National Math Standards?

The idea might sound attractive at first blush, but consider the dampening effect of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, when it comes to experimentation and innovation, learning from others' mistakes.

As a Quaker, I've learned from my elders that "knowing experimentally" is a key way we know. We need to tentatively feel our way ahead by trial and error, not in response to some edict from on high.

The freedom to forge our own way as a faculty is therefore a cornerstone liberty. That doesn't mean we reinvent every wheel. But neither do we allow just any wheel to be imposed by outsiders. We're very selective in what we import.

Making every teacher teach to the same set of tests is potentially another form of tyranny, a practice worth of subverting, should the source of those tests itself not pass muster in some critical way.

Any mention of MITEs, A & B modules? We American Transcendentalists have a right to at least ask. As a tiny minority we have our heritage to preserve, our children to look after.

Shouldn't our tax dollars count for something? Why must any family living in a geodesic dome almost by definition have to home school, because our geodesic math is precluded from ever propagating widely under our current form of idiocracy?

If we all make the same mistakes, redundantly, we've imperiled our overall efficiency as a nation. What happened to states' rights and every state is a laboratory?

Concentrating control over curriculum standards should be a right winger's worst nightmare (another government gone crazy, control freaking out). So is it we liberals who're clamoring for 'em? Not me.

Why should bureaucrats in Washington D.C. busy themselves with math teaching as one of their special jurisdictions? No founding document gives 'em such responsibility or authority.

Thinking every kid should be on the same page on the same day, within some state approved curriculum, is holdover clock fetish aesthetics, a degraded form of Taylorism, nothing to
celebrate from a contemporary management perspective.

Let's not even start down that path, OK?

Followup:
Some comments @ Math Forum (April 6, 2008)

Wanderers 2008.4.1

Last night's open session was well attended and highly animated.

I admit to stirring the pot, still pumped from all the fan mail I'm getting in the aftermath of my futuristic talk in Chicago.

I fell back on old habits and started trash-talking Abbott's Flatland again, a manifesto of the hypercross dogmatists, even though we have no such dogmatists in our midst, only competent engineers and mathematicians, intelligent laymen.

Aldona's book with the poem by James Clerk Maxwell may also have fanned the flames a bit. Here's an excerpt:

March on, symbolic host! with step sublime,
Up to the flaming bounds of Space and Time!
There pause, until by Dickenson depicted,
In two dimensions, we the form may trace
Of him whose soul, too large for vulgar space,
In n dimensions flourished unrestricted.

To the Committee of the Cayley Portrait Fund

Anyway, I'd intimated ahead of time I'd be open to presenting on my experiments with the I Ching and Unicode. Lynne showed up proclaiming the prospect of a formal presentation is why she came so long a distance, whereas Steve likes the unprogrammed format, specifically because there's no designated speaker.

I suggested as a compromise that we borrow from Python culture and open the floor to "lightning talks," emphasizing how all important is that five minute time limit. Or do Wanderers want to jigger with the formula? Maybe go for ten?

Actually one can say a lot in five minutes if one is well prepared, so that's what I'd suggest to Tacoma and Eugene.

So I got to do my lightning talk, mostly at the white board, saying more about Unicode than the I Ching. Seven, then eight bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) has been subsumed as Latin-1 within a context of 114,112 symbols, with room for future growth.

Even the I Ching's 64 hexagrams (themselves in a binary tree), have allotted slots in this codespace, though not every font will bother to include them as glyphs.

Whereas UTF-32 is a fixed-width 4-byte standard, UTF-8 and UTF-16 are both variable width, meaning they lead to more economical file sizes. All three schemes address the same codespace.

Python 3.x source files default to UTF-8.

Dick's lightning talk followed mine, and had to do with urban forestry solutions to the growing asthma problem among school children, especially those close to freeways. I thought his arguments were well reasoned and on target.

We could also drive on freeways less, and/or use different fuels.

I'm channeling my futurism in other directions now, back to my usual venues. Like on Synergeo today, regarding some supposedly authoritative web site: "Still not a space-filling MITE, nothing about the unit volume tet and how that rationalizes other polys -- after more than 30 years. If you need proof that we live in a corrupt, intellectually slovenly society, you've got it." (#39145)

Ban Constrictors?

"What would it cost to eradicate Python, Boa or Eunectes individuals or populations, or similar species, if found?" asks Lyle Laverty, Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks [FR Doc. E8–1770 Filed 1–30–08; 8:45 am].

The Fish and Wildlife agency is using the threat of a nationwide ban, on the import and interstate transport of such reptiles, to motivate a public response, both pro and con. This way, the government need not sponsor any scientific studies itself, need only rely on biased feedback coming from affected parties.

Presumably the mostly urban pet store owners will push back, claiming the vast majority of their stock stays within the "virtual zoo" of a pet owner's environment, while feral snakes in the sewers actually serve on the front lines, holding down a disease-bearing rat population, taking the fight to where they live.

Rural farmers may know differently however, as one sheep after another is picked off by some boas gone wild, rampaging through the outback. Prairie dogs may soon be an endangered species.

The deadline for a public response is April 30. Uncle Sam wants a list of all pro-constrictor people handy, just in case that position proves unAmerican in some way, in which case Homeland Security might be on your case as a snake owner in violation of the Lacey Act.

Burmese pythons on the loose in Florida's Everglades are of special concern. Is a nationwide ban the best answer?

Hairspray (movie review)

This remake of the John Waters comedy is disturbing, as it leaves me wondering if our failure to achieve escape velocity from the target of both spoofs, the 1960s, means we're destined to keep to this lowly orbit, forever and ever.

Truman Show, Pleasantville, Yes Men... and yet we're still here?

Then I realize the movie explores some new ground, spoofing the movie and musical genres more completely (clichés on steroids) plus it explores ageism a little, not just racism.

Still, I expected Travolta to strike a disco dance pose or two, a wink to the audience, more water under that bridge.

