Teachers' Strike

FaceBook chatter...

Kirby Urner:  They're going to announce at 7 pm tonight (Halloween) whether the Portland Public Schools strike is on or off starting tomorrow. I got an email from a former employer about these new online sessions for affected students.

Julie Urner:  Maybe you will get a few gigs, but my guess is that the strike won't last long. What to Know

Hayden Dunn: going to cross the picket line?

Kirby Urner:  I'm not with Coding with Kids anymore. I could go back, but they want you to sign a non-compete, and I'd prefer to compete. 

My angle during the strike is to encourage high school math teachers to keep occupied and up on their game by studying the curriculum I wrote when teaching 8th grade, for Sunshine Elite Education (SEE), a private school for techie families in the Silicon Forest.

That's all free and cloneable, as well as forkable, presuming said teachers are Git savvy. If said teachers want to meet me in person and set up a workshop, that's not strike breaking activity. That's like striking actors trying to stay in shape by hiring some kind of coach. Maybe the union itself wants to contract with me. I'd rather work with teachers than directly with their students.

Hayden Dunn: I was wondering. I didn’t really see you as a scab.

Kirby Urner: even if I stayed with CwK, it was an after school program that depended on cooperation from faculty. In moving to an online format, per Covid, they’re probably not seen as scabs as their program does not count towards a degree within the system. They don’t do the same job in other words.

A Foggy War?

A cliche around here, regarding the war for military dominance over Ukrainian territory, is "no war before this one, has been quite this foggy" i.e. more impossible to know less about, more opaque. 

I'd beg (or at least propose) to differ: never before has a war been so micro-covered. I'm not just talking about the Pentagon's view, fat pipe shared with Ukes and Russkies, but the view of householders subscribing to open source channels. 

If you want a fairly fat pipe, with updates almost in real time, with geolocated video, it's all out there, and sourced from points near the action.

None of which is to say you're unfree to immerse yourself in propaganda. Go for it, pig out if that's your genre. If you don't know how to distinguish propaganda in its many flavors, high school is your friend.

In pointing to high school, I'm not being condescending. Remember teenagers. They pop up in the adult world and many of them find that the adult world is a mess, a wasteland as much as theirs. This discovery is somewhat exhilarating and begets an egalitarian willingness to step up to the plate among some, but it also engenders disillusionment and cynicism.

A great way to feed disillusionment and cynicism, and to develop one's immune system, is to study old programming, meaning persuasive media designed to inculcate a way of looking that is currently not in vogue. Visit museums of propaganda, something I did as a kid growing up in post-WW2 Europe.

Tour all the ways humans have persuaded themselves to believe any amount of goofy garbage. Then look more deeply into what "persuasion" is all about, as it borders on "coercive" so much of the time. People internalize bullies as often as they encounter them in the wild, it sometimes seems. An authoritarian is often some voice in your head, too sure about everything.

The German language philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes a lot about immune systems and how these hyper-dimensional membranes between bubbles (as in media bubbles, echo chambers, subcultures) become more or less permeable and/or subject to entropic memes.  

Marcuse, a critic of capitalism, always marveled at the capitalist system's ability to transform apparently undermining materials into cute knickknacks, subversive lyrics into commercial jingles. I'd argue this ability to trivialize and de-dimensionalize (to recontextualize and render harmless) is intrinsic to any effective counterintelligence program.

Accelerating Acceleration

I’ve reached the fat farm, I mean XRL prototyping area. We’re close to universities. Full disclosure: a Wanderer couple was here just before me, also with dog. We’re still in the Silicon Forest, as a namespace and geographical area (these go together, as often as not).

Of course the proposed Cuban proposal for a New Gaza in Guantanamo, is unlikely to gain much traction right away, given the media forces hogging the limelight at the moment. Some gurus in State realize this is just the off and on ramp needed, wherein the Pentagon voluntarily and with understanding starts the process of launching a new mission, this time one the Cubans have no issues with, as it involves collaboration.

Here’s the ideal opportunity to accept the legacy of the Spanish American war without becoming its puppet in perpetuity. Remember the Philippines. Remember War is a Racket. That’s a military reading, a dharma talk by someone who knows men.

A military base quickly becomes a white elephant, if all its good for is forcing unnecessary war planning, as we see from the case of China.  If you already have an established base, you’re motivated to justify keeping it open if that’s in question, meaning war plans pour forth, in which your base is strategic.

The DCers would not have to spin it as some kind of Afghanistan. On the contrary, building a substantial Asylum City will involve with talents of many Cubans and the lifting of sanctions, giving a boost to the local and global economy. Taking care of business instead of persecuting civilians, treating them as guinea pigs for weapons testing, is going to inspire people with thoughts of prosperity, which in general is a prerequisite for a growing economy.

When I say “growing” I probably should be saying “morphing” or “transforming”. The economy needs to keep changing shape just to run in place, meaning there’s no static solution now that all these balls are in motion. If we learned any thing at all from Toffler (Future Shock) it’s that dynamism and volatility are what’s normal. He called it accelerating acceleration.

