Fall Equinox Celebration

The Friday following the CERM Academy presentation, we gathered for potluck.  Greg & family were of course invited and may make it another time.

We've been doing these Equinox and Solstice celebrations pretty much since being granted access to the Linus Pauling House as a part of the Silicon Forest sponsored ISEPP project, which included restoration and preservation of this historic home.

Linus studied chemistry in the basement and came to intellectual maturity during that exciting time  when organic chemistry was first getting its head around macro molecules, DNA included. He won two Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry, one for Peace.

Our discussion turned to off-color acronyms, such as engineers use to remember the color coding of resistors. That took us to the politically incorrect (at first blush) mnemonic phrase I learned at Junior English School (Appian Way, Rome) for spelling "arithmetic": A Red Indian Thought He Might Eat Tobacco in Church.

Bob McGown and I realized somewhere around the time I trucked out Pascal's Triangle, that this Red Indian must be that very Chief SohCahToa to whom we who our memorization of the specific names of functions in Trigonometry.  He lives in a tetrahedron tepee. It all came together.

My spin is of course smoking tobacco would be the natural thing in a church, seeing as it was treated as a medicine and religious substance.  We have lots of "tobacco churches" in America, and that's just for starters.

C6XTY, often dubbed a "molecule" by neighbors, especially when assembled, is indeed named in part for C60, the carbon molecule.  The 6 also refers to its six identical parts, locked together with eight screws to give the 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons of the Fullerene macro molecule.

Alpha Helix by Julian voss Andreae, the red helical sculpture outside, commissioned by ISEPP's Doug Strain and its president, Terry Bristol, shows a much simpler molecule than DNA, but one that inspired chemists with portents of what folding could do. Linus Pauling had worked out its structure.

We collectively learned molecules could do origami like nobody's business.  Shape matters, a lot. There's a jigsaw puzzle aspect to chemistry, with lots to visualize.  Chemistry is a lot like a block-based language (thinking of MIT Scratch and its kin).

In attendance: David DiNucci, Barbara Stross, Dick Pugh... I could go on, but not everybody likes their name mentioned.  Brenda Wyse showed up, nice for me as she always showers me with affection (an English idiom).  No Nirel though.

We talked a lot about Brenda's ambitions to get a rather muscular tractor.  She'd done a lot of homework and got into details.  I enjoy tractor talk, even if I'm not good at it.  She has a large farm, that her dad worked on, showing her the ropes.  We've had celebrations there to.

"Tractatus" for "work" connotes "tract of land" and "roe to hoe".  One of my favorite Latin roots.

Mom and I drove the maxi taxi, parking a block behind, and coming across Satya at the temple.  Some equinox-related ceremony was happening there too.

Satya is one of our local holy men who bounces around between the outdoors athletic youth culture (Rainbow Gathering etc.) and elder spaces (Food Not Bombs is for all ages).

I met him through Lindsey, political refugee (not unlike Dawn in that respect) and former house guest, sometime Wanderer.  She's in Kathmandu these days, immersed in some of the cultural traditions this temple traffics in, part of a Religious Studies major through OSU.

Bob McGown brought his dog, which I appreciated and Facebooked about. Wanderers for me is about celebrating non-humans in addition to humans. I've always considered the dogs among us as symbolic of this respectfulness.

However the dog's specific name will be left out of this account in order to keep the confusion level down.  Having a pet python named Barry is bad enough, given Barry Redd the former Peace Corps volunteer machinist banker.  Barry helped a lot with the Sam Lanahan C6XTY Gala Event, another major subject of our conversation.

Life During VUCA Time

:: greg | CERM Academy ::

VUCA, an abbreviation for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, is meant to characterize the times we live in.  We can't just go by established patterns.  Alvin Toffler anticipated a somewhat shocking future, and this is it.

Greg and Vic, with their daughter Margaux, packed the Pauling House for what was a first for this audience: a talk on life during VUCA times with perspectives from the Hutchins family.