But in doing nothing so covert, he brings a surprising innocence to his role as Divine, reminding me of De Niro in Stardust somewhat (I hope I don't get in trouble for saying that).

When it comes to spoofing musicals, Portland loves the Buffy episode that does that.

Two other things struck me about the rented DVD: the preview for The Golden Compass was like a complete synopsis, truly a preview; and for extra features, you needed a computer and a very special case stack of software, which I just happened to have, but not the patience.

Some sly winks about camera tricks, in salute to a great director- psychologist.

My Talk in Chicago

Kirby Urner addresses conferees in Crowne Plaza Hotel, March 14, 2008. This is the audio track from that event, slightly edited, supplemented with stills and short screen scenarios, added later in Portland, but in many ways matching what got screened at the talk. For higher definition, check here.

Designs for Living

Sometimes the home construction industry maybe feels threatened, by the prospect of aerospace types muscling in, but that's not how to look at it.

Interior design and decoration still need to go on, once the surroundings have been tuned. Our lives need their settings. Storytelling doesn't cease, just because we've inherited the geodesics.

The large shell or transparency that gives shelter from the elements, needn't be the focus of stage management, theater people. Our cameras still need their pattern language of foci. Studios R Us.

In fact, OK to make the sets flimsier than ever, which doesn't mean "not sound proof" or "not light proof"; whatever it is you need, we have the materials, but their potentially more ephemeral nature is owing to the safer more robust externals.

That being said, not every scenario need involve some giant superstructure with delicate village cultures therein. That's one way to go, not the only way to go. People understandably get nervous about style changes. They don't want to go overboard.

However, given the currently shabby state of humanity per average living standards, I'm not thinking aerospace campuses ala Orlando's, public or private, are really a threat to the competition. We simply don't have that many.

It's a problem many of us would welcome, to have to compete in such arenas.

Celebrating Dawn

We gathered at a small rural cemetery today in west Pennsylvania, where Dawn's paternal side of the family is remembered, to spread some ashes.

I felt grateful to be here on this first anniversary of my wife's death, especially after managing to miss the flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh and driving for eleven straight hours instead.

Dawn's two girls were both forgiving and supportive, a lot like their mom.

Cousin Pat guided us through winding back roads to Aunt Betty's farm, where we enjoyed home made lasagna and rolls with strawberry jam, family stories.

Back in Portland, Laurie, Elizabeth, Gayle, Chris and Barbara went to the Grotto, then joined others who knew Dawn to walk the labyrinth at Trinity Episcopal.

Pycon 2008

I've not attended Pycon since Dawn joined me for Pycon 2005 in Washington, DC. This year, I am grateful to have Tara and Alexia to be with. They get to explore Chicago while I geek out in the hotel near O'Hare. I joined them Thursday evening, in a somewhat perfunctory visit to the city of my birth.

I've enjoyed reconnecting with Patrick O'Brien (Schevo) and Ed Leafe (Dabo).

Guido sat with us briefly, friendly and relaxed, his keynote behind him. Making small talk, I noted Vilnius is one of Chicago's many sister cities, plus asked why "callable" was going away (answer: because it's redundant, now that stuff's cleaned up; just check for __call__).

Jeff Elkner, high school teacher and long time Python enthusiast, is looking forward trying some new approaches under STEM, maybe using some math through programming techniques, also my focus.

Patrick Barton, a graduate of my Python for Wanderers class, is here with his Chicago-based company, getting more exposure to the Python community. He shared some ribs with me, which was most apropos (__ribs__).

My talk, on the "Pythonic math class of the future" was a big hit, with lots of people interested in connecting with me afterwards. I made my joke about uniting our open source language communities against a common enemy, Texas Instruments, only to find we had a Python-friendly TI guy in the audience.

Python's role in the future of education is of intrinsic interest to many of us here, especially given all the OLPC activists (lots of XOs on display).

This was my first exposure to Ian Benson's campaign to further popularize Caleb Gattegno's "brick based" approach to math learning. We seem to share an interest in problem solving as an energy-consuming activity (link).

I'm heartened by what Josh showed me of The Open Planning project.

Pyglet looks promising.

Good seeing Johnny Stovall (aka "the impossible man") from Indonesia again, and Steve Holden, newly chairman of the PSF. Good meeting Vern Ceder from Indiana, Jessie Chavez of Google, Andrew Harrington of Loyola University (Chicago), and Jonah Bossewitch of CCNMTL (a Princeton philo guy, like me).

This was the biggest Pycon ever, with over a thousand attenders.

Related:
my Pycon photos on Flickr

Wanderers 2008.3.12

I showed up at the Pauling House earlier than usual, given the school's early field trip to a local judicial branch facility. Glenn showed up later than usual, tricked by a laggard clock, not yet on PDT.

A lot of today's conversation, expertly steered by Bunce, was about the origin of Oregon, as the name of our state. One can find when the whiteman explorers started using it, in connection with the Great River of the West, but why? Many myths circulate, no one really knows. A most plausible hypothesis is it's a mistranslation of Wisconsin.

What's true though is locals take pride in saying Orygun. That's like secret insider knowledge. So if you're like a tourist from "New Yawk" or something, trying to pass for native, and say Oregon (as in polygon), then you're the legitimate object of concealed titters, behind paper fans or whatever. Of course if you're not pretending you're not a tourist, OK then, you're forgiven.

We also discussed the perennial need for a more Christmas-like holiday in July, ostentatiously commercial, designed purely to galvanize the economy (not conflicted like Xmas, where we're supposed to be pious and greedy at the same time (i.e. kinda schizo)).

I proposed a "fourth king" folk tale and cover story (he shows up way late, other kings long gone), for those wanting to revise and extend within the Christian tradition.

David Tver was among us, and suggested more Judaic approaches.

Other religions welcome to step up to the plate on this one, or give us something scientific to celebrate, some annual migration or something (what are penguins up to in July?).

