Excavating Orwellian Memory Holes

Snow Day

I just assumed we were having school as usual and somewhat stupidly set out for Bethany Village.  Yes it had snowed overnight, but that wouldn't stop the economy in Minnesota. 

I-26 was blocked.  Detour signs pointed every which way. I finally thought to check with the administration. We had all been notified on Whatsapp: fall back to Zoom mode.  I'm new here, and didn't get the message.

We started fifteen minutes late, when I got back to my office.  I'm a caretaker for my mom in addition, plus I have other duties.  I'm keeping busy.

Our topic today was USA Computer Olympiad past problems and training challenges.  This school attracts families looking for competitive opportunities in this cerebral realm.  

I'm expanding out that section of our (dynamic, electronic) textbook on Github.

That same textbook has some sandboxes dealing with unconventional topics, some might judge, in an Algorithms and Data Science class.  I'm chalking that up to time marching on, i.e. they didn't have such as R's and Python's DataFrame objects until recently.  They're data structures for sure.

Then there's the sandbox on Synergetics, a more right brained and philosophical seeming offering, however the link between Graph Theory and polyhedrons, not to mention Group Theory, are already non-trivial. We're mainly supplying an alternative swap-in volumetric system of some interest, an American invention, still being fine tuned.

The wear and tear of wartime grief has been a constant feature of my life since birth.  The property values really aren't that high when life gets so bleak.  There's nothing like knowing life could be less stressful but for our programming.  

One shoulders responsibility and yet the inertia is so heavily in what's collective.  The wars represent continuations of themes we keep beneath the literally violent surface, when psychology is working right. War is a breakdown in decorum.

The cruelty of man to man is heart-breaking, which may lead to hearts hardening and further cruelty.

I'm not ascending a soapbox in order to be preachy here.  This isn't a fire and brimstone sermon.

I imagine jumping back on Youtube and narrating an update.  I could toot my own horn some. However for years before my multi-year spate of Youtubes, I had my journals to look to and share from.  

Maybe it's time to get back to a more linear medium?  I suppose it's not either/or.

Frequency in Synergetics

Frequency is a subtle concept in Synergetics, unlike in geodesic dome & sphere architecture, where counting struts from pentagon to pentagon, along a geodesic, gives the number, i.e. the frequency of said structure.

But what about Bucky Fuller's "Eureka!" formula 10 FF + 2, where FF is a growing / shrinking triangle of edges F.  There's a cuboctahedral and/or icosahedral number sequence around here somewhere, which takes us back to the icosasphere of paragraph one.  When F=1, that's 12-around-1, a signature starting point once adjacent spheres become involves?

What?  That all sounded way to complicated.  Consider the sequence 12, 42, 92, 162... those are successive layers of balls around a nuclear ball.  The picture is one of growing outward, though one might just as well hold radius constant and say we're subdividing, getting more meticulous.

Once inside the nucleus itself (inside the atom) i.e. once a single CCP (= IVM) ball becomes the core focus, we cross a line.  Now we're in subfrequency or even zero-frequency territory in Synergetics. The super and sub scripts start using 0 a lot.  There's even a 0/2.

This is all because whereas the XYZ origin is inert, and pretty much the same anywhere, as good as irrelevant, in terms of where it is to begin with, the "Cabal of Polyhedra" that Bucky is vested in has a singularity at its center, a zerophase novent where we don't pause, anymore than Universe itself is unitarily conceptual.  Not in Synergetics it isn't.  There's a pass-through no stopping zero, surround be a vector equilibrium that's half not of this world.

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311.18 We may logically assume that the intellectual cosmic integrity of the timeless, sublime integral of absolute perfection must continually test its integrity of eternal regenerativity; wherefore the integral that we inadequately identify as god requires a plurality of local sensing monitors to be omnideployed in the time-distance-differentiated, nonsimultaneously conceptual, serial Universe to continually observe the local Universe events, while also being progressively advantaged with an ever larger inventory of the discovered laws governing cosmic regeneration integrity, and thus equipped, to cope metaphysically with each of the profusion of unprecedentedly unique regenerative complexities that we speak of as problems. In effect god differentiates cosmic integrity into a time-distance-differentiated plurality of limited, local, metaphysical, intellectual experiences with which to test the capability of "god" to reintegrate and restore its timeless zerophase unity.