Greg talked about the challenge to continually reinvent himself given accelerated change in engineering.

Vic is in the midst of changing careers in mid life, turning herself, along with Margaux, into a computer programmer.

Margaux, age 18, has researched the return on investment for college and doesn't see how it pays off. A lot of people she knows find only low income jobs yet are already saddled with debt.

She has been homeschooling and volunteering on numerous projects, gaining life experience by leaps and bounds.  She and her mom just got back from Burning Man, a first time for both of them.

The premise of the talk, well established using slides, was that the challenges faced by each family member were highly representative of mega-trends in the workplace.  Their predicaments are our predicaments.

We're moving to a gig economy.  Artificial Intelligence is promising to automate many jobs that humans are currently paid to perform.  The nation (USA) is swimming in debt, yet only mega-spending on infrastructure is likely to keep it alive politically.

Greg has written and led workshops on Risk Based Thinking [tm] for quite some time, and through his CERM Academy counsels businesses on ways to manage risk in times of upheaval.

Learning to connect the dots and think outside the box may sound cliche, but only because such skills remain vitally important.

How we respond and adapt organizationally is at least as important as how we respond as individuals.

The talk was perfect for Wanderers and sparked conversation and debate.  Some of us are already retired whereas others are just starting their careers.  We come from many walks of life.  I didn't recognize quite a few.

Steve Crouch brought donuts.  Chips and salsa, along with soft drinks, were also served.  Deke recorded the whole presentation on his iPhone.  The projector misbehaved at first, so Vic and Margaux dashed home to get another one, but then it ended up getting the job done.

:: derek @ LPH ::

It (movie review)

It took me a few weeks to realize this movie It at The Bagdad, my neighborhood movie theater, was the same movie as this box office record-setter I'd been reading about, featuring some scary clown.

For context, I was joking about Trump fitting the "scary clown" archetype before going, and then after coming back from the movie I dove into the Steve Bannon interviews, with Charlie Rose. 

So Trump is a student of Jung's I found out.  So the scary clown knows what he's doing?  Scary.

The film is a kind of Goonies meets Stand By Me meets Carrie, and some other horror films you may have heard of. 

The directing is confidant, way more than competent, and is self aware of its genre, which filmmakers in this area generally need to be.  It's a world of symbols and motifs, of nightmares and minor keys.

As we learned from Vienna Circle, a good way of tackling taboo subjects and sending messages along to the tormented, is to employ the code language of Gothic horror. 

What children most fear, including their own fantasies of vengefully murdering others, get explicit treatment amidst manifestations of disgust and outrage over mistreatment.

In childhood, the local bullies may be of primary concern.  Intelligence learns to zoom out and appreciate the bigger picture.  A 27-year-long time cycle haunts this town.  The evil is at the archetypal level, less than in the individual incarnations.

The stereotype personalities in the making band together as blended hero, to fight their collective projection of pure Evil, whom they eventually find, and corner.  They fight for each other.

The hellmouth they find is worthy of another Buffy and crew.  I respect the cinematographic effects.

There's always a library, full of those musty books, telling texts that at least hint at the sulfuric sepulchral creatures that haunt the netherworld. 

Childhood means taking up the perennial battles against our own deepest fears. 

Horror flicks like this one help us focus and deal with whatever traumas.

Eye Glasses

Glenn and I moved some plants out of the expected rains, an October harvest, prior to which I shop vac-ed a bit, spewing fine what powder out the rear while barely getting enough pressure to lift a few rat turds.

I also swept a bunch in the basement, wherein the dust is harder to see but nevertheless a suspect.  New hot water heater going in, the last one lasting from a manufacture date in 1992, and installed before we moved in to what these days we call the Blue House.

I'm blaming the fine dust for the more milky vision, but according to WebMD and other sources, I'm overdue for another eye exam.  I rolled over on my main frames the other night, falling asleep to quantum mechanics (Bell's Theorem experiments again), and woke up to another logistical challenge.