Of course some killjoys say we already have July 4 for a pig out and BBQ, lots of merchandise up in smoke. But I'm thinking of something less loud, more demur. How about something more geeky (lots of shopping online (where the penguins fit in?)) with a dash of gothic (ala Happy Halloween)? Summer movies play a role.

We also discussed the ethnography of joke-telling, how certain ones stay popular at like the 4th grade level, have probably passed kid to kid since Roman times and before, and yet don't seem worth telling once you're out of that head space (which isn't to cast aspersions on 4th grade humor necessarily -- some say IQs apex at that age, all downhill from there).

More on Sims

One might presume the puppet master in this electronic doll house would go for replicating actual family, trying to make a mirror image of her or his own domestic matrix.

However, I've rarely if ever seen a kid take to it in this way (of course that's just me, not some "universal observer" so your mileage may vary).

Avoiding the attempt to transliterate one's own reality gets around the challenge of needing to model oneself in the software, as a cartoon, with whatever hairstyle and outfit -- could be time consuming to get it just right.

Then there's all that zodiac stuff, the motivation settings -- who has the time to be so self-indulgently introspective? "It's just a game for crying out loud, let's get on with it" -- another playmate protesting the slow pace.

On the other hand, one might imagine psychotherapies deliberately built around The Sims architecture, with the express purpose of working on various complexes.

In my own household, some part-time staffers were marveling at my always-clean fish tank. How often do I change the water? I explained about the filtration system, powered by the Columbia River and FDR's progeny. So put like a talk balloon next to my sim, with a dam hieroglyphic, maybe some lightning bolts, smiling fish...

Of course every life saved in the big city, thanks to a steady supply of AC, means livelihoods lost in the fisheries business (except in the hatcheries), including among fish (and the sea lions who feed on them).

Finding a sustainable balance remains a dynamical systems challenge, not something to resolve once and for all. Nature doesn't pause at any equilibrium, just hovers around them, sometimes stretching to limits, again optimizing, and so on. In a very primitive sense, "evolution" means no more than this, against a backdrop of generalized principles.

Peace Teams

Tonight I learned a lot about Alternatives to Violence (AVP) and Healing and Rebuilding Our Community (HROC) workshops, in conflict areas around the world, from a visiting all star cast of Quaker practitioners, in Burundi, Kenya, Colombia, other places.

My thanks to Nadine Hoover for sharing some of her Indonesian adventures with me during potluck, including some illuminating service committee stories.

People naturally seek healing, and sometimes a new context for looking at their own suffering is a first step, even though real life is a more difficult set of circumstances than a facilitated workshop.

This new context: respectable alternatives to violence take more skill, are more effective, and we (the participants) wish to become more skillful and effective.

Of course there's plenty of unskillful / violent behavior in the USA as well, where AVP is likewise available.

I don't know if AVP credits the encounter group movement of the 1970s and 1980s for its content and format. Definitely the exercises are more powerful when involving actual parties to a violent or potentially violent conflict, and a long term test of workshop effectiveness is whether these conflicts actually resolve nonviolently.

Restoring a sense of community outside the workshop format, drawing upon already ingrained cultural values, is the name of the game.

HROC ("he-rock") is more geared towards overcoming PTSD, a prerequisite and/or concomitant to AVP in some circumstances.

My thanks to Multnomah Friends, Andy Cross especially, for bringing us all together.

Hairspray (movie review)

This is about the 1988 John Waters contribution, with Divine & Company. I'm looking forward to this new one with Travolta & Co., a topic of discussion among Quaker youth these days.

This is fantastic ethnography, when knowing stellates pointedly poke fun at their own historical context, in this case the early 1960s, high school teen culture (pre Buffy).

The hippies are just beginning (cite Cool Cat & Chick, both brilliantly played), however Jahiliyyah is already in full swing, in this Elvis lookalike contest (a few James Dean wannabes).

Amazing to think these people'd be invading Iraq down the road apiece (Vietnam first though, and still a presence in Korea).

That psychologist (psychiatrist?), played by John Waters himself, is the funniest character, all tricked out to deprogram, a shaman protecting his tribe.

Divine plays both the racist carnival boss and... well, Divine.

Waters enjoys this technique of zooming in on a colorless television, then zooming on through to reality, by upping the volume and changing to color. He does this several times, poking fun at the medium.

Protein Folding

Top priority this morning was fixing a lesson plan and student handout, making the POSIX commands clearer, based on valuable feedback from test users.

I also posted some writings about calculus, and the importance of algorithms in sparking a Renaissance in Europe awhile back.

Then I met with a teacher, to discuss weighty issues, plus talk about that ferris wheel for canal boats in Scotland (thanks Jim!).

Yakking about kayaks ensued, in a subterranean maze (part of ToonTown).

Back at the office: protein folding on YouTube, checking out the state of the art in low rez.

Ironic that many high school biology students have no access to these films from inside biology class, given onerous school censorship. But hey, there's always playing with Folding@home on the PS3.

Over on edu-sig, I told a funny story about a Quaker MUD I was peripherally involved with (MUD = multi-user domain, early text-based gaming environment).

Back Early

We enjoyed an abbreviated version of the family retreat this year. My XO proved a big attraction to the kids, which proved triggering to a few parents with luddite tendencies, so I put it away.

Not all Quakers are geeks by any means. Electronics in general are seen as "of the devil" by some, or something like that -- I'm not up on all the latest thinking in Quakerdom, that's for sure.

I made my nest in the cavernous rec room near the wood stove, so I could take in the late night folk singing around the piano in a soporific state.

I also learned that orthodox Judaism has a long-running reincarnation thread (we had some yeshiva grad lecturing us). I'm sure there's much more to be said on the topic -- probably not here though. DWA check 11793, payable to MMM.

We capped our day on Hawthorne, walking the dog and purchasing a 30th anniversary reissue of Dark Side of the Moon, on heavy vinyl, from the new music store Juke Box, replacing Goddess Gallery (an old haunt).