Obviously I’m not expecting any sudden turning on a dime as they say. Momentum implies a current direction, not easily changed, which is why we have TrimTabers (not unlike Wanderers — there’s some overlap) i.e. people in precessional positions who have ways of nudging the storyline. At least more people are talking about getting those who wish it permanently out of Gaza, but without tearing apart the community.  Your whole school, parents and extended families included, want to move, to some new South Park.

The spectator world tends to go into observer mode, offering commentary, hand-wringing, faux passivity. That’s the role of the chorus. The idea that we’re actually authorized to participate is foreign to many, who eschew activism and prefer cheering from the bleachers for whatever side in some conflict. When you become a player on the field (an action figure) it’s easier to define the game itself, given the rules might be fluid (as they tend to be in World Game).

Looking back, I want the Palestinians to know that some people such as Center for Defense Information types (a former WDC NGO), not unfriendly to Cubans, would not have a problem using Guantanamo for a worthy cause that requires military level logistics, and helps repair many global relationships. Even if saying so out loud is politically problematic, you can think it. When Americans think of Gaza, they’re not all equally knee-jerk about it.

Extremely Rural (XRL)

I didn't blast off and down the freeway to the "fat farm" as planned. Maybe I'd do better by shifting the narrative to reveal my gaining access to some XRL (XRL = "extreme remote livingry" but how about also "extremely rural"?). 

Extremely Rural means on the wilderness fringe yet likely in touch with satellite services, cell towers, even roads, even paved. Like a parking lot at some public beach. Criteria are not strict as we come inward, towards the more urban pole. Camp grounds maybe.

The reason for this change in plans: a likely minor electrical glitch best dealt with on a business day versus some sabbath. I'd planned to drive. Still do.

So instead I went to a Quaker meeting I've frequented a lot in the past, doing my time on various committees, lighting the tunnel for the family's passage within a Friendly community. That was fun. I recommend Quakers. Dawn joined me in our tunnel.

Today, however, the meeting was grim, with people feeling bleak and trapped in familiar patterns regarding well known cultural narratives, resonating with stuff in the holy books and seasonal programming down through the ages.

Quakers tend to be horrified by orgies of violence, which doesn't single them out all that much (many share these compunctions), but they do want to stay worldly and help process whatever is happening. They're participants more than hermits by training. I say "they're" to capture my "just visiting" status. 

The last time I visited, was to show Andrius, the visiting math guy from Lithuania, what a Quaker meeting was like. Before that, I found them in Laurelhurst Park (sometimes this group shifts its worship outside).

One lady wound up the meeting by urging we read up on what FCNL had to say. We were encouraged to write to our representatives and to write letters to the editor. I'd call it necessary boilerplate.

I heard no serious talk of an actual evacuation, granting Gazans actual refugee status and the right to never return, along with the right to return maybe. One's status, as a refugee, seeking refuge, does not, as a matter of grammar predetermine, any final destination. One is escaping from, not converging upon.

The meeting had a possible new family to my left, just moving from Atlanta (we learned that during introductions), and a newcomers' gathering coming up (this came with the announcements), and maybe the wheels really do turn that smoothly. When things really work exactly as designed, there's this sense of self parody why is that?

The gathering did feel well oiled. They run microphones now, and include the Zoomers upstairs (in person only downstairs, and maybe no mic runners, I'll need to sample that).

These were unprogrammed Friends (Stark Street). Pretty much anyone might deliver a sermon, or folksy talk, or self analysis, lecture whatever (or call them rants). If you hang around Quakers a lot, you'll note the tropes, the signature rhythms, of vocal ministry.

Greetings all. Sorry to have skipped out on social hour. And sorry about my cell phone going off, I thought I'd taken care of that.

Evacuation?

My major focus during the Serbia-Kosovo crisis, to which NATO contributed its signature aerial bombing service, was evacuating those wishing to leave. I don't care whether we call them civilians or not. People should have the right to vacate a dead end combat zone.  Indeed some buses showed up. Some got away.

Likewise, I was glad how the war in Ukraine started with a prolonged evacuation period, in which literally millions of Ukrainians could opt to leave the theater. Some escaped to EU countries, some went to Russia. I don't know where all of them went, but at least they had a chance to leave, some of them.

When it comes to Gaza, I always storyboard the same vision of a steady belt of ships, a circle line, undertaking a massive evacuation. 

Where would the Gazans go? They deserve a homeland, a Zion. They need liberation as much as the Jews of Egypt ever did, under Pharaoh Bibi or whomever.

Of course many Gazans would choose not to leave, given their attachment to a godforsaken semi-desert (just kidding, that's a beautiful and fertile area, been there myself (not to Gaza but places nearby (dad did some scuba diving in Sinai, when Urners lived in Cairo all those years, during and after president Sadat (I helped Palestinians build a swimming pool in Ramallah)))).