By "this world" I mean "this side of the dumbbell or bow tie" -- we're picturing a symmetry that's reached "through the middle" on both sides, a singularity or sorts and pulses in and out between two worlds, "this world" and this "other world" that share a transformational out-of-time inside-outing inflection point at their common origin.

What all this means might be put on a shelf as an abstract model.  Any time you need two worlds linked by a singularity, call it a Narnia Lamp, here's a candidate model.  It pulses outward as a jitterbug and reaches an extreme and continues on back to a point of origin, goes through an eye of the needle, then pulses outward in a symmetrical fashion, in this inside-out space.  Fuller symbolized this "bow tie" shape with a "bow tie" symbol.  I also tended to wear a bow tie.

Again, the language is one of generic patterns, one that sets the stage for a drama without specifying the drama. The programming comes next, as Frequency.  The subfrequency discussion is more about Angle, i.e. the structure of logic as if logic were a purely right-brained affair, best symbolized by shapes.  The left brain wants nothing of it.  The security of a strong symbolry, a lexical anchor, is not enough.

 Enter Q-rays, maybe, at least as an alternative to XYZ with its passive / dormant origin-center.  Q-rays are free to take on the volatility of Synergetics, the fire, and shoot out in two worlds, one positive, one negative, but without privileging either as more than the other.  Equanimity is pinned between them, as where going in becomes and outwardly expansive movement.  We shrank to nothing in order to be reborn in a next space.

Q-rays, if you don't know, are {a, b, c, 0} permutations, only positive scaling required to span space.  The four basis vectors shoot outward dividing the world into four quadrants.  XYZ, in contrast, uses six rays to subdivide space into eight octants.  Negative scaling may be used to hint at a singularity inversion point of a type we don't find in the conventional Cartesian model, although we do find a cogito in the same field, going inward meditatively to discover the most general of generalizations.  Cogito ergo sum and all that.

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  440.09 Zerophase: Being the zerophase of energy the vector equilibrium is inherently invisible and non-empirically-discoverable, which accounts for its having been for so long unrecognized as the spontaneous equilibrious model. As specialists, scientists seek only the somethings. The vector equilibrium is the only model of nonbeing zero-inflection at the nonmoment of omniintertransformabilities, where anything can happen and must happen single- atomically within and multiatomically without. Specializing science...
  
  
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  440.10 The vector equilibrium is the most abstract of all the always-and- only abstract scientific generalizations, for it is the heart of all interrelationships existing between — and not in or of — any of all the empirically apprehended intertransforms of the ever-and-everywhere intertransforming Scenario Universe. The vector equilibrium is the zerophase — ergo, inexpressible— interrelationship of all Universe events.

 

Ruminations

The Fuller Projection is by design borderless, but that doesn't change the situation on the ground one iotum i.e. we don't have borders as geographical features of Planet Earth, but we may have walls that define where these borders would be i.e. walls that follow the property lines.  We have different words for property lines and borders in that the latter are more a subset of the former.  "Walls" are a stand-in for barriers of various types.

The point of showing the bare stage, minus the marks and lines necessary to the current plays and dramas, is to remind ourselves that we live through theater.  We express ourselves through our characters, which are in turn defined in terms of attributes, such as citizenship in one or more nations, or refugee status.  We need to keep all that political data front and center, or risk changing our character.

Could someone join a roster of citizens minus moving to that very territory?  What if there is no such territory, only a smattering of facilities around the world?  Yet this network offers citizenship?  Could a golf club offer citizenship as another form of lifetime membership?  If not a golf club, then a virtual nation?

Instead of knowing the answers to such questions, I toss them out there to help shape the conversation about what's in need of ongoing design.  These concepts were passed down through many generations. What did it mean to be a citizen of Rome?  Of Athens?  How has the concept of citizenship evolved?

Using television to show us exactly what is going on in various borderlands, in terms of barriers, defenses, drug dealing, would be elucidating and feed the computation.  Is the Canadian border somehow less permeable to fentanyl?   How might the medical profession take over the drugs problem from those into crime and punishment?  Does the wall in Judea-Mesopotamia define the borders of a nation state?  Define "nation state". 

Again, I'm not the answer man.  I just know the humans alive today have responsibilities to keep working out their differences.

Anti War Warriors

One of the ironies associated with recent geopolitical maneuvers is among those most empathetic towards the Russian mindset, partly projected of course, are high ranking active duty and/or retired military personnel.  