Of course it doesn't help that the city's air is full of particulate matter, the detritus of incinerated forest out the Gorge. I-84 has been closed for some time.  The fire is less than half contained.

Lloyd Center Lenscrafters didn't carry spare parts, only sparkling new frames, but I was directed to a place I'd seen driving by on numerous car trips, may have even patronized in chapters past:  a frames fixer on SE Powell and Foster.

The guy was quick with the frames.  All they needed was new bows.  This milky vision symptom came later and seems fleeting hence the shop vac dust theory.  However I'm reminded by the Internet that I've got the problems of an almost sixty year old male.

I switched my healthcare plan awhile back and haven't visited my primary provider since the switch. However we're talking eye doctor here, not family care.

I'll be relying on pretty good vision in the coming weeks given all the driving and coding I have scheduled.  Vacation time is coming to an end.

No I don't have a bizmo yet (beyond the body itself), although my friend Tim Hitchcock does. He brought it to Sam Lanahan's gala gathering on Friday.  More about that gathering in another post.

Ancestors

:: grampa carl ::

:: Jack Urner (my dad) ::

Vacation Time

I was grateful for some downtime after the 7:30 AM to 6:30 PM gig, including commute, with some even longer hours ahead.  I'm just staying at home ("home me o stays is") and marveling at the strange colors.  Oregon's forests are burning, British Columbia's too.  The moon, almost full, is blood orange (deeper red than just copper). The atmosphere is full of ash.

Hurricane Harvey has already struck as of this writing, lots of collateral damage.  Irma is still swirling in the Atlantic, its future uncertain. Computer models see about two weeks ahead max. That's less a deficiency in computing than a feature of everyday math.  Climate modeling and weather modeling are two different things.  The former need not be detailed about day-to-day weather phenomena whereas in weather modeling, that's the whole point.

The downtime has not been idle time. I have more freedom to dwell on my own projects, which these days includes drilling into Jupyter Notebooks more, and sharing them on Github.  I'm recycling some of my homework from the 1990s wherein I dove into cryptography some.

The whole RSA thing (public key crypto) was fascinating. These days we hear more about the blockchain, with crypto-currencies bopping up and down like publicly traded stocks, investments in some Global Data Corporation (GCD) of the science fiction future (but with value today).

RSA is in every web browser so is for sure not off limits to journalism, given Mozilla is free open source, plus the patents have expired.

When you use your Visa card number via HTTPS (little lock next to URL), you're in TLS mode, meaning your browser and some distant server have shaken hands (shorthand for "opened an encrypted channel") that makes it difficult for 3rd parties to crack in, stealing info.  People are meant to have secrets in current economic models, if prosperity is a goal.

What I'm attempting is an on-ramp into Python the computer language, where I explain a little Group and Number Theory along the way, somewhat mirroring an established academic approach you will find in some progressive high schools and colleges.

RSA is completely open, as an algorithm.  What makes it cryptographically secure are current facts about the state of the art, in mathematics and computing power.

Bitcoin and blockchain technology leverage similar facts.

A bitcoin miner, a dedicated computer, has the job of brute forcing through a math problem that should take about ten minutes.

The miner that gets there first broadcasts to all the others, and in the case of a tie, there's a way of breaking it.

The miner's version of the blockchain thereby "wins the day" (actually just the block) and the block detailing what just happened (a set of transactions) around the world, in the last twenty or thirty minutes or so, is accepted by all the others as "the truth" and on we go, block by block.

Lots of blockchains are up an running, many of them experimental given this is all recent technology.

Glenn and Joanne Baker came through for dinner with Carol and I at Bread & Ink.  They were on vacation too, exploring Ashland (pun intended) after catching the eclipse.  I was at work during the eclipse, but allowed to go outside to get the 99.4% experience (not totality).

They were able to see Crater Lake, but on some days I gather the smog has been filling the crater, hiding the lake from the rim.

Oregon is burning, as I said at the top.