I understand Gaza is valuable real estate and once we sweep religion aside (Promised Land = Planet Earth, duh (I think a lot of Jews know that by now, as do the rest of us especially gifted (chosen))) we see it’s a battle between land developers, who want resort hotels and retirement communities in Gaza, ala Florida. 

They want the "lowlife" out of the way, as unable to afford the Miami of the Mediterranean level rents they have planned. Not only Israel-based lenders want to invest in the luxury version of Gaza (think Hawaii). International land developers would love to participate in the makeover. Again, it's not really a religion thing.

I'm thinking Palestinians are a resourceful and intelligent ethnicity and letting Gazans move en masse, versus enforcing some diaspora, would be a welcome development to many. 

But where could they go? Who is willing to develop a refugee paradise from scratch?

Naturally there'd be a lot of scheming and dreaming, on the part of the emigres, as to how they'd gain access to their old stomping grounds by means of moneymaking. A Gazan family might buy its way back into the community after the dust has settled.  

Many Ukrainians are thinking the same way. They want to return, but maybe some American real estate conglomerate owns their family farm?

Many Jews, in Germany's concentration camps, dreamed of being rescued and having their lands returned.  

Many Americans, forced into camps by other Americans, who thought Japanese Americans were a lesser breed of American, were lucky enough to get their farms back. Many were not.

Obviously I'm fumbling around, short on details, imaging my flotilla of cruise ships introducing Gazans to a Carnival and/or a Disney line level living standard, at least for the voyage over.

They certainly deserve a vacation. Somewhere in Africa maybe?  A mega-project, like an OMR? I know it sounds like an admission of defeat, but then the Jewish diaspora didn't really win either.  When we look at history, we see it's about humans streaming around the planet, often in evacuation / refugee mode.

Of course what's important is Gazans get options, not commands. Even if there's some promised Shangri-La, at the end of the cruise, that doesn't justify coercion. We want to build community on the basis of "people want to be there" not "people have to be there".

The Creator (movie review)

:: atmospherics ::

Mazur (Melody, Mel -- visiting faculty) and I thought we might have the Bagdad to ourselves, not a comment on the popularity of the movie, but on the feasibility of making a multi-hour commitment starting at 3:15 in the middle of the day. We could, and some others joined us.

I'm not dissing the film, but rather showing off my budding film savvy, in saying this was viewable as a mashup of other famous flicks in the same genre. That's not really saying anything as what makes science fiction a genre in the first place is its a namespace of shared tropes (motifs, plot elements), often drawing heavily from military experience. This film is about a geopolitical scenario, one I found pretty fun and original.

The collective west was at first in love with the AI layer, a source of compliant labor, to the level of trusted caretaker, only to see itself betrayed, with AI turning on humanity and proving itself soulless, to be dealt with accordingly. The west sees AI machines as literally that: machines. However, New Asia has taken a different track and still sees AGI robots as sentient, to the point of being equals.  Asians are still blending with AI whereas the Americans are in an existential war to the death with AI.

As viewers, we're challenged to figure out where we come down. We're in the same space as the movie Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg, taking over for Stanley Kubrick. That's the first movie I'd finger as an influence (the circus scene especially), but then also Ex Machina and all the films arguing for AGI achieving humanity, in the sense of sentience and self awareness. WestWorld. Usually it's "the West" that's head over heels for its electronic monsters, wanting to bestow the breath of life into them. In this movie, the West is disillusioned. AI says it wasn't responsible for nuking LA (spoiler alert but you find out how the Americans see it in the opening credits, so not much of one).

Another trope (Melody picked up on this one): the sacred messiah child, perhaps with (or definitely with) superpowers. We get the demon child on the flip side, which is how the Americans would see her (the hybrid).

Most of what struck me were the atmospherics, as the two table top scifi books I've been gazing at the most (pictured above), emanate precisely this aura of fluorescent lit giant cities in the fog, technology blended with nature, at the same scales. 

The flavor of Avatar and Avatar 2 was likewise present, both in the atmospherics and in casting Americans as the insensitives, the invasive monoculture, coming to seem more bot-like in contrast to our protagonist, at one time undercover against AI, but becoming instead a bridge figure (another trope).

Tellingly, it took me, a viewer, a little time to determine what side this NOMAD might be on. Was that an AI asset or "one of ours"? The movie answers this question, but I felt drawn in by a sense of ambiguity. Who was fighting whom and why? That tends to gel, not be readily apparent at first glance, even in real life.

Science fiction is known for its open-minded acceptance of permutations. Lesser minds will decry this film in anti-American and yet it is quintessentially American in its continuity with the morphing culture, part Asian from the get go. 

What "American" means is a function of context, which some will call "climate". Getting locked into just one way of thinking (imprisonment within the dream) is a way of losing one's freedoms. 

Sometimes we need to snap out of it (whatever the dream) and films such as this one, already conversant with the collective unconscious, may prove catalyzing in that regard. I gratefully accept it into the canon and recommend seeing it.

