Politicians Meet AI

A few of us independently minded were somewhat tongue in cheek on board with Singularity for President. My twitter feeds (@thekirbster, @4DsolutionsPDX) will show some evidence of my supporting that campaign.  More than a serious religion, this meme was a dig at the relevance of the usual suspects, pointing instead to a kind of black hole in Cyberia.

Uber and Lyft drivers are these days told to love their jobs while they can, as the big bad driverless car is just around the corner. Behind these autonomous vehicles lurk another set of memes, stitched together in a kind of marketing hype science fiction, whereby a form of "artificial intelligence" (AI) might threaten just about any job (as in "livelihood").

I'm not about to discount the power of our learning to co-habitate with our machines.  We needed some serious steam pressure to activate the industrial age, leading to dirty coal fired furnaces and soot everywhere. We gradually got it down to just greenhouse gases, saving the ozone layer (fingers crossed) but now we're starting to literally cook.

The hope is we might do a lot less polluting commuting and enjoy our electronics a lot more, thereby giving the planet a chance to cool.  We're proving we can sustain some pretty serious viewing habits, when it comes to staring at screens.  I'm not saying we've properly balanced that sedentary lifestyle with the outdoorsy more camp-like experience we'll need to stay competent outside of densely urban areas.  Simply walking over rough terrain takes talent.

However getting to these lifestyle places requires something other than the passing and enforcement of laws.  People think in terms of "making rules" when a more useful shoptalk would involve "playing games" (which have rules).  Game playing is where social media come in, and with the design and evolution of social media, comes what we might call "social engineers" except that sounds ominous.

Americans have frightened themselves with the word "social" and therefore even "sociality" and "sociology" have a scary ring.  Combine "social" with "engineering" and you get "Russian hacker" or worse, but then we think of Facebook and Google and remember Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

We've had our revenge of the nerds, or geeks inheriting the earth (Bible off by a letter or two) -- world domination they called it.  Now we're back in the realm of politics and at a higher level than many attain.  A picture emerges of politicians up and down a ladder, along with PR people, marketers, all social engineers of various stripes. Some learn to code.

The new blend of technology with socially-savvy meme-makers, puts the lawyer shoptalks in a new context. Engineering has come into its own more and we have the "code is law" meme.

What better way to write games than in software?  What better way to self govern than with the assistance of free open source?  With respect to traditional politicking, AI represents this new face, or interface, this API.  Welcome then, to this world of AI.

So yeah, you might be out of a job as well, mister would-be ruler, given we're using these Ouija Boards (these social media) more and more.  Accelerating acceleration, Toffler called it.  We need our self-governing tools simply to keep up.  The center of gravity has shifted to social media, radio and television included.  Politicians have become actors in a new kind of theater.  We're seeing that all the time now, on Singularity TV.

Family Reunions

Pat Kenworthy, my late wife's cousin, has let us know about the passing away of her mother, Dawn's Aunt Betty, at the age of ninety two.

Around the same time, I learned of my brother-in-law Sam's grave illness, sparking a family reunion over here. I'll be driving over the mountain once Tara arrives. Sam is in hospice.

I've been reading Arnold Mindell (The Shaman's Body: A New Shamanism for Transforming Health, Relationships, and the Community Paperback, November 30, 1993).  He's still a Carlos Castaneda fan whereas many grew disillusioned with his undermining of the literal truth about the spirit world, through his anthropology books, about his relationship with his own sense of wisdom (Don Juan).

Thanks to Bob Bornemann of Esozone for turning me cluing me re the above lecture, worth watching if you're doing Jungian studies, a long time theme in these blogs.  Thanks to Alex as well.

Composing Functions

The code below shows a way of teaching operator overloading in Python, and about lambda.

Function type objects do not ordinarily multiply, leaving it up to the developer to ascribe meaning to said operation.  We might use it for "compose" such that (F * G)(x) == F(G(x)).

The __call__ method invokes the original function, while Compose wraps the function inside the type that knows how to multiply and therefore power.

At the end, decorator syntax is introduced.  I explain decorator syntax in more detail in this