We had heavy rainfall all winter and a lush spring, then the water shut off (no rain) and lush vegetation turned to tinder.  The flick of a cigarette will set off a major forest fire.  Some jerk was doing fireworks near Eagle Creak.  There's no telling how careless some will be.

Glenn Stockton (different Glenn) has been assiduously working on the back patio and backyard, on those C6XTY sculptures. I've had an art teacher visit.  I should encourage Julian to swing by.

Most of these sculptures are on their way to a photo shoot, and some won't come back.

I'm reminded of Bonnie Tinker's Love Makes a Family float, a tall-tiny house on a wagon, that used to sit out there too.

Our Quaker Meeting was supportive of liberal values, with member Dawn Wicca providing safe haven for said float (I believe I'd become a non-member by then, without changing in my love of beer).

Vacation time is a chance to run errands and catch up on stuff.

I rolled over on my glasses (talk about careless) and wonder if Lenscrafters at Lloyd Center will be up for fixing them.

Carol (88, hard of hearing) needs to replace a charge card she canceled, then thought she'd lost, then found again.  Lloyd and OnPoint are not far apart.

Being Bad

Rush Hour

I do my best to avoid being part of the problem, withdrawing my car from congestion, taking more time at the watering holes. I don't always succeed.  Yesterday I was hoping to make a 6 PM meetup back in my neighborhood.

So I snapped on the car radio, like many commuting North Americans, and tuned into NPR for some stories about how the CIA is still looking for a mission in Afghanistan, and to succeed will need some level of military engagement.  Pakistan is likewise in the cross-hairs.  Oh, and Egypt.  Syria is pretty much out of the news, as is Gaza.

All this traces back to the 911 debacle, around which so many questions still swirl, and used as a major excuse to mislead.  Iraq had made huge concessions in hopes of avoiding an invasion, but the PR people knew they'd need a scapegoat if anything really bad happened. Invading Iraq would move from back burner to front, because Afghanistan didn't have anything like Saddam's palaces. Libya got the same treatment, even after concessions.  Europe got the refugees.

We also heard about The Wall again.  A nation of immigrants can't bring itself to really self-govern. Reaching for too much territory too quickly, was that it?  Psychologically, the Civil and Spanish-American wars are still driving so much of the "policy" albeit unconsciously.

I did manage to meet up with Derek (Deke the Geek, big on Twitter) and Trevor (one of the top Bucky Fuller archivists, world class), at the intersection of Hawthorne and SE 37th, in front of Starbucks, totally unplanned, but missed meeting with the folks I'd actually scheduled to meet with, on their way to Burning Man this weekend.

Today I'm staying out of the melee, having some happy hour beers and salad while I wait for rush hour commuters to get home.  I won't be listening to any news programs.  Bankrupt policies are of fading interest.

The Matrix

Given C6XTY, Sam Lanahan's invention, consists of six identical base units, fitting flush, edge to edge, tongue in groove, to build a soccer ball, I'm realizing a spherical cube, a hexahedron is part of its core nature.

This intrinsic "qyoobosity" relates to the mutually orthogonal placement of three phi-rectangles X, Y, Z within the icosahedron, which served as the compression unit in previous iterations of Flextegrity.

With C6XTY, this icosahedron is replaced with a soccer ball, or hexapent, with which it has many properties in common.

The connector pieces, in this case ABS plastic or polypropylene, grab the spherical cube by its six faces, locking into them with form-fitting hexagons and special screws.  The base locks, each keeping three faces together, appear at the eight corners of our spherical cube.

A C6XTY "soccer ball" fully embedded in the matrix, is at the center of an XYZ economy and IVM economy at the same time.

By "IVM economy" I mean the ball centers are at the centers of a CCP (cubic close packing) or FCC (face centered cubic) lattice.  IVM = isotropic vector matrix, what R. Buckminster Fuller named this well-known lattice.

