kit learn (sklearn). 

Divinators: random forest, K nearest neighbors, support vectors (multidimensional, hyper), and of course whatever deep or shallow neural nets. But these data devouring beasts require “clean” food, meaning you’re better off not feeding them raw data. There’s a lot of “food prep” that needs to go on, and that’s where I’d come in with my Jupyter Notebooks and so on.

However, going back to Pythonic basics (Pythonica), I’m not averse to barking up a different branch, meaning SQL roots might take you towards website development (back end mostly still, if using Python), which involves entirely different skill sets in many cases, or at least until recently. 

I’m showing this “river delta” or “tree” pattern above, which is how entropy fans out and burns calories, to paraphrase Adrian Bejan. Up the left side (house left) we see the web developer namespaces, such as Django (named for the gypsy) and Flask. Up the right side: data science, which was numpy + pandas in my day and age.

What’s happening more recently is data visualization world is colliding with web-displayed dashboard world (remember the Johns Hopkins dash during covid?), so you end up learning HTML / CSS either way, and the JavaScript DOM. JS tends to be less about data science and more about web development, whereas Python frequents both sides of that membrane.

I’m not saying you can’t do data science in JavaScript, and with my Jupyter Notebook solution (the solution I favor, I’m not a developer on that project) we have JS built right in, to use in combo with our Python kernel.

Am I leading such an “AI for janitors” course today? Nope. I’m barking up the web developer side focusing on Flask, in a demo for my Supermarket Mathematics. In the meantime, we study Fred Meyer (the local Krogers) from an intellectual historical point of view. Meyer Memorial Trust is a former client of mine actually, although I haven’t gotten into the FreeGeek chapter yet, in my Winter Term chronology. 

Diving Into Supermarket Math

I’m back to building out my school’s curriculum in the Supermarket Math domain. That’s one of four domains in my Silicon Forest Digital Maths: Supermarket (logistics), Casino (risk, prediction), Neolithic (retro), Martian (futuristic). These are purposely broad-brush-stroke typical areas with lots of overlap and nebulous boundaries.

Supermarket Math includes everything from pumping gas to pushing a shopping cart to driving a truck or working in construction / demolition. Or maybe you’re in healthcare or fashion, entertainment (some kinda showbiz). The everyday economy in other words, chugging along into the future: in the direction of Martian Math, with Neolithic Math receding in the rear view mirror, yet laced with core principles.

These days, a “shopping cart” could be virtual, meaning metaphorical next to a literal shopping cart in a literal supermarket. Virtual shopping carts get built into websites. Browsers go around picking and choosing, like they do in a supermarket, and then check out at the end, paying for everything all at once.

So how does a website work? 

We expect it’s facing browsers using HTML and CSS, whereas on the back end it’s talking to some database. The LAMP architecture is still there: OS-host; web-server; database; application. We can map that to Linux, Apache, MySQL, a language starting with the letter P (Perl, PHP, Python) but that dates us.

Where I’m currently building out is at my Pythonanywhere site, hosted by Anaconda, likewise the source of my Python distribution, packed out with 3rd party tools, such as one of my favorite IDEs (Spyder) and Notebook environments (Jupyter with a Python kernel).

Today I expanded the locally hosted version of that website with a fourth SQLite database: airports of the world. I’m not saying it’s a complete list. Gaza’s might be missing. The three already on tap: Elements (as in Periodic Table); Shapes (as in Polyhedra); Glossary (of geek terms). 

I’ve used airports.db quite a lot through the notebooks, like when teaching for both Saisoft and Clarusway, but I’d yet to add it to the Pythonanywhere website, likely because doing so is semi-redundant. I’m off the critical path.

Zooming out for more overview: many School of Tomorrow scholars, each embarked on a personal work-study journey, enter by the Martian Math trailhead. They’re attracted to this futuristic, esoteric wrapper around a 20th century magnum opus, the two-volume Synergetics (not to be confused with Dianetics). 

But Martian Math is number crunchy digital, as well as rewarding to the dexterous. A programming language is not out of place, and it doesn’t have to start with P, even though for me it often does.

Once you’re through that Platonics portal, a Genesis story, you’re in our playground, our sandbox. That does not require forsaking computation, or developing those muscles newly.

By “Platonics portal” I mean something like what gets covered in the segment on our 20th century Cascadian businessman Fred Meyer. The Asylum District store in the Fred Meyer chain has Martian merch on its 2nd floor. How come? What keeps Portland so weird? 

The five Platonic Polyhedra are in the foreground in our narrative, but with the argument that maybe there’re really six. How could that be? Because in our Genesis story the Platonic polyhedrons come as three dual pairs, which in turn beget the rhombohedrons by combining them together.

• Tetrahedron + Inverse Tetrahedron = Cube (a rhombohedron, as squares are likewise rhombuses).
• Cube + Octahedron = Rhombic Dodecahedron (the RD; 12 diamond faces)
• Icosahedron + Pentagonal Dodecahedron (PD) = Rhombic Triacontahedron (RT; 30 diamond faces)

And then the dual of the RD: the cuboctahedron, which is close in meaning to what in Martian Math we call the VE, introducing the alien Synergetics terminology.

I put a first installment of my curriculum tutorial on Medium, advertising and promoting it through my LinkedIn profile. This initial reading is about getting stuff installed and becoming familiar with the workflows. 

Develop locally and test, only pushing to the cloud (GitHub) when you think the website is actually ready to be load bearing. 

I’m using Flask as my web framework, plus those four SQLite databases. It’s a minimalist website, yet involves using a templating language: Jinja2.

I’ve yet to make a next YouTube about this project, but when I get to it I’ll be sure to advertise O’Reilly as worth subscribing to as a kind of community supported library, versus stockpiling physical wood-pulp books in everyone’s home office. That company has everything neatly organized.

In Memoriam: Bill Lightfoot

committal ceremony + pancake house gathering of family