Spiralling Forward

NATO's Inevitable Decline | Andrei Martyanov

The Alphabet algorithm suggested I might be curious regarding the above YouTube, which I watched over coffee. I'd check in with Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, later. He's another coffee fiend. To watch X does not mean to agree with X at every turn, we all know that right?

In my echo chamber, we don't lavish love on NATO, that spearhead of Russophobia. NATO was way too bloodthirsty / bomb happy, in the Balkans, in Libya, in Afghanistan... 

However what's salient in Andrei's rant is how much he despises an Ivy League education, granting some  exceptions. His thesis is NATO would never have trespassed so egregiously and out of its depth had the children in charge of it (now "grownups" of a sort) been better informed about their world.

As an Ivy Leaguer myself (Princeton, Class of 1980), I should note the US Army General Mark Milley, recently retired, 20th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is of that same class from that same university. 

Obviously we went forward on different tracks. 

I became more the contrarian, and the closest I've gotten to the US military (not counting times on base in the Philippines, as an expat civilian teen) was my occasional visit to the Center for Defense Information (CDI), which was likewise contrarian vs-a-vs many of the long term trajectories that landed us in the current iteration of World Game.

chatting with a Princeton peer, 2009

My own rhetoric has taken up Future Shock type memes to insist that a high school education in the 21st Century cannot afford to simply replicate that of the 20th, and that our curricula have evolved way too slowly. 

That led me to the position that "high school" and by extension "higher education", should be perpetually reoccurring phases in a single lifespan. We'll need to go through high school more than once in other words, just to keep up. 

That doesn't mean squeezing back into old facilities and reliving the same teenage years. We have to invent what it looks like to keep our learning going. Obviously the internet will have something to do with it.

In studying futuristic literature, including science fiction, I've come to what I'd consider not so much a new Future Studies but a future Basic Studies. From my point of view, we have an adult population, say the Boomers, that never got to go to high school again, in order to retrain for new careers. 

Or rather, many of them did, but under what felt to them like forced circumstances. The Boomers' expectation was still: go to school, learn, and then work, rising through the ranks, until retirement. Those reading the futurist literature knew even then this expectation was somewhat unrealistic.

What I'm wondering is whether we're entering a period akin to the one I was born into.  As a 1958 baby, I popped up in the middle of the so-called Cold War, but during a period when the USSR was pulling ahead in aerospace, in the form of Sputnik. 

Educators realized they could now justify their reforms as a national security priority, by suggesting the curriculum was out of date and we risked coming under the thumb of the technologically superior. Have we come full circle?

April, 1999

Game Pods

I keep mentioning Game Pods as a feature of my Schools of Tomorrow, in ways I'm sure other teachers find too cavalier. What evidence based research drives my eagerness to experiment with this technology? Aren't computer games the ultimate distraction and therefore the antithesis of what we'd call a "school supply"?

The game pod comes in many shapes and sizes, but is primarily designed to be immersive. Immersive needn't mean "isolated" though. A learning program might include one-on-one and group calls. One is often immersed with peers, many of whom are geographically distant.  These pods were designed with computers in mind. There's no reason a cubicle worker might not find a pod a big step up, remembering it's not an either / or proposition.

Sometimes I'm in a "booth" (i.e. pod), scanning documents, or mastering specific games designed to teach chemistry. Other times I'm at a desk, or in a meeting room.  I visit the gym. I shop. All these activities may occur in one building. That doesn't mean I'm stuck here. I cycle through a long list of such buildings, in the course of designing these schools in the Global U context.

You'll remember from Math Forum my emphasis on simulations. We make models to help us conceptualize the many inter-gearing workflows, in an airport, in a shopping center, in a hospital, in a mine.  A dollhouse is a simulation.  Childhood features simulations.  I'm not breaking engrained patterns so much as reinforcing them.

Wanderers Fall Equinox Celebration 2023

Over the years, I've come to connect "wanderer" with "flaneur" i.e. someone with a sketchbook drawing time going by in ways many don't notice, in getting on with their lives, but chronicling differences that really add up. 

Some people had enough time on their hands to step back and observe, getting into the headspace of geological time, understanding "this will someday be seen as an industrial revolution, if it isn't already".

Wanderers come from many walks of life, however this particular group is heavy on the science and engineering side, given origins in ISEPP (isepp.org) which includes those with practical experience working with machinery, engines, boats, motor vehicles. We include artists and musicians.

Having a degree in something specific was never a requirement. We never had much in the way of requirements. Our only bookkeeping was the coffee fund, which Jon Bunce took care of.  We haven't been brewing much coffee lately, now that (since the pandemic) we're down to four meetups a year.

What happened this time is people started gathering on the porch of the Linus Pauling House, on Hawthorne, only to realize no one was inside the building, so getting someone to answer the doorbell was not an option. 

We had come to rely on Glenn to know the combination, as he was connected to the building on many levels.  We lost Glenn in October of last year. He made it to the Fall Equinox gathering of 2022.  