Yet the tension arms run in a mutually perpendicular fashion throughout, not between centers as in Bell's "kite" designs, but in the space in between.

Another Haystack Needle

[ originally posted to math-teach @ Math Forum ]

True enough I'm the token "Fuller disciple" here on math-teach.

Given recent history, it's not surprising to find one of his "cult members" here. I use scare quotes cuz Fuller did his level best to avoid "cult leader" status, though he attracted his share of devotees, collaborators, co-conspirators (Marshall McLuhan, Arnold Toynbee, Hugh Kenner...).

I'm not apologetic for keeping his "concentric hierarchy" alive though, his Kepleresque embedding of polyhedrons one inside the other (Russian Dolls), with the tetrahedron his volumetric unit. A & B modules. T & E, S modules. Cubocta:Icosa :: S:E. https://repl.it/IqOL Lots of low-hanging fruit in this area, as David Koski will attest.

Sharing such content in K-14 is not that off the wall given how super-accessible it is, visually as well as mathematically. I'm used to other teachers sounding defensive, giving lip service to how math is a big tent... but maybe not that big. I'm also a speaker at art schools and maker spaces (more 3D printing ahead).

If Fuller's writing were incomprehensible, I doubt Nature would have singled out Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth as one of the more influential tomes of the 1970s.[1]

His writing is difficult, but so is Heidegger's. My background as a philosophy reader (Wittgenstein etc.) leads me to plow into esoterica such as Synergetics. Applewhite liked how I brought Wittgenstein's "meaning through use" dogma into juxtaposition with Fuller's alt-meanings. The Synergetics vocab was deliberately remote (see Synergetics 250.30).

When I share the whole number volumes table with kids, I'm quick to remind them they won't find any of this in the textbooks. That tends to add to their curiosity.

Remember, the Jitterbug Transformation is alluded to in the logo of the IMU (International Mathematical Union), and the old NCTM logo was an octet-truss. The memes are still out there, albeit in a somewhat X-Files blend.[2]

Kirby

[1] 26 November, 2015 pg.
https://flic.kr/p/BeVqrV

[2] http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-tale-of-two-logos.html

Didactic Cartoons

For further reading:
Lesson Plan (alternative models of multiplying to get area) -- Math Forum, August 2017

Data Stores

Wanna do CRUD against a Google sheet using Python? Sounds dirty? Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete are the core actions one takes against a recording medium, with the devil, as always, in the details. Do we use SQL (Structured Query Language)? Maybe so.

In the above video, however, we're putting a resource in the cloud, a tabular data set, and letting a single user consult it, or mess it up, using Python. When a dataset is read-only, or, as we often say, immutable, the chances for panic attack are a lot less. But what if disparate users write and read at the same time? Are transactions atomic? That's where we talk about ACID, in addition to CRUD.

Precisely because spreadsheets are such a useful tool, and easily comprehended, there's a temptation to go overboard and overuse them. The key skill, then, is to recognize when a spreadsheet might be sufficient, and when it's potentially a dangerous shortcut, a decision that might come back to haunt one down the road.

Python has long participated in the office automation environment within Windows.

The win32all extension gave Python the power to talk to the Microsoft Office suite and even to define COM objects, later renamed to ActiveX.

Indeed, the wish to have ActiveX objects collaborate yet have different source code language origins, was a primary motivator of .NET (dot net), as was the wish to give C# (C sharp) a playing field it could dominate happily.

China Town

As one of my summer campers put it today:  we could call this China Town but that was in Old Town, so maybe Asia Town is better?

Portland, the city, did a number of things to push much of China Town out of Old Town, including adding some sculptures with negative Feng Shui.  I'm sure the higher rents didn't help.

In any case, the growing edge of Portland's Asian community is outward from SE 82nd, a state highway under the control of ODOT, as Friend and Wanderer Lew Scholl has oft reminded me.

I'm working in an Asian mall on SE 87th, as a part of the Learning to Code movement.  Coding with Kids is a lot like Kumon, in terms of supplementing where parents perceive the school system may be weak.