Happy Birthday Alexia!

A One Hand Clapping Sound

I thought I was hot on the trail of some denial of service attack.

Finally, someone felt offended enough to spam me at a rate of over one per second.

My email boxes were filling fast, with thousands upon thousands of spams. I phoned Qwest to complain. This was at least drama, if not trauma.

What I finally figured out is one of my auto-responders had gotten into a devil's embrace with another auto-responder, with each politely telling the other the same thing, over and over and over...

Neither had any reason to ever stop. Reminds me of diplomacy sometimes -- those stalemates from hell.

Anyway, once I shut down my own auto-responder, the "room" went silent. No more echoes.

I detect wry smiles from sysops, as in "welcome to my world" ("no, welcome to my world", "no, welcome to my world"...).

80th Academy Awards

I am like so out of sequence, though at least recognized Juno from living among fans, had taken in the cartoon about rats sometime earlier.

Now, with my ignorance admitted, let me just say I enjoyed the editing and respected the obvious, and not-so-obvious talents among those controlling my view (both in front of and behind the camera as they say -- or was it a curtain?).

The retrospectives on periscopes and binoculars, and awakenings from bad dreams, were also both much appreciated (in case other reviewers forget to take note). My thanks to Jon Stewart and company.

Today on car radio, some talking heads were talking about cutting the fat, paring it down. But hey, the Superbowl drags on for at least twice as long, doesn't it? Quit complaining why not? It's just once a year.

Lunar Eclipse

I learned at a dinner party last night, about the lunar eclipse we should see tonight, providing the skies are clear (so far so good, in Portland).... Yep, the skies were clear, even if my own eyesight is less than perfect (some doubling (didn't find binoculars)).

Much of the evening was about getting the Compiz Fusion rotating cube of desktops working on Tara's new Ruby Red laptop (Dell 1420 N), while watching Simpsons and eating Subway. Adding to software sources, and installing lots of updates over factory (hundreds of files), and finally finding a new compiz configuration manager in Synaptic, proved the answer in this case (we're using restricted nVidia drivers, having had good luck with that previously).

In a lunar eclipse, the Earth's shadow completely covers a full moon for a short time, as it moves in front of the sun. Looking back from the moon, the earth would somewhat cover the sun. I tried to get that view from the moon in Celestia, newly installed on my laptop (another Dell), but I'm still all thumbs with that program, much as I tout it as a classroom-ready paradigm open source project.

Along those lines, today I've been studying the HDTV pix of the moon's surface coming back from one of the Kaguya sensing stations in lunar orbit (i.e. from a satellite designed to spy on the moon).

Computerizing Synergetics

Background reading:

• Synergetics: Fig. 954.00B Mites and Couplers
• Synergetics on the Web: Quantum Modules
• Math Forum: archival postings re MITE
• Synergetica Journal: Computerizing Synergetics
  

This Just In

(click here for stereo version)

Recently published to Synergeo, a Fuller School asset: this "jumble pack" by John Brawley, rendered in POV-ray from output generated from a C++ package he authored.

Unlike Steve Waterman's quasi-spherical packings, which assume a CCP center for each ball, John lets his 100,000 strong army self-organize more casually ("at ease"), in accordance with his Tverse cosmology.

Kudos to Adrian Rossiter of Antiprism fame, for giving John some C++ coding pointers.

Salem and Eugene

(click image for larger view)

For those of you not familiar with our Willamette Valley lore, I should introduce you to our two sister cities to the south, not forgetting Corvallis, nor Albany for that matter, but both are tucked away from the principal artery, I-5.

Also, there's Springfield, on the east side of this same I-5, Eugene to the west, which road (or freeway) extends northward into Canada, southward into Mexico.

While in the USA, it's a part of the I-net or I-system, a set of freeways numbered with odds north and south (e.g. I-5) and with evens east and west (e.g. I-84, which also converges to Portland).

Another convention is to prefix a number, as in I-405 and I-205, also both in Portland. Those are sub-arterials or subsidiaries to the principals.

Out east, the I-count is higher. The New York to Philadelphia arterial, which continues all up and down the coast (a mirror of I-5 in some ways), is named I-95.

So Springfield is opposite Eugene, site of one of our major universities. Salem is the seat of state government, that state being Oregon, my early boyhood and later adulthood home.

Speaking of family homes, the March 2008 issue of National Geographic has a fun article on Bhutan (Urners lived in Thimphu for many years).

Easy Does It (movie review)

This 1946 animation, with cuts to live action, seeks to develop brand loyalty among grocers worried about their bottom line. Although cast as a simple love story, it's really a tutorial or "how to" for grocers, an "infomercial" in today's parlance.

A decent Smallville type, alter ego to an aging father figure (the store owner), is about to lose his bride-to-be (owner's daughter) to a Lex Luthor type, a villainous high roller and banker named Mr. Squeeze, who uses his petty patriarchal powers to leverage sexual favors and so on (compare with Betty Boop in She Wronged Him Right (a 1934 "mortgage melodrama")).

Mr. Easy, a boy pixie capable of time travel, appears from the engagement ring and educates our young hero about the Stokely-Van Camp line of canned vegetable products (also canned chili and tenderoni).

Intensive push advertising, including strategically placed recipes, helps cultivate customer brand loyalty, which in turn entails a greater gross for the grocer, even if the margin per can is lower than with some of those unknown brands no one buys.

The Stokley man who does the explaining (by showing a movie within the movie) is a Bob Dobbs type, with a pipe and smoking jacket.

Our hero follows the advice of the Stokely man and sets up an over-the-top Stokely Week™ at the home town store, assuring enough cash to pay off Mr. Squeeze. He then dashes to the church in Blissville, where Mr. Squeeze is about to steal away his love interest, and indulges in some cathartic animal violence, winning the day.

I liked learning about "starter gaps": housewives (live action) don't like messing with perfectly symmetrical displays (e.g. cans stacked in a pyramid) so make sure you prime the pump with some intentional gaps in the merchandise.