Don called Terry but his phone was turned off (direct to voicemail) so... we moved the event to my place, and taped a sign to the door redirecting anyone else who might come by.

Dissing Unity

The algorithm snagged my attention, as it often does, on this Unity / Disunity story. Unity is the name of a big bucks on paper stock market (virtual bulls) venture made valuable by game developers, and to some extent academic modelers. They make an engine, which in this case means a software framework, which developers use as a basis virtual reality.

I’m prone to see intellectual history as a roiling melting pot with schools of thought (invisible colleges) adding ingredients, hoping to make something yummy, but we all know the “too many cooks” adage. I’ve seen the legalese speakers feeling triumphant over their mastery of the reality principle, but then engineers can be that same way, as their disciplines boil down to the reality principle as well.

The lawyers are ascendent in many dimensions, as they’re the ones who see themselves applying a living corpus, their law talk, to the unfolding of history, in terms of who are the real criminals. Which presidents were likewise gangsters, in the technical sense? That’s the game show on TV now, as infrastructure is more neglected, with engineering considered “sexy” only if it’s about launching phalluses towards space, ala Apollo. The oceans are still mostly militarized such that thinking about submarine infrastructure is largely discouraged in the tabloid opinion papers.

However I’m not seeing LAWCAP as farsighted enough to plan the phasing in of more science, with its independent grasp on reality. Competition from the engineering minded is fended off more than welcomed, leading to the disconnect foreseen and satirized by H.G. Wells in his Time Machine. We get the Eloi (pudgy) and the Morlocks (chthonic), a Martian Math theme I keep coming back to.

Fall Term Begins

:: readings ::

:: homework ::

Low IQ Valley

Speaking of rebuilding, and low IQ periods resulting in gross destruction, I woke up to a guy on YouTube in England, bemoaning some aviation shutdown owing to some miss-entered record, and how it took a long time to debug the problem, resulting in chaos and cancelations system-wide. His worry is less capable people are filling the shoes of their progenitors, and leaking away organizational knowledge and skills. He’s seeing a brain drain, in other words.

I’m in my own IQ valley, having misdiagnosed a basement plumbing situation and only awakened to the reality this morning. I had been blaming outside rain, versus a kitchen drain. 

On top of that, I may have fumbled a transaction yesterday, and left a Visa card in limbo. I’ve got it locked and have a place to check when it opens, before I declare the card lost.  One could say such valleys represent everyday mundane challenges and when one is looking ahead towards a task, there’s always that self assessment that goes on. Am I up to it?

I have optimistic stories too, about the world’s IQ. Our level of self awareness “as humanity” has improved, thank you National Geographic and other architects of global consciousness. The airlines for sure. 

Aerospace did end up integrating our intellect in a major way, though marred by psychological complexes associated with Ken World militarism. Perhaps my readers have a different diagnosis. “Conditioned reflexes” is an umbrella term, for those mental habits that serve one well, until some no longer do. 

There’s an ongoing process of self rehabilitation (self healing), best undertaken oneself and voluntarily, in one’s capacity as an autodidact. I need to keep doing my homework, along my work-study track in the Global U.

The Rebuilding Channel

From a zoomed out perspective, a Rebuilding Channel might seem pretty awesome, including as a recruiting tool. People with relevant skills like to get involved in rebuilding.

But why "rebuilding" in particular instead of simply "building"?  Some of the deeper lessons come from learning how a particular rebuilding was needed. What happened? A natural disaster? An industrial accident? A war? Exploring these questions requires entire episodes, as we jump around the planet.

Another reason we theme it "rebuilding" is to remind ourselves how much running it takes to stay in place. We have to completely repopulate the planet, with new people, within every one hundred years or so. The epigenetic logistics involved is mind-boggling and yet we've been succeeding in getting it done.

When I say "channel" I might mean "genre" as we'll see imitators. "So what happened after those great floods of 2023?" Our genre provides more continuity and followup than your average newspaper or even magazine. Or call it a magazine channel, which is what many of them are (magazine-like in format, yet streamed).

Clearly I'm back to the themes of My Bizmo Diaries, as MBD forecasts these scouting and reconnaissance fleets, vans and minibuses (some full-size buses) that scope out and monitor, provide admin and coordination in some cases, with regard to Global U projects. A lot of these projects connect into the Coffee Shops Network (CSN) back end when it comes to fundraising.

What happened after that big earthquake in Syria-Turkey? Or after that war that destroyed Aleppo?

Study Habits

online puzzle, solved by Dr. D.

I was talking about "frame of mind" over on Coffee Shops Network (CSN), suggesting "detective mindset" as a good one, not too judgemental or prejudicial, open to findings. Omnitriangulating.

Somewhat continuing, in the vein of "disciplines", I've been keen to marry personal scheduling and prioritizing, with insights into the generic importance of scheduling more generally, an excuse to foray into operations research, which, through computer science, has become systems science or something like that (design science in some cliques).