As a matter of fact though, Portland Public Schools have a lot of affinity for MIT Scratch and for all I know are also using Codepen.io and other such cloud-based sandboxes.

Daniel Shiffman (Coding Train) provides many exemplary Youtubes helping kids overcome the digital divide.  Although we don't teach P5.js or Processing at Coding with Kids, we're on the same train.

Like most teachers, I like to decorate my classroom and so brought along a few items from the Oregon Curriculum Network inventory.  The cube especially, the least stable, of the set, is looking the most battle-scarred (see below). These are volumes 1 (tetrahedron), 3 (cube), 4 (octahedron), 6 (rhombic dodecahedron) as anyone math-literate will likely recognize.

Some campers, when not huddled over their Chromebooks, take a break disassembling and reassembling some C6XTY. 

Today I stopped at K&M Auto Service on the way home to see if they'd have time to fix my driver's side power window on the Nissan.  They said they'll take a look later this week.  I also need my passenger side mirror replaced.

Consciousness

The term "consciousness" is a crown jewel in many a diadem.  We should begin our investigation by acknowledging the widely diverging rule sets that apply.  In some language games, an awake, tracking human being is by definition "conscious", as opposed to asleep or maybe dead.  In other language games, the awake human is certainly "dreaming" (as in daydreaming) but the words "conscious" and "aware" are reserved for only some dream states.  People spend a lifetime hoping to attain "wakefulness" or "enlightenment" or one of those.

For example, the Russian mystics take the more reserved tack, with their default being what we might label "robotic consciousness", an oxymoron from many points of view.  The discourse comes across as a challenge, more as religions aim to encode.  However lets remember philosophy since Plato at least has posited "self awareness" in contrast to a life unexamined.  "Consciousness" is very commonly presented as a ladder, with "higher" and "lower" states.

When physicists wade in to this morass, minus a lot of anthropological training (in some cases), their tendency is to conflate all meanings of "consciousness" on the assumption that words mean by pointing (not the later Wittgenstein view), with "consciousness" an objective state we know from private individual experience, not from getting programmed in English or any robotic language in particular.  We know "consciousness" as "the world" in the Tractatus sense (that's a philosophical work, Vienna Circle).  We begin with Descartes, with his cogito (it thought, therefore it was).

My recommendation is we not attempt to converge to any singular meaning.  "Consciousness" has a different role in different games.  I'm partial to the Russian mystic usage because I enjoy the gradient religions set for us.  Mere daydreaming is not enough.  Night dreaming also contributes to a consciousness. I get that from reading other Vienna Circle writers, as well as from the dreams themselves.

Expanding Access

A lot of us measure freedom to access the Internet as a leading indicator, yet factors inhibiting such access differ a lot in character.

The sheer physical challenges in terms of location and equipment, are easier to reason about than Nanny State policies, which try to keep populations innocent (virgin) in some desired way.

Those of us who've grown up in the conference organizing business, which I did somewhat vicariously under the tutelage of Steve Holden and crew, understand the expectations of conference goers, which often includes unfettered Internet access.  That means convenient access to all the sites and sounds one might be used to from browsing at home.

In 2017, this expectation is often frustrated, both for physical reasons, and for metaphysical reasons. The Nanny States keep a list of problematic IP numbers based on nation of origin, and routinely surveil and/or block access from such addresses.  Lets remember the origins of the Internet in ARPA, later DARPA.

Remember also, though, the NIMBY syndrome ("not invented in my backyard"). Some subcultures may wish to reinvent the wheel rather than adopt the wheels of others.

How much one:

(a) needs to feel in control and
(b) needs others to perceive one as controlling

feeds the calculation.

Those operating within a contextualizing religion or wisdom tradition that allows surrendering control, even as a means to regaining it, may have an edge.

Master IPv6 and recreate it with your own features if you must.  But why throw out the whole transport protocol, which is working so well?