Such is the case on all sides we might say, but in Smedley Butler World in particular, wherein the slogan "war is a racket" is well-known, we know that soldiers see how they get to be pawns in someone else's grand strategy great tragedy.

Insofar as West Point helps cadets see what the cosmic computer is seeing, that war with outward weapons is obsolete, it helps keep the cold war cold.

Anti-war activists, including a military that knows something about logistics, intuit the world could be a lot more promising and encouraging of the freedom-loving, were tomorrow's players not saddled with today's working misassumptions.

The challenge of protecting the Constitution remains at issue.  Was it protected, or have we entered a post constitutional age?  If the latter, then the US military has actually failed against its undermining.  Upholding and protecting does not mean passively looking on as civil liberties are eroded.

Smedley Butler stood his ground, but when he exposed the Business Plot, few took him seriously.

Pi Day

An expected blog reader type is a teacher, looking for was to pass on the culture.  Yesterday and today are a bit of a bonanza for me in that regard, in that we're shifting to Daylight Savings Time, and today is Pi Day.

We had a Zoom meetup last night.  The segue from Daylight Savings Time to a world map is a great way to slip in time zones in the Pythonic sense e.g. jump to the date, datetime and time documentation and remind students of the intricacies of calendars.  Our proleptic Gregorian is no joke, in turns of curve ball twists and turns.  Imagine if imperial presidents raided the months for more days the way those Roman guys did.

However, the World Time Zones map, picked at random, was of course a Mercator.  A great interim next map has been floating around Facebook as a meme for some time now, and shows the true size of countries, inside of countries as outlined on a Mercator.  Tiny Greenland set within monster Greenland, and so on.  Russia is really not that big, compared to some other big ones.  Nor is it small.  Africa looks about the size it is.  Antarctica was all together missing from the time zone Mercator.

This is an Algorithms and Data Structures class remember, and there's nothing more algorithmic than a mapping, nor a data structure more familiar than a globe.  From a quasi-spherical globe (a tad oblate) we map to a screen on a flat surface, to create a kind of dashboard.  We call the resulting instrument a "world map" and it's easy to search up a bunch of them, which is what we did.  This was all by way of intro, reminding students we're in the age of GIS / GPS.

On the Pi Day front, I mentioned Vihart, the Youtubist, and had I not got into a mouse fight with Replit, I might have again demonstrated the technique for embedding Youtubes inside of Jupyter Notebooks.  As I explained once again, this is a "school of the future" where I'm pretending "this is how it is" for a lot of us, whereas really we're just an elite few.  Not many underprivileged have even heard of a Juypter Notebook. We're considered an elite school for a reason.  But that just means prototypical, ahead of the pack, experimental without being iconoclastic.

Diverging from established orthodoxy sounds risky until the new orthodoxy we're converging to comes over the horizon.  One's impulse is to not jump ship, even if it's going down, until there's at least one other ship in the picture.  Pick one and swim towards it?  In my case, I'm pretty much right back where I started at the International School of Manila and/or the Overseas School of Rome.  The tools have improved immensely however.  I'm able to take advantage of much more engineering.

The Vihart Youtubes I'm thinking about have to do with Pi versus Tau and a kind of mock political battle that's like a model UN, a sandbox for later, when you enter center ring.  Check 'em out, we're talking about a whole genre.

For example, with a computing surface in the picture, say a Replit in the cloud, you're able to casually dialog with an implementation of Permutations, which form a type, a math object.  The Group Theory ideas come through loud and clear, to the extent one skates through the concepts without getting bogged down in too much tedium.  But there's enough concreteness to keep it real.  A P-type object maps letters to letters as shown by its ability to encrypt and decrypt.  Yes, just a simple Caesar code.  The point is not to encrypt securely at this point, but to understand something about Algorithms and Data Structures.

Homework Marathon

My teaching schedule is intermittent and like any professor, although I'm not claiming to be one except in jest, I'm doing lots of homework and prepping for upcoming classes. My life is that of an anonymous academic, although I would not say cloistered.

That homework includes a trickle of RT still (post a sweeping shutdown) but with most of that cast dispersed to other venues.  I still remember when Air America Radio went under, which is from where some of this talent came in the first place.  Randi Rhodes foreshadowed Tulsi Gabbard, a female fluent in military matters, questioning the common wisdom.