Related Reading:

• Supermarket Mathematics
• Enticements (was Supermarket Mathematics)

Pop Culture

I've finally started reading The Portland Mercury more, high time I should think. It's not like I had any focussed reason not to.

Quick zip to Salem and back this afternoon, for some bureaucracy and coffee, not so doubleplus unfun (Orwell allusion, for those of you just joining us).

Tara tried her first real nigiri sushi @ Toney Bento, SE 37th (a school-related project).

On tap from the vid outlets: High School (documentary / ethnography), some old Betty Boops and Bill Plymptons (toontown stuff).

Domestic Scenes

Toki wo kakeru shôjo (movie review)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time chronicles the adventures of a high school aged girl, living in contemporary urban Japan, a safe enough environment, but not without dangers.

It's a coming of age story, of the kind my wife loved, on the surface a romance, but laced with metaphysics, a sense of wonder about time, the deep dimension, one might even say the only.

Makoto enjoys a rough and tumble lifestyle, to put it mildly, even without all that leaping. Girls have most of the freedoms of boys in this culture, relate as equals, although when it comes to after school drudgery, the guys tend to goof off (sound familiar?). She pushes her body to its physical limits, running, cycling... even studying.

Whereas a more somber soul might be plunged into an existential crisis by this new degree of freedom, Makoto takes it in stride, gradually building her power to solve triangles and otherwise "fix" things (shades of Groundhog Day), including for her own benefit.

She only gets really lonely when she finds someone to share it all with, but apparently misses the opportunity. Anyway, she still has her wise auntie to console her. I won't give away the (happy enough) ending.

Neighborhood Meetings

For me Super Tuesday, the televised experience, began in a bar in zip code area 97214 (like places in Austin -- four of us yakking geography, statistics and demographics), returning home to KOIN, then CBS.

Oregon wasn't voting today, just watching.

Then I went out to mingle a bit, encountering Nat among six or seven others of mixed gender, three of us from Richmond.

Interesting lessons, great teachers across the board.

Political Rant

So why do people suppose it's up to politicians, the USA president in particular, to "fix the economy"?

I'm sure there're important roles these folks (most of 'em lawyers) might play (but mostly don't). I'd rather they just focus on running the government effectively, streamlining it, converting more of those antediluvian leather-bound law books of tortuous code into cleanly designed, runnable software (executive = executable).

The president presides over the executive branch, puffs up into commander in chief during war time. It's not really part of the job description to "fix the economy" -- that I can find in the Constitution anyway. That's for the enterprising, risk-taking American people to do.

Only intellectual slobs think manufacturing and selling war is a good way to dig out of a slump (and we have slobs aplenty, no question).

The huge standing army that saddles the USA with debt and makes it the laughing stock of more developed economies, is probably what's killing the future the most. All that oil down the drain, just to keep a lot of dinosaur equipment (e.g. aircraft carriers) working overtime to intimidate and threaten (called "projecting a presence" in the infantile language of idiocrat bullies).

There's really no room to focus on upgrading the education system as long as these silly North Americans are busy losing wars left and right, with children in military families among the least well served (sacrificing their parents to the war gods is downright cruel and unusual if you ask me).

This thing about being a "superpower" just feeds that old imperial presidency mindset, leaves people treating presidents like they had mystical / divine capabilities above and beyond what any human might cultivate. Very superstitious, very not how the nation got started, very devolved and pathetic. What losers!

Coyote Academy

Coyote Cum Laude
print of etching by Amy Adshead
photo by K. Urner

So how might a public, tax supported charter school interface with the private sector?

Individual teachers might mine company web sites for their lesson plans, sure. Another likely design pattern is companies offering modules at different grade levels, perhaps a free version surrounded with purchasable services leading to a credential of some kind.

Textbook publishers provide a relevant model or prototype, although here we're replacing traditional wood pulp with bytes and pixels, meaning even small engineering firms might get into the game.

We might also have a Subway concession in the school's food court, and/or maybe a Noah's Bagels.

Note that shopping for curriculum segments and putting them together in creative ways could still be under local control, the responsibility of academy faculty.

I would encourage not abdicating this responsibility, plus devising democratic ways of collaborating with both students and their families, with the details left to the players (various templates available).

Even an extremely remote school depending on the Web for most of its content might nevertheless earn a reputation for creativity and curriculum writing effectiveness, based on what the school's in-house web wranglers had wrought.

What accredited schools provide that homes need not is a controlled testing environment. The private sector is already used to credentialing over the Web, but typically depends on administering tests in a safe and secure environment where (a) no bullies take unfair advantage and (b) well-meaning guardians don't get to back seat drive.

Congrats to Dave Koski on his new 4D Golden Spiral (made of T-modules).

image by DK in vZome

Skyping About Math

edubuntu terminals, LEP High

I set my cell phone alarm for an early rising and hopped on a pre-arranged Skype call from Germany to chat with some young math students and their instructor about our futuristic math teaching experiments in Portland, Oregon, an open source capital.

Basically, we phase in object-oriented talk when introducing such concepts as vectors and polyhedra, and then we use those vectors to actually build those polyhedra on screen. I didn't go in to all the details, although I did hold up the MITE cube and dissect it (this was a video linkup).

In Germany, there's more of a top-down, "government tells us" approach, whereas the USA has this tradition of treating states as laboratories, where many competing approaches run in parallel, a kind of genetic algorithm wherein new hybrids at least have a fighting chance of finding a place in the sun.

Our computer math hybrid starts using Python pretty early, mainly to generate sequences at first, such as the Fibonacci numbers and successive rows of Pascal's triangle (e.g. see Pippy on the XO for a currently non-generator-based approach).

generator based Pascal's, Python 2.5.x

These are very short programs, with longer ones provided as scaffolding, so rather than losing lots of time to debugging, we stay with much of the traditional content (linear and polynomial functions, trigonometry (some spherical), some calculus ideas though with a more discrete flavor).

