I have a drive of about three hours planned out, with my dog in the back seat. We’ll be both ascending and descending, with more of the latter than the former, given where we’ll end up, near the Mohawk River at a favorite campsite (well equipped).
Per the worldgame shoptalk, that’s what I’m playing, with my “avatar” or “piece on the board” so to speak, as they say in est, or said, back in the day. If you want more context, think Glass Bead Game from Magister Ludi, a Hermann Hesse novel. I used to bring that up over on math4wisdom (a Freelists listserv) when laying tracks nearer to Lithuania via M4W.
Most Lower48ers (USSAers) won’t have heard of the GBG I’m thinking, unless they’ve heard of Martin Gardner as well, but that’s narrowing it down quite a bit.
Martin Gardner was a polymathic columnist for Scientific American, a role reminiscent of Hugh Kenner’s vs-a-vs Byte. I’d read both. I had free access to the latter when I worked for McGraw-Hill.
Gardner helped with the spread of cellular automata as a topic, per Wolfram et al. By “cell” we mean a partition or particle, like a box but not necessarily hexahedral. Often we just stack em in Tetris fashion and play a game of “trickle down” (i.e. of the “life substance” in terms of what next row — generation — begets).
I’ve been personally invited to a G4G by someone close to Gardner when he was still alive, but I didn’t have any budget for it back then. I still don’t, but remain hopeful. Maybe someday.
I recall something about heptagons one year. I’ll find my blog post about it. Heptagon means seven cornered, deriving from ἑπτάγωνον (that’s Greek).