I also solicit debating partners on Facebook and compare notes.  Study involves discussing and debating, not just passively reading and viewing.  That's what friends are for.

Scott Ritter has gotten a lot of words in edgewise amidst other chores I've been doing.  I've watched at least three recent interviews. Readers might remember I was tracking Ritter closely from the newsgroup alt.politics.org.cia (did I get that right?) during the post-911 attack on Iraq, wherein I still connected through Teleport as pdx4d.  

I had my usual focus on keeping up supervisory or "oversight" mechanisms (interesting double meaning there), involving webcams and whatever i.e. arms control, trust but verify, the verify part.  But this wasn't my specific training, just my focus, so I was mostly there to learn.

Then I've picked up a couple new independent journalists wandering about on the outskirts of the hot spots.  There's that American who grabbed a train from Kiev to Kharkov, even deeper in the conflict zone, and now making selfie shows (as I do too) from his hiding place, giving his strong opinions. He's no Zelenskyy fan, but doesn't speak Russian either.

The story I'm getting is political actor Zelenskyy ran as a peace candidate and even at this late date would like to deliver, but fears the youth groups to which many in government owe their current positions.  The "Inca brain surgery" Russians hope to pull off would deprogram the little sister (an analogy I've been using), delivering her from the Cult of Otan.

That's similar to Washington, DC's fear of anarchic insurrectionists who came out in support of Trump, but don't seem inspired by this new older guy as much.  DC knows how it feels to feel cornered by a hostile constituency on the brink.  Trudeau thought they were coming for him and acted out, but they weren't really.  They just wanted to have a conversation.

I suggested in my recent video that any truck convoy heading for DC do a 180 and head for Hollywood or somewhere where they make television and social media.  DC is providing a lot of the talking heads, for sure, but the screenwriters tend to work remotely, some maybe from bunkers, believing their own science fiction.  Not that bunkers can't double as luxury apartments and what not.  Facebook and Twitter deplatformed a sitting president, albeit the lamest of ducks by then.  That's our Grunch in the high chair.

Saturday Workshops

The regular tetrahedron, not a space-filler, may seem a disappointing shape when taken alone. However, given a whole mess of them and face-bonding an operation, we get those spirals, or tetrahelices (a word my spellchecker dictionary does not have).

The spinning vortex at the core, might be a good title for Bonnie's presentation, which helped us bring the patterns in question into focus.

The discovery that an icosahedron does not actually consist of twenty regular tetrahedrons, with a common tip, comes as a shock to some.  That nature would offer such nuance... and that's but the tip of the iceberg.

The Jitterbug Transformation is the opening lotus flower, whereby the tetrahedrons regain their regularity at the fleeting moment of cuboctahedral satori-hood. 

As you may be able to tell, I'm coming down from the high of being in on a virtual meetup featuring vZome, Scott Vorthmann's tool for pretending one has Zome for real.  

David Koski joined us, as well as an official rep from the BFI.   

First Bonnie DeVarco's trans-disciplinary tetrahelix talk (with lots of focus on virus morphology), then Paul Hildebrand's vZome workshop.

Dear Senator

In hopes of doing a good deed and sharing a constituent viewpoint, I gathered up an email directly to Senator Merkley's office. I say "gathered up" because I included a cut and pasted posting to someone's timeline on Facebook, a comment.  Obviously such cutting and pasting brings over a lot of invisible HTML, and the submit process barfed, saying what I'd sent was a security risk and could I please just use plaintext.  I also linked to this blog post.

My hope was to represent a more Russian point of view from Oregon, given we have an extensive Russian heritage right down along the coast, to Sebastopol, near the Russian River (or along it?) and where I used to work (remotely).  Onion domes dot our landscape.  Eastern Orthodox Christianity is not alien in Oregon, it's part of our sensibility as homelanders.

However I'm not counting myself as ethnic Russian.  I'm fascinated by Cyrillic.  I still remember touring the "KGB museum" in Vilnius that time, the token American fatso among what were still not yet fast food fed Lithuanians, looking forward to long lives, getting married in droves.

Maybe the email with the security risk HTML made its way through some channel or other to an office and someone will forward from there.  I was sounding pretty anti-NATO in my rhetoric which is really nothing new for me.  That has to be OK under free speech rules, so I'm not worried about NATO push back. What can they do?  Bomb my house?  Maybe in the former Yugoslavia they could get away with that, but Portland is a veteran when it comes to defending itself against Marriott Marionettes.