However, we also mix in more semi- and non-numeric algorithms (e.g. around XML), plus some elementary group theory with an eye towards explaining RSA in some detail by senior year high school (group theory also helps in later physics, intimately connects to those polyhedra and their rotations).

More Show & Tell

So I'm continuing to refine my homey Internet skills, via Skype and Youtube.

Obviously these things take practice, and by submitting my work to a general audience, I get back such useful feedback as "don't be chewing that gum!" and so on.

Plus I consider these cameos, like ol' Hitchcock saying peekaboo on camera. Like I said earlier, my role is more behind one.

Tonight was another State of the Union (SOTU) speech, a pretty relaxed affair. Like that guy said on CBS, sounds like George and Condi have something up their sleeve for the Middle East, if they think it'll really fire on both cylinders by year's end (speaking of Israel/Palestine).

Other than that, it was pretty not-lofty and straight political. I thought the Kansas governor was elegant and dignified, but I had some raucous teenagers watching with me, so I can't say I heard every word.

After the speech plus analysis, I headed off to my office for a little daily practice with my toyz.

Thanks for watching, and thanks to Naga for putting up with some man-handling (hey, circus life gets rough sometimes).

War College Philosophy

E. J. Applewhite. Synergetics Dictionary.
Garland Press, 1986. Vol. 4 page 140

In a civilian school like Princeton, the philosophy department tends to hash over what might still hold water, although it's OK to venture back along the time line and study what, by today's standards, are truly unbelievable belief systems (medieval philosophy and such -- I took at least one course in that, found lots to agree with).

But when you're looking out over a battlefield, trying to figure out why people dressed that funny way are taking up swords against that other group over there, you can't afford the luxury of believability. You just need to know what animates these people from the inside, to help with modeling, anticipating what might be coming next (just saying "one damn thing after another" is sort of a cop out -- clients won't pay for that).

The OWL/DAML community is happy to talk about ontology, a philosophical term, but has less use for teleology, which is where I think Bucky Fuller might lend us a hand. He spoke of teleology in terms of voltage pressure.

Just as hamburger fuels long divisions among 8th graders in North America, so does water held back by dams, give us the pressure to turn huge coils through magnetic resistance, generating that back and forth push/pull of electrons known as alternating current (AC) -- keeping the lights on in those schools. We also use direct current (DC) and convert back and forth, from AC to DC, from DC to AC.

OK so where does teleology come in? In how we switch all that power, in the form of energy investments. Do we drive with this or that control panel API? What tools do we commit? What skills will we need? Does the storyboard depend on any unproved or as yet unavailable technologies? If yes, is this all just science fiction then?

Putting it another way, to every ontology, however unbelievable, there corresponds a pressure to perform in this or that way. Perhaps aggressively, perhaps with vindictiveness (stay alert for that stuff).

You still need to do a lot of intelligence gathering, as the devil is in the details. Plus you'll need repositories in which to store your findings, like DemocracyLab or whatever.

Even better: enlist the assistance of true believers to help with their own modeling, plus remember to share the road i.e. don't be too proprietary about your own way of thinking, especially if you want friends -- help 'em stay up to date and in the game, or they'll have no choice but to work around you.

Where both physics and theology agree to some extent is in judging that some beliefs just don't have much underwriting, in terms of laws of nature and/or God's will. If you think you can fly, and jump off a ledge, more power to ya, but really, probably here's a belief system with a short TTL.

To have "no integrity" doesn't mean to sneak around lying so much (too obvious) as it means you've already stepped off that ledge, and so now we'll see: does it really fly? Unless Nature is behind it (Fuller's "generalized principles"), then the answer is no, at least not for long. But of course that's a borderline tautology, plus a frustrating outcome is always a good excuse to try try again, and yes, sometimes persistence pays off.

Fortunately for us humans, we're able to auto-reprogram to some extent, especially by staying open to Spirit (what we believe as Quakers anyway -- that there's that of God within each one of us, potentially to the rescue in times of belief system melt down).

Wolf Moon

I sampled chatter among engineers last night, in some hotel room along Sandy. We were a green building designer, two solar steam engineers, an artist, and myself -- a reunion of sorts after 17 years, with me the gray eldest.

Earlier I visited a recuperating college professor in the company of a Quaker war veteran. We talked about muppets on Saturday Night Live, among other topics.

Lots of telecommuting and cyberevents (such is life in the big city) -- still horse from all the howling (a "wolf moon" is a full one that stays visible all night long (I learned that from CBS affiliate KOIN)).

MLK Day

We're having a serene federal holiday today, with visits from good friends (including from Stillaguamish country) -- lots of sampling of trax.

Tara ordered up Serenity, fittingly filed with FireFly at Movie Madness. I spaced her dentist appointment this time.

Lighting a candle at Red Altar.

Saturday Meetup

Today's work included ferrying Micheal Sunanda, aka the goofy sufi, back to his Portland base camp (he's visiting from Eugene).

Coincidentally, Andrew Frank called while Micheal was sitting on my living room rug, eating something organic.

Andrew, Micheal and I have all been on KBOO, plus Andrew and I did some Portland Cable Access many years back (I've not seen him for almost two decades). Micheal and I also did a radio interview together, anchored from Chicago.

However, I'm happier behind the camera, in storyboarding and production, where a lot of hard work goes on. There's true talent on all sides in this business.

More on G1G1

I enjoyed the interview with Michail Bletsas this morning. He too envisions XOs, other models, in Darfur.

G1G1 or Give One Get One was OLPC's marketing campaign aimed at giving the program's domestic partner a way to donate a laptop to a talented overseas counterpart with no hard currency, while getting an opportunity to snuggle with a live XO (cute).