Here's an exercise: roam through your current habitat noticing tasks you might realistically undertake, tasks you're even tempted to do right now (while you're thinking about them), but the point here is to enqueue. 

Make a list and report back. No side tracking. Let the candidate tasks pile up as you take inventory of your domicile or PWS (personal workspace, GST jargon (general systems theory)) but don't engage in doing any of them during this exercise.

An advantage of the above exercise is you may engage in it as a meta exercise i.e. instead of physically roaming through your home, you imagine doing so, and even so, come up with some thoughts about tasks, such as doing dishes, vacuuming, baking a cake, walking the dog... (fade into a cloud of memes colored by some ethnicity fusion). It's that much easier not to engage in imagined housework, when you're kicked back on a jet plane to Hawaii or somewhere.

A payoff is not to get you slaving away on a bunch of tasks (although you might be in the mood to tackle a few, or you had them enqueued anyway, with or without some stupid exercise), but rather to engage the conceptual machinery, the contextualizing grammar, around data structures, such as bag, queue, stack, tree, network.

Bag: just throw the things into it, with unique handles or addresses (hash table)
Queue: line up, first come first serve, FIFO
Stack: stack up, last in first out (LIFO)
Tree: store in cul de sacs addressed by forks in the road (binary or more)
Network: a directed graph, polyvertex ball, wireframe, may contain cycles

We don't need all the details or implementations right at this juncture (e.g. a bag may be implemented as a tree), but rather an appreciation of context: that of simultaneously developing computer and logistical literacy, in association with mundane thoughts about cleaning house or whatever. 

Connect the day dreamy world of up close logistics with some abstract topic you might encounter in some cryptic notation, in this case parallel programming, multi-tasking. But then we're just talking about taking out the garbage.

Charting Great Circles

In math world, I'm scooting around the edges of what there is to know about the above chart, from Synergetics 453.01. Where did Bucky get those numbers? How did he compute them in other words, way back when?

David Koski was wondering if he was using primes in some way, to work with minimum integers, e.g. the arcsin or arctan of what n/d ratio would agree with the above to the digits computed?  In every case, he found a match.

More background:
Great Circles of the VE on Synergeo

City Planning

:: remote campus ::

I'm back to the Asylum City meme, my rubric for talking about human settlements and their planning, maintenance, decommissioning. We may not think in terms of decommissioning normally, but I'm thinking of Burning Man in this regard. Camps. Many cultures (we call them "nomadic" sometimes) are good at making villages, even towns (campuses) come and go.

The giant warehouse, possibly a dome, is where people send their garage full of excess belongings. "One garage" is roughly one shipping container. A truck comes to haul it away and your stuff is there when you arrive, and so is the stuff from many other families. This is your opportunity to share, swap, let stuff go. Our center may actually be in the export business, once this excess is sorted through.

"Woah, are you saying my middle class belongings will all be confiscated? They'll take my pets?" I hear the FUD already. Asylum City is for volunteers wishing to engage in specific social experiments, researched ahead of time. Come check us out. Visit. Roll your own. This particular scenario involves recycling vintage stuff, giving families opportunities to both discard, and to keep.

"Do you have some beef against single people? What's all this family stuff?"  I'm working to stay economical with my imagery. I'm talking about a place that's inter-generational, cradle to grave in terms of age representation. That's not quite the same as a rock concert like Woodstock or Vortex 1, although some brought kids. We've got grandmas and grandpas here. The families may not be "nuclear" (a sociological term).

The giant warehouse is about continuing to mix it up, as new stuff keeps coming in. The campus needs to have policies. Do we want a lot of couches? If the rule is "fill a container" then it's really up to the participants to decide what to ship. Many of them are hobbyists and plan on both pursuing, and sharing / teaching their hobby to apprentices. This will be the basis for an economy.

Long time readers of these blogs will be able to connect the dots to my "EPCOT West" modeling. We're in a "tiny house" phase at the moment, a genre featuring lots of innovation these days. The idea of a rigid shelter that's more than a tent, takes us to "tiny house" as well as to "yurt".  Dymaxion Yurt. That's being economical (with concepts, with imagery).

Limbo

I'm thinking ETs of an inter-dimensional extraction oughta be said to be from Limbo. There's no reason we can't remap that old lingo to whatever the new physics allows. 

Of course many are rolling in their graves at this point, as inter-dimensional species have not been establishment authorized nor mandated, neither from Limbo nor anywhere else.

I took the bus 14 downtown, along Hawthorne, through Asylum District, then walked to Office Depot near Pioneer Courthouse Square, then to Apple (like a temple, bitten apple icon), coming back on the new FX2 articulated bus, on route 4, along SE Division. 

I got off across from Tom's (Greek restaurant) and had a healthy breakfast similar to the one we had (also here at Tom's) with Terry of ISEPP the other day, with Andrius and Ryan. We talked about the Carnots (father and son) and thermodynamics (as a precursor to QM).