Besides, I'm a NATO professor (one of my brilliant disguises).

Boot Camping

I'm participating more in the global economy, but I'm still a "butt worker" as I label my sedentary class.  I think of truckers as butt workers too, but with defined tasks away from piloting their rigs.  Scholars have always been butt workers, bent over too many books, with shelves to the ceiling crammed with more, cobwebs everywhere -- that's the stereotype at any rate.  That's not one I fit exactly, but I'm in the neighborhood as stereotypes go.

Actually, once you throw in the weekly commute to a brick and mortar day school, I at least get to practice the hand-eye-foot coordination associated with operating heavy machinery (a lot heavier than me in any case).  I'm closest to truckers out there on I-26, which connects Greater Portland to the Pacific coastline.  That's not a trivial drive.  Some movie I saw made it some just a hop, skip and a jump from the everyday city school yard.  At the final bell, teens would rush to the shoreline to make out.  Not so.  Not in droves anyway.

Glenn has been on a beer fast for reasons other than weight loss and has seemed pretty bright eyed and focused. But then he's always that way.  He's a scholar too, but not one to neglect housekeeping.  I was over at his place again for lunch, discussing Graham Harman's hyperobjects and Peter Sloterdijk (both philosophers in the Continental dimension -- hardly a true geographic distinction at this point).

"Continental philosophy" has meant European, descending from Hegel and like that.  The UK-USA faculties have tended to gravitate more to logic, with a border on computer programming.  The continentals have been disregarded as too mushy, but then language grows fallow if unexercised and trying to compete with computer sciences just leaves philosophers in the dust a lot.  

Investing in prose is not necessarily unproductive, as Wittgenstein, an ordinary language philosopher, showed clearly.

I'm thinking of a university with a lot of parking space devoted to the trucks our students use, to ply the roadways, performing their duties on many levels.  

Mixing ethnicities on the basis of informed consent versus smashing them together, helps with the gear shifting and cuts down on the fireworks. 

I enjoyed our multi-continent orientation this afternoon.  Sitting in the back, on Zoom, I got the flavor of the boot camp I'll help lead over the next couple weeks.  

Again, we're talking butt work, the opposite of boot camp from many a more military viewpoint.  

The psy folks adopted a lot of the same terminology, with committing to the same lifestyle.  So many geeks talk about foo camp this and bar camp that, yet couldn't pitch a tent to save their own lives.

My hope is we'll fix that rift in the culture and get the programmers out under the stars a lot more, out from under those less than full spectrum lighting fixtures.  

Instead of cubicles in towers, why not sprawling "golf courses" of cubicles, where the "cubes" a more sphere shaped, and much bigger than actual golf balls?  

 Call it a campus, dotting with Fly's Eye Domes.  Old themes in these blogs.

The talk on moire patterns at FSI Institute this morning reminded me of those windows sliding shut, with the two polarized planes controlling the flow a photons through each portal.

Disambiguation

 

I remarked to the TrimTabbers recently, that when I joined academia.edu, and began surveying the Synergetics literature, I was surprised to find how much the Russians had embraced the Hermann Haken work by that title, while ignoring the all American classic, Bucky Fuller's.

Since that time, I've been doing my part to counter all the confusion occasioned, not only by conflating two very different operational domains, but by the issue of name collisions more generally.  In Python, we know the solution to be namespaces, and that usage has caught on.  

We even have dot notation in our formal (as in machine executable) logic, so we can say Coxeter.4d and understand this refers to extended Euclideanism, whereas Einstein.4d refers to (3d + time), relating to how time/size is rolled into one energy ball in the contemporary physics namespace.  Fuller.4d is yet something else again, having something to do with the simplex, if I may flex my American vocabulary.

In the namespace of Wikipedia, we speak of disambiguation. Vestigial drafts of the page in question may suggest a time when Fuller and Haken philosophies might have been conflated to a single entry. Fortunately, bifurcation happened and the Fuller and Haken works by the same title got separate treatment. That allowed Fuller's to get a direct link from Tetrahedron, tying together memes that need to be emphasized to keep our story coherent.