On Synergeo, recently rejoined, I'm thanking Adrian for his excellent C++ resources, which have enabled us to pitch futuristic bookkeeping front ends to providers of gaming solutions, soon to be like Sims for grownups if all goes as planned:

As you browse through these 4D++ worlds (yeah, jargon), you become aware of motifs, themes, which may suggest company lore. My 4D Studios is even more inhouse, but has a public face on Myspace.com (as 4dstudios). That's another storefront for Synergetics out there, and the many ToonTown productions it inspires (John, you were asking about applications...).

I'm also advising Brawley to replicate his Tverse project (more C++ modeling) on the Linux platform:

You just find the corresponding editors, compilers, linkers and libraries and then go to town in C/C++ or C# on Mono. Lotsa fun, lotsa (eXtreme) peers, development time in general way less -- but because these are real cyclists, not wannabes (I'm a wannabe -- my C skills are piss poor, couldn't write a kernel to save my own hide).

Alexia is in a chat window.

Errands, TTFN.

Uphill Slog

Those watching over my shoulder for the past decade may have concluded that the ideas I champion can't be that viable, or more would have happened by now. There's a self-fulfilling aspect to feedback sometimes, which is sometimes positive, not always vicious.

In the case of learning math through developing one's coding skills, using a free state of the art language like Python, the idea is a no-brainer, meaning of course it's a good one, and for all its shortcomings, I'm pleased to see Pippy going out on the XO, complete with Fibonacci sequence (of Da Vinci Code fame) and Pascal's Triangle (a grand central station of convergent concepts).

I'm not sure what all has changed since the 1980s, but when I was a high school math teacher in Jersey City, going to night school in education theory at St. Peter's College, my observation was teachers considered their jobs low paying and low status, and coding skills were regarded as a ticket to some other more glamorous profession. Math teachers were especially likely to escape to new careers by this route.

The reason we don't teach Python programming as a way of learning mathematics is most people with such skills aren't interested in teaching at the K-12 level, and/or have no certification to do so.

In small pockets, tiny schools, it's possible to enforce higher, or simply different, standards.

The teachers I work with most closely tend to have pretty good computer and/or multimedia skills, although not always in Python.

But then I'm the guy who wants my back office managers to have a general systems theory background -- "just economics" won't do. No wonder we have so few at the top in my virtual world. Most jobs go begging.

Store Management

The franchise or chain has its advantages, presuming management is friendly to itself in the back office, in which case a clever innovation by some anonymous employee over here translates into quasi-spontaneous improvements throughout the organization.

Given the wide diversity of environments in which a company replicant must provide services, a geographically diversified chain is going to adapt more quickly, given all the good ideas from the field.

On the other hand, new chains have to start somewhere, and often it's the mom & pop approach in some difficult new environment, like Portland's, like Coffee People, that gets it right in many dimensions.

"Parallel prevails over serial" is one important maxim in business. What it means is you'll want to get many experiments going in the face of big uncertainties, not knowing in advance which will succeed, but knowing that "one at a time" is slower than "many at once."

However, not all management teams are prepared to support parallel operations. In this sense, management is a lot like an operating system. How good is it, at managing memory? And don't blame management for every memory hog application an end user might want to load, on insufficient hardware. Typically, they'll plan to pay you a pittance and ask for the moon, moan and complain if you don't deliver.

In sum: the franchise many-storefront model is ideally a theater for parallelism, and therefore better at fitting in, provided feedback from the field is taken seriously; any highly evolved chain was likely once a corner grocery, and probably had high level, well-exercised skills thanks to some ornery customers or other challenges.

Remember: some of the best stores actually pay managers to go under cover as ornery customers, in order to test the effectiveness of their own store training and policies, sometimes scouting for new managers in the process.

Buckaneer Lore

Some tracked Bucky because they loved the dome and what it portended, in terms of sheltering big dishes or whatever, whereas others, an earlier cohort, came because of the car, the dymaxion vehicle.

Jay Baldwin was one of the latter. Although he worked closely with Bucky on many dome projects, including a first pillow, his heart was in automobiles and auto mechanics, futuristic concept cars especially -- another way to make the future happen.

Jay's dad, like Jay, has a very Native American appearance and would stand proudly on the parade float, in like Montclair, New Jersey, as a last Mohican or like that.

Jay headed to the west coast as soon as he was old enough to drive. He loves the LA freeway system, that Worlds Fair future many dreamed would come true, yet today often villainize (too many drivers).

Personally speaking, I consider the North American I-net one of the great wonders of the world, nor have I anything against car nuts.

Synergetica

The above encasement of an IVM sphere (that the sphere appears to really be made of tiny dots is not unfortunate in this context), outlined in black, is the rhombic dodecahedron.

The long diagonals of each diamond facet (one is shown in red) form an octahedron, while the greens (short diagonals) form a cube. The relative volume ratios are 6:4:3.

Of special importance in Synergetics is this space-filling shape, shown in red, called the Coupler. It's a non-Platonic octahedron of volume 1 relative to the above 6:4:3 schema, and may be developed in terms of the cube (left) or in terms of the rhombic dodecahedron (right).

Below is the shape most people think about when they hear the word "dodecahedron," if they think of a shape at all. Centuries of Platonic bias stacked the deck such that "dodecahedron" means the Platonic one, kind of like when some USAers say "Americans" and just mean themselves.

We needn't waste time "blaming Plato" for ignorance of the rhombic dodecahedron among the lay public. Indeed, one may correctly view Synergetics itself as a form of NeoPlatonism, although American Transcendentalism fits at least as well, if you're shopping for an "ism" with which to pigeon-hole this work.

Christmas Folk Lore

In at least one telling, no boxes were exchanged on Christmas Day, no incense, no gold, as the Kings didn't arrive until January 6, Epiphany.

Whether we call these three "Kings" or not is open to dispute, as some prefer "Magi," a nickname for "Magicians," although that later sounded too pagan, although "Wizards" was worse (plus they were pagans).

Anyway, in some folks' tellings, there's this fourth King (affectionately known as King Moron) who showed up really belatedly, after the first three had long gone. This tale provides cover for people sending truly late gifts, even after Epiphany is long over.