I think most of us take for granted that Cuba will see fit to adopt the same RFPs and other standards (http, ftp, smtp), that have provided a backbone for globalization thus far.

The true opposite of globalization, in the sense of organic counter-trend, is localization, not nationalism.  That nation-state system was already a game of the globalizers, known as the Great Game or later World Game.

By the time one gets to the level of nations, it's already too late, as the formal infrastructure of diplomatic relations is already in place.  True locales actually provide refuge from anonymous globalism.  Ordinary people (true characters, some of them) get to play.

What corresponds to the global versus local tension in everyday memetics? Branding and advertising.

In B2C we focus on locale, customization, meeting the customer where she or he lives.

In B2B, we tend to focus on longer-term stability, in which case a satisfying accommodation of the global ecosystem is what to look for in a company or organization.

The "standard model" is therefore one of Big Company back ends (server side) and Small Company front ends (neighborhood grocery store).

This doubling of identity is accomplished through branding and parentage.  The local store is quietly owned by some more global conglomerate.  Getting the mix just right is the job of your marketing alchemist.

In the case of Cuba we've had Proctor & Gamble versus Unilever.

The Ben & Jerry's factory on Cuba fantasy more belongs to the latter, of which it is a subsidiary, Vermont factory notwithstanding.

The EU has discovered it has the freedom to define trade relationships independently of either the US or the UK, which often stick together where BDS is concerned (state sanctions etc.).

The EU is free to amp up Cuban Wifi, for example, whereas Microsoft and any company based in Delaware, may feel obligated to consider itself within the US nanny state jurisdiction.  That's called giving the competition an edge.

We've seen more expressions of EU independence recently, when BDS against Russia, unilaterally imposed by the US Congress, nudged NATO towards looking more and more like its own brain children, Aleppo and Mosul.

Revisiting Lambda Calc

My video talks about "lambda calculus" in contrast to "delta calculus", the latter being more well-known as Calculus with a capital C, i.e. the calculus of Newton, Leibniz et al.

The Python language has what we call "little lambda" meaning one expression, for example:

>>> result = map(lambda x: x * x, range(30))
>>> result



Treating functions as "top level citizens" is more what lambda calc is all about.

Pass functions to other functions to return functions.

Do this in math class (or call it CS if you insist).

More Manicuring

The last remains of the old phone pole have been hauled away.  Today, starting 8 AM, the job is to completely remove a large street-side tree another house down.  The city approves, but I'm not sure if they're paying for it.  My impression is it interferes with the sewer line, so maybe so.

I think I've been fairly successful on math-teach, making my case that the K-12 math curriculum needs to adapt.  On the ground what that looks like is an infusion of CS (computer science) as a separate discipline, so that math texts might continue as they were.  The Learning to Code movement has been effective.

My campaign to make more room for tetra-volumes at least in sidebar, as a teaser, is a decades-long endeavor which has an unclear outcome, so the powers that be seem as yet unwilling to invest.  Too many unknowns?  We have to recognize the standard pattern:  early adopters, bandwagon, laggards (one may use other terms).  I focus on "international schools" (such as I attended) as where this history and literature is more likely to make inroads.

The nationalism versus globalism debate is less a debate than a continuation of East meets West.  People still think in terms of "western civilization" and historically speaking that's useful.  However, going forward, I don't think so.  I argued on QuakerQuaker about this, suggesting "western civilization" is an obsolete term in many contemporary contexts.

Giving the Russians such an important role in determining the political landscape of what used to be considered "US domestic politics", even writing it into law, is something of a breakthrough.  The superpowers are merging, in terms of synergizing oligarchies.  That's not what the nationalists have in mind, but precession was never about straight lining from A to B.

A Disconnect

What are the chances?  A phone and electrical pole utility truck pulls up across the street and starts transferring what remains attached to pole A, the old one, to pole B, the new one.

We have some tree branches and stuff, touching the wires.  Couldn't the guy have just shaken it loose then?  My CenturyLink optical fiber connection stopped working.  My wire goes right to that space.