Happy New Year 2021 - 2022: School of Tomorrow

My video coincides with a writing blitz, ostensibly in response to Curt's call for content, given a new BFI website going in. I'd started with the opening paragraphs a couple weeks ago, and the piece had mushroomed on Github ever since.

Yes, this is a time of family gatherings and/or family consciously choosing to play it safe in our second year of covid, when variants name delta and omicron were all the buzz.  

However our family has established a pattern of scholarship and learning around Christmas, as you'll find if you consult these blogs going back.  Our default gift giving gathering had become Laurie's Hanukah party.  However these rituals were all disrupted.

The TrimTab Book Club is Curt's project.  I didn't learn of it right away and was invited to join around the time Princeton's architecture program was a main focus, number twelve on CJ's reading list for last year: R. Buckminster Fuller: pattern-thinking by Daniel López-Pérez (Spain, 2020). Bucky had taught at Princeton that time. This time a core focus with the Geoscope, as an idea.

I'm thinking in terms of movie-making in my year end video, by contrasting possibilities for the future as I would movies we might want to make, or see made.  

Some resource hogs are hell bent on continuing to waste.  

My editorial sense tells me we can't spare the time on such pointless detours.  Any wars between Russia and Ukraine for example, have to come across as both avoidable and pointless.  My brand of cold warrior is about keeping it too cold for the hot heads to get their favored fireworks going.  Meaningless fevered dreams needn't gain traction, praise Allah.

Opportunity Cost

I'm ready for a sprawling network of quasi-academic institutions, with more military levels of risk, in terms of the dangers of leaping from helicopters or donning scuba, with the curriculum intelligently redesigned, to include, for example, American philosophy.

However, my fellow chrono-bums (cronies) are more into robot re-enactments of WW2 scenarios, with some "evil communists" in the picture although it's hard to say exactly how that works.  

So many DC roles are defined as "X vis-a-vis the former Soviet Union" i.e. the Russians moved on, but the Americans are still stuck in the 1980s, reliving Reagan and believing their own fantasy TV shows.  

Out to lunch in other words.

So nothing much is getting done, of a materially beneficial nature.  

We can keep hammering on the metaphysics until the cows come home, or is it the chickens that come home to roost?  Something animal related.  Something about a farm.  That would connote basic macro-economics, which is what this is.  

If you're coward who can't face your responsibility to make the world work, then you'll take up arms and hope to die a hero for no good reason other than what your village elders managed to concoct -- something about "communists" or "authoritarians" -- you know, the ones who assume authority to destroy the earth in the name of their stupid and obsolete fantasies?

If you want more self understanding, you will work to provide yourself and others with more opportunities for travel, and not just to resort destinations for conferences.  

My Truckers for Peace was / is a refreshing break from the usual format, involving more heavy equipment, but not degenerating into toting WMDs around (highly unfashionable in my book).

Metropolis (movie review)

I haven't been doing movie reviews, and I doubt readers notice.  Even when I did them quite a bit, they wouldn't always stay on topic and just focus on the movie in question.

Starting with the facts:  I told Glenn I was sure I'd seen Metropolis at some point, hasn't everybody? It's one of those Citizen Kane type films, archetypal.  And so it is.  But I'd never seen it.  Excerpts maybe.  

And this from the guy who went downtown five weekends in a row to watch that fifteen hour odyssey about film making.  I'll have to link to it.

The film is German, released in 1925, and as shared on this Multnomah County Library DVD is to some unavoidable extent a reconstruction.  All the real footage that remains, is used.  Some captions are added to keep the storylines clear, which is important, as the storylines twist around quite a bit, with lots of spying and people outsmarting one another.

A privileged son is turned off by the insipid shallowness of his padded existence and catches a glimpse of his heartthrob from the other side of the tracks, from the Morlockish underworld of the downtrodden proletariat.  

The Morlocks, if you don't recall, were the subsurface technologists who kept civilization going in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.  I'm borrowing some of that imagery.

The hero starts out Eloi (a privileged child-like surface-dweller) but is determined to discover the depths of his own father's depravity in chasing his heart throb.  

When it comes to exploiting the underclass (his dad is the industrial overlord of this whole Metropolis project, the Tower of Babel in particular).

I should probably go no further without stating the thesis and teaching put forward explicitly by the film: the heart is what mediates between head and hand, meaning if you think of something you want to have happen, it needs to filter through the heart, and be real, in the heartfelt sense, to lead to right action.