Limbo is a phase between phases, we might make it that space of the still juxtaposed, which the new physics posits as probabilities in some as yet immaterial landscape, with material rapidly colonizing and moving forward into this space, making it real. 

Limbo comes before the real, before a heaven or a hell.  Not that we posit Heaven or Hell as eternally real for ourselves at the moment, we the still living. We're in a kind of limbo of our own here, before the afterlife, before that  ever-postponed Final X Day (here the Catholics and the Subgenii come together).

Connected with Limbo (pre-judgement, pre-reality), is the concept of Neutrality. The two must be neighbors in most of the general purpose word vectorized semantic spaces, wouldn't you say so? We haven't decided between good and evil yet. The tape is rewound. The apple is back on the tree and the snake is sliding backwards, in a downward spiral. In myth, time may indeed be reversible.

Neutral comes in connection with Polarized.  We need a sense of the spectrum, the extrema, to make sense of what the average is, the most middle of the road.  It's not like polarize and neutral are arch enemies, but that you need the one to tune the other.  When you "take a neutral tone" it's probably because you have done your homework, and seen it from both sides.

What to remember here, is that one spectrum need not preclude another. You have whole different ways of being neutral within a system, depending on what stars you steer by. An experienced comedian steers a fun path through the Matrix, for having been around the block a few times.

Extra-Dimensional ETs

The back and forth Andrius shared, regarding his rejected math contest video, reminds me of the ordeal I went through with Bridges that time. 

True, I hadn't jumped through all the hoops regarding formatting. I'd been hoping for encouragement and a chance to do a final set of fixes in response to editor feedback. No such luck. They didn't like my focus on "wedges" (the Synergetics modules). I saved some stuff on EduSig about it.

However this isn't about me and my travails. All that happened a long time ago. Andrius and I collaborated on this latest, as did Ryan. However I counseled ahead of time he might run into problems, if this were a mathy community at all similar to the Bridges one. I reiterated my points in a postmortem analysis.

We live in tender times, when ETs might be squeezing into our reality from an inter-dimensional one, according to Congressional hearings. If ETs can do this, why not Russian trolls?

The pundits brought on a Harvard physicist countering that we should not need new physics e.g. string theory, which owns the multi-dimensional stuff, to explain (or explain away) the UAPs and their pilots. 

UAP pilots are made of ordinary meat until proved otherwise. Races of multi-dimensionals need not clutter our conceptual horizons.

Of course said physicist was wrong to circle the wagons around multi-dimensional stuff in the name of string theory, as the former has been a vista feature long before the latter made its reach for the brass ring, as the carousel turns. String theory capitalized on pre-existing art is what I'm saying.

We've chronicled the rise of hypercross dogmatism in these blogs and elsewhere, starting with Edwin Abbott's Flatland, and in connection with non-Euclidean geometry and the various art movements going back to P. D. Ouspensky (1878 - 1947), Claude Bragdon (1866 - 1946),  and before. 

The idea of a "fourth dimension" didn't first come up in connection with Einstein, and once you have four, the sky's the limit.

Bucky Fuller (1895-1983) threw his hat in the ring around this time (4D Time Lock, 1927), with his own 4D meme, which he continued to shepherd, making ripples in that shared n-dimensional space of vectorized word-meanings. 

When you have enough dimensions, you can have a lot of close friends that might not be that close to, or even aware of, each other. The freedom to associate, without guilt by association, is an important freedom.

Nowadays, we're free to use multi-dimensional models in ML without thinking twice about the "spiritual implications" i.e. talk of higher dimensions no longer inspires any sense of religious awe, either towards a supreme being, or towards minor beings, e.g. priests, who might know SB's mind better. 

We use higher dimensions in the linear algebra sense, with no sense of mysticism. We're computing credit-worthiness for mortgage lending for crying out loud. 

Enough with the inter-dimensional ETs already. We need some sexier language. "Astral planes" are dated too.

Remembering YouTube

My title "Remembering YouTube" might sound like I mean to eulogize, as if YouTube is behind us now. It isn't, not in 2023. The title is more meant as a mental exercise: for me. I'm taking a fresh look, and remembering YouTube in a way I've never imagined it before, according to the coordinate system (memory scheme) of an experienced content creator.

Let's remember, for context, that I'm a content creator myself, but not one with mass appeal or even monetization. I might as well not exist, in terms of the YouTube subcultures talked about above, vast and sprawling, with their own memes. However, as the tip of an iceberg, I do represent a subculture more generally, just one with a strictly limited tip on YouTube (as well as on Rumble, while we're at it).

You might be thinking: "how do you have the time to dive in to pop culture in such a time intensive way, don't you care about the design science revolution?" Ah, but I do care. Study of pop culture is essential to my work. Education automation. Freeing the scholar to return to his studies. Memes. Like I said.