I went out and talked with the crew, but they said no, they'd not done anything to mess with my connection, call CenturyLink.  Which I did.  A technician should be coming in the morning.

That's good, as I have another class to teach on-line come evening.  But if it's not a ladder truck, just a van, a repair may be out of reach.  The CenturyLink trouble shooter on the phone didn't think it was the a pole problem either.

What are the chances?

I think it's a mistake, by the way, to make "cyberspace" be just the Internet.  The telecommunications revolution started with radio (before that telegraph), and then television.  I get my Prism TV through the Internet, even though I don't watch it, stick to broadcast.  I have a digital antenna.

The Internet wraps all that up, and then some, along with the telephone, also revolutionary. 

That's all cyberspace.  Segregating the Internet from voice, phone, radio and TV, saying cyberspace is only the former, not the latter, is really dull-witted.

Like I say on math-teach, it appears that English is broken, and those who think in it have a hard time having coherent thoughts.

I'm using my Verizon phone as a hotspot at the moment, which explains how I'm able to blog sans my expensive / fancy optical fiber connection.

Followup:  the CenturyLink tech confirmed my suspicion: they'd touched the wire.  Photons don't like sharp corners; there's a reason for those hoops.  Think of a garden hose with a cinch in it (a pinch); the water stops flowing.  He unpinched it, by climbing a ladder, and service was restored.

Summer Camp

I've been busy with summer camp lately.  That conjures images of the great outdoors, hiking and pitching tents, campfires. Not in this case.  The kids and I were in a back room in a tiny strip mall, struggling for bandwidth, learning to use MIT Scratch.  In a next iteration, I took over for the Center Manager and had all three rooms to myself (counting the foyer) so we spread out.  I pressed both HDTVs into service.  This camp was about Web Development; we used Codepen.io as our workout service.  However I had an Arduino set up on the side, as a kind of "coming attraction".

Speaking of coming attractions, the new Planet of the Apes movie has opened at the Bagdad.  I've been following that franchise since the beginning, with Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowell. Here in 2017, the flavor has changed quite a bit, but I've continued to enjoy the science fiction.  I think of how Bucky Fuller claimed we were devolving into a Planet of the Apes thanks to overspecialization.

Throughout these weeks of summer camp, I've been holding up my end of the debate on math-teach. I'm also posting to QuakerQuaker (Q2) but I'm less confidant that archive will withstand the test of time, given the site owners have talked about dumping the existing framework for something else, losing all our writings in the process.

David Koski has branched out into spherical trig lately, looking at the 120 and 48 LCD triangles in Synergetics.  I've been endeavoring to follow from a distance.

Lastly, I'm keeping up with my one Coursera course, Interfacing with the Arduino, that I'm taking for credit.  I'm in the process of auditing a few others, mainly to bolster my HTML + CSS + JS skills.  I was unaware until yesterday, for example, that the CSS grid feature has become available, since earlier this year.  That's going to come in handy and feature in future versions of Web Development, either as a camp or after school.

Headline News

:: 2007 ::

Glenn was by this morning to report success on what seemed to some of us a long shot: getting Don's boat back in the water in time for this year's Blues Fest.  For those just joining us, Don's boat goes way back in these blogs.

Without going into too much detail, Don having his boat there is a tradition, but with so much use over the years, way more than average, this 1927 Chris-Craft was overdue for deep maintenance, as in rebuilding the hull.

They got it done.

Barry and Don have been on it for months, Barry having completed a first prototype of his enclosed two wheeler (motorcycle with full body fuselage with ways to stabilize at rest).  Glenn pitched in four twelve hour days in the final push.

I tweeted Chance, the lonesome cowboy we met north of Redmond.  We bought him some biscuits and gravy at a roadside place in the sun. @Artpotheosis.  Judy is taking care of estate matters.  The family has once more dispersed with respect to the physical plane (more a sphere by today's reckoning).