The father decides to deceive the son into seeing his heart throb is really a slut (thanks to the stunt double robot he has cast in her place), but the son isn't fooled for long and the ruse backfires, and seemingly plays into the hands of the robotics expert originally charged with the cloning project.  

The slut robot is programmed to run amok, to stir up worker rage, while meanwhile the actual heart throb, good to the bone, sets about rescuing the children, who will surely be impacted when the workers, whipped into a mob frenzy, decide to destroy the machines.

The evil dad (the dark father or "darth vader") has been wanting to provoke the workers all along, so they'll do something he can use as an excuse to use violence against them.  

The whole seething mess of unleashed pathos is ultimately self destructive and both the above ground and below ground aspects of Metropolis are existentially threatened.  

This brings people to their senses, at least a little, and the mob figures out they've been duped, multiple times.  The dad and the workers reconcile, as the hero rescues the heart throb from the robotics guy, who falls to his death (spoiler alert) in the denouement.

That's all me regurgitating much of the plot and calling it a movie review.  Glenn and I were agog at its sophistication, for one of the earliest commercial movies.  Glenn said Hitler saw it and liked it.  That's what they say about The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin as well (that Hitler found it funny).  For his part, Chaplin said he wouldn't have made the film had he understood the full scope of the ongoing holocaust.

Carol (92) watched the film with us (Glenn and I).  We paused the film for popcorn and beer. I expect to watch the commentary on another occasion.

Lighting Talk: Planet Urbit Discovered

Martian Computing

Not So Early Adoption

The decision to not share about the concentric hierarchy in public schools, in K-12, came from an authority I so far have not encountered, and nor would I trust it initially if I did, as I disagree with the decision. 

Another possibility is it -- the nested polys with volumes expressed in tetravolumes -- just fell through the cracks.

Perhaps the decision was to not share in K-12, as that ghetto-neighborhood is already packed to the gills with tested content and prereqs, but in higher ed, we have more room to share.  Note to Earlham.

I think maybe the "fell through the cracks" narrative has merit.  There's a chicken-egg issue with booting any new content, like starting a startup.

The decision to share about the concentric hierarchy in some public schools is the one I'm backing.  We're free to start in the literature department, or in history.  We're also free to continue questioning the slow adoption by others, demonstrating a competitive spirit.

If computer science (a) exists and (b) takes an interest (in that school, does it have its own server space?), then we're free to widen the circle.  Look for schools that share Blender (blender.org).

Teachers of mathematics are welcome to keep their distance, as they have been doing.  We'll be drawing on their knowledge base, while trying not to disturb their SAT, AP and ACT preparations.

Public Schools Embrace Design Science

 

Not all at once mind you. A blend of computer science + the humanities is ready to roll forward without disturbing the math teaching rank and file, which are boxed in by standards.

Our impact on other STEM subjects is more by osmosis and organic growth than because of any top-down campaign led by think tanks, not that we don't have our own think tanks and ways of advertising.

Some public schools have more freedoms than others, when it comes to sharing American and/or World Literature and History. We do not all share the same notion of "cultural literacy" and the resulting diversity is considered a positive.

School of Tomorrow. Oregon Curriculum Network. 4D Solutions.

Steering in Cyberia

TrimTabers are plowing through Fuller's Earth these days.  "TrimTabers" is not really an English word, although "trimtab" is, at least according to Collins English Dictionary.  

I find many dictionaries have "trim tab" as two words.  Either way, the meaning traces to maritime origins (but has aeronautical applications as well), as "the rudder that steers the rudder" (or smaller plane that acts on a bigger plane -- with "plane" meaning "piece of the wing" and not short for "airplane"). The trimtab steers the wing or rudder in which it is embedded.

Cybernetics was likewise linked to the verb "to steer" i.e. ""kubernetika" referred to "steering as a skill".

To some extent, Buckminster Fuller (aka RBF) likely helped "trim" and "tab" stick together in a single string, as that was his usage, with "Call Me Trimtab" his famous epitaph.

But even with TrimTab a brewery in Alabama (I have some souvenir empty cans, shared on Youtube), we don't say "TrimTaber" a lot (and should it have two "bs" as in Tabber and Tabby Cat?).

By TrimTabers I mean participants in Curt's TrimTab Book Club.  I'm tempted to write BookClub in camelCase, to allude to TrimTab in camelCase. At least Simple English Wikipedia writes camelCase in camel case (not all sources do).