I'm cutting and pasting from Zachary's description, in hopes of giving myself more guidance as I proceed with my project (of remembering YouTube): 

0:00 Introduction
1:20 What is YouTube Subculture?
5:30 Smosh Subculture
9:48 h3h3 Subculture
15:50 Gus Johnson, Eddy Burback, and Abelina Sabrina Schism
20:15 Idubbbz Subculture
25:46 Creator Clash 2

Channels primarily featured in this video:

   / @anthonypadilla  
   / @smosh  
   / @h3podcast  
   / @h3h3productions  
   / @gustoonz  
   / @eddyburback  
   / @abelinasabrina  
   / @idubbbztv  
   / @idubbbztv2  

:: MoPOP ::

Weather Watch

I've got a live channel going in another browser tab, as I follow the action regarding the tropical storm currently battering the state of Mexico and parts north.  Residents are wary, many having experienced flooding before. California properties are not exempt from the "laws of nature" as nature would have it. My sis filed a report about her situation (looks safe).

Some of the TrimTabbers on Saturday were likewise feeling safe enough, and therefore somewhat excited about the coming storm. I know the feeling. The satisfaction of having sufficient protection, while weathering dynamic force fields is an exciting experience sometimes. Lots of people tune in. Roller coasters are designed to be this kind of experience (and sometimes designs fail).

Events in Maui did not follow the slow buildup of suspense. The fires swept through before people had much information, if any. More like getting bombed. They surprise you. I heard an interview with Tulsi Gabbard on duty and not at liberty to play politics.

My situation is different: Portland is now getting the atmospheric effects of burning Canadian forests, more like in Calgary, where TrimTabber Ramsay is from. He was also on the call. We got to goof off on Mt. Tabor yesterday, where the Adult Soapbox Derby came off as post-covid, even though covid is still with us. I had a good time. I hadn't ascended Mt. Tabor by foot in awhile. Sydney got her walk in prior, and was happy enough to enjoy the shade of an insulated indoors.

Indeed, my environment has notched up in comfort in that Dr. D. finally induced me to allow him to install a living room aircon, one perfectly adapted to this environment. I've been one of those "only a few really hot days a year" Portlanders, stubborn about entering the air conditioning market. However this one was free, long story involving homeowner associations not always liking the aesthetic of home units. I'm not subject to such homeowner rules (beyond city codes) plus the unit is unobtrusive anyway.

This is the morning (before noon) time of August 20, and I'm in the same timezone as Angelinos (denizens of Los Angeles). What sounds like real time coverage is coming from my other browser tab. Portland is enjoying a break in its heat wave.

Given my situation is not dire, my focus, outside of mathematics videos, were climate change videos, rising water levels in Miami and Florida more generally.  I've lived in Florida in my formative years. I've visited in subsequent chapters, as my wife was from there too, east coast (Satellite Beach) versus west coast (Bradenton). I don't claim to be a southwesterner to the extent Glenn was (from Glen Canyon in formative years), but a feel like I know California and New Mexico to some degree, with still expanding horizons in some areas.

My study of rising seas led to the more general science of climatology, which is all about the Gibbs Phase Rule. Temperature and pressure, plus chemical composition, results in specific exo- and endothermic processes (aka chemical reactions) designed to achieve equilibrium among the phases:  gas, liquid, crystal (air, water, stone). That's an old timey alchemical-sounding formulation. The focus needs to be on the maths, the algorithms, if the goal is precise predictive models.

Humans still have a lot of optimism about their cosmic environment, in terms of solar output and projectile trajectories we know about. We're not expecting immanent incineration from outside the planetary ecosystem. We're far less serene about our internal situation, as we're a volatile species known to have some auto-immune disorder tendencies. We keep fighting ourselves, in ways that amaze even the entomologists.

"Please do not panic" the public official is saying. The public will thank you. The soap box derby was funny in that the adults were on the side of the megaphone flag people seeking to keep the track clear for the down-bound gravity powered vehicles, pushing off from the starting line. The crowd was welcome to hustle-bustle during announced intermissions.

The crowd would boo and heckle when scattered others would disobey barked instructions and try grabbing a little more distance to some better location, often a temptation. I was reminded not to sit on a hay bale, as these were collision protection devices, not spectator seating.

Both the barker and the heckling crowd were being good humored about their mannerisms i.e. the air of self parody and self mocking ("how could you?") had been achieved. No one disobedient was in danger of being mobbed or gunned down. Portlanders were simply enjoying their telepathic ability to create community theater, or perhaps the hecklers were volunteer plants. Either way, this was part of the fun we city dwellers enjoy, when not under threat from external force fields.

A takeaway from my studies: the thermal expansion of the oceans, with global warming, is a distinct phenomenon vs-a-vs melting ice, which is also happening. Or should I say "distinct cause" (same phenomenon: rising sea levels in Florida)?

The recent storms and flooding in northern China, including in Beijing itself, have been another YouTube obsession. Cleanup is more prosaic yet is just as dramatic in its own way and worthy of ongoing coverage, as is infrastructure more generally. Post-war Ukraine will be quite the undertaking, as is the refurbishing of the Donbass region (American and otherwise) is being.