This fourth King is a bit too much the clown to be admitted into classic tellings, such as Christian hymnals and so forth. Besides, he wouldn't be in the manger scene anyway, so there's nothing to add in this case.

Wanderers 2008.1.8

We have a packed house tonight, with Glenn Stockton speaking about Synchronicity, part 2 in our Opportunity series (I missed the first one).

Glenn began with a history of the concept in the West, which traces to Jesuits in Portugal and France bringing home news of the I Ching from the East to which Leibniz was subsequently introduced.

The eight 3-bit strings, or trigrams, pair up in a matrix of 64 permutations, which are consulted by oracles, shamans, truth speakers, housewives, hardhats or whatever.

Glenn brought along a lot of books to show and tell about.

The I Ching Workbook by Wing looks like something put out by the Dharma Initiative.

David Peat's reminds me of when David came to Wanderers to discuss his Blackfoot Physics.

C. G. Jung's is about explorations undertaken with Wolfgang Pauli and others.

The discussion was lively, the wine plentiful. Glenn's repartee was just light enough to keep us moving and on topic.

I kept having flashbacks to Jersey City and my time with Ray and Bonnie Simon, later baby Julie, for whom I was a babysitter (I'd quit high school teaching by then, to work on a startup).

Ray is/was a huge synchronicity buff, had techniques for encouraging its workings in his life, some of which he tried to teach me.

I was happy to provide transportation to Eve Menger for this one.

Homework

Trying to catch up in a number of areas (teachers assisting), including gender studies (North American focus [1][2]), Panetics, Japanese Traditions. Finished Lost DVDs from Santa. Upgraded to .NET 3.x on KTU3. Moved 16 Words to iPod, also An Introduction to Quakers. GB's Stand Up! rescheduled to May 11 so as to not conflict with SOTU. HB2KC. Topped Mt. Tabor, gym.

SIGMAA Award

:: an honor well deserved ::

Posted retroactively on Feb 2, 2008 with thanks to Dave Koski, a Wenninger fan. Thanks also to Glenn Stockton for snagging a copy of Wenninger's Polyhedron Models from Powell's recently, in very good condition.

Fish Tale

As I was pointing out to some family and friends over the holidays, my little Mathematical Canvas website, 4D Solutions a sponsor, has an embedded message on the cover page: Alaska. See it? I like the fish for its Tlingit appearance.

Here in the Silicon Forest, we see it as our responsibility to offer relevant curriculum of the kind future Silicon Foresters might need. As I was writing to a contact at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster recently, regarding a proposed Skype interview:

Discussing the US picture as a whole might be too unfocused for me to speak intelligently about as there's no "national curriculum" and the state standards are little more than outlines cribbed from the various text books, with a minor role played by industry and commerce (private sector)....

My job in Portland is mostly to circumvent the standard obsolete curricula (any math with no programming would be considered too 20th century to remain viable or relevant).

Let's look at an example of what knowledge workers in my sector of the economy have to read to stay current:

Relational databases can be accessed using the Structured Query Language (SQL), and every popular programming language has libraries that allow manipulating data in relational database management systems (RDBMSs) such as Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL Server, and Oracle.

Not long after relational algebra was invented and the first RDBMSs started appearing, another similar rise from obscurity to market dominance took place. Procedural programming began to give way to object-oriented programming, which allowed the bundling of data and actions into objects. [page 152]

Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears: Using Python to Create Ajax-Powered Sites, by Mark Ramm, Kevin Dangoor, Gigi Sayfan (Prentice Hall, ISBN-10: 0-13-243388-5; ISBN-13: 978-0-13-243388-4)

Although the style is accessible to young adults, the content remains alien, unfamiliar, even though "algebra" is mentioned and "success in algebra" is considered a primary indicator of future success in college by much of the math teaching community.

The problem is mass textbook publishing, to remain economical, especially in this environment of rising paper and shipping costs, mostly needs to recycle previous content, adjusting it slightly from year to year, fine tuning, to keep up with the latest math teaching fads, which are often superficial, purely cosmetic.

Over the last two or three decades, this recycling of old content has precluded much true pioneering inventiveness at the K-12 level, to where college profs now do little more than throw up their hands and complain about their low caliber entry level students, in need of so much remedial course work.

Computer science goes begging for new majors.

The Silicon Forest ends up importing much of the talent it needs.

As a matter of fact, the traditional math curriculum contains many candidate segments that have the potential to become segues into our more relevant Digital Age content (relevant from the point of view of working in our Silicon Forest economy -- other bioregions may well have different needs).

For example, ever since the New Math in the 1960s, we've had segments on truth tables (boolean logic) and Venn Diagrams (unions and intersections). The former connects directly to logic gates, the basis of all computer chips, and the latter might be used to launch forays into SQL and the relational algebra mentioned above.

Unfortunately, the math teaching ethnicity (an ingrown subculture worthy of anthropological study) is pretty well stuck in the calculator era, just a step beyond slide rules, and calculators don't do SQL.

Switching to a language like Python for hands-on math exploration is just too much future shock for most rank and file math teachers, already set in their ways. Plus the NCTM tends to baby them by telling them just what they want to hear, no matter how head in the sand this might be.

Fortunately, given the Internet and North America's mostly wired schools, a burgeoning home scholar movement, circumventing yesteryear's dino textbooks has become mindlessly easy, a piece of cake. MIT's OpenCourseWare, other flagship offerings, provide plenty of raw material.

A new breed of more progressive teacher is emerging, more of a hybrid between web wrangler and classroom presenter (itself a type of theater, with the faculty lounge a backstage).

These mostly younger teachers, some of them returning war veterans, understand about letting students multi-task, don't feel so threatened when all eyes are not on the authority figure at the front of the room, are maybe focused on Google Earth instead.

Random Trip Pix

pet trick

in northern california

santa barbara pelicans

quaker midnight, philadelphia time

driving home