The other week we had Siobhan Roberts as our guest, author of two biographies connected to our own readings.

John H. Conway was her most recent subject and she had some interesting anecdotes about him.  

Donald Coxeter (also known as "H.S.M. Coxeter"), based at the University of Toronto (Conway was at Princeton in his final days) is the late great geometer to whom Synergetics was dedicated, speaking there of RBF's magnum opus.

These days we're plowing through Fuller's Earth, as I mention in my opening.  That's a book wherein RBF gets together with a few kids, with a tape recorder and a camera going, operated by a small crew.  Their plan was to turn the voice recordings and photographs, along with Fuller's hand drawings into an easy to read book.  The one we're now reading, almost forty years later.

We'll take our time with this book, but it's pretty short and I've been reading ahead.  The kids he's hanging out with know he has a reputation as a futurist, which is akin to a prophet or soothsayer, but with strong grounding in science.  Fuller stresses has faithfulness to science, but in a way that would dismay many teachers: as a source of skepticism versus axiomatically accepted mathematics.

We may be used to pitting science versus religion, but not science versus math.  

He encourages his young proteges to get good grades by pleasing their teachers (what he did ultimately), by giving them the sought for answers ("when in Rome...") but in the mean time, they had the inherent right to exercise freedom of thought, which could mean harboring and cultivating a counter-narrative.

Fuller sets an example by exercising his own freedom to diverge from convention, by converging to something else:  to the tetrahedron, his central construct for conceptuality itself, and his unit of volume.

How esoteric is this history and will it be taught in American high schools?  Not in all of them certainly, but then propagating curriculum ideas is relatively easy these days, so lets expect a few to take it up, perhaps under Lit.  American colleges too, will in some places be picking up the slack.

In the Google Group archives, not public at this time, we intertwine our various threads.  There's a Zoom meetup and a publishing / prototyping aspect.  Some of us are Canadian, as was Coxeter.

Fuller isn't giving spooky Greek metaphysics a free pass, even though it masquerades as beyond questionable.  The infinitely long lines of mono-dimensional thinness come in for some scrutiny. Why don't we reject the Cube World as a world of phoniness and fake news?  Obviously such questioning of the dominant paradigm is enough to perturb the authoritarians, especially given he's passing this torch to kids, in the open.

Centrum Censorious

I take umbrage that Moderate Rebel Max Blumenthal would diss a Blogspot blog as inherently less professional than whatever else he was pointing to in the linked Youtube.  Blogs started as long ago as mine didn't have this wide range of choices or sport the current vogue look.  So what?

On the other hand, the Rebels are making the good point that NATO is the immature school boy with its hands in the wrong jar again.  Their mockery of Nemo who whomever is appropriately scathing.  The "west" likes to pretend it's above censorship ala some imagined Chinese model (not that there isn't one, just it wouldn't be exactly as you imagine).  On the other hand, "censor" was an appropriate privilege and job title within the Roman-Catholic Empire.  Other euphemisms pertain.

I quit the Mathematics Research Educators group yesterday, public on Facebook.  The admins just couldn't be bothered to include a "pensive cowboy" in the conversations.  That's my Youtube persona:  a guy with a black Stetson a lot of the time (not always).

The education research I'm doing centers around mainstreaming various aspects of a "Bucky math" that's embedded in American literature and that some universities are now starting to grapple with.  They don't like having to play catch up, but in an open source economy that may become their role.  

Remember how GNU / Linux grew from the need to continue practicing one's craft even after enjoying tools covered by license fees unaffordable to individuals.  Everyone needed UNIX but relatively few could afford to pay Bell Labs.  Once ordinary people could use Cyberian power tools, the playing field was leveled like never before and a new kind of democratic meritocracy could begin to experiment with itself.

Our "open source textbook" approach is not new.  I get peer reviewed by my peers even as I pump out the Jupyter notebooks from JupyterLab, while urging my high school students to do the same.  There's no reason to censor my School of Tomorrow content, which extends various entries in Wikipedia and Wikieducator.  We're more delayed than stopped, by the Pearson + NCTM conspiracy.  Given the American literature context, we will continue to "debritify" i.e. escape the tyranny of NATO + English programming.  Does that mean widening the distance twixt NPR and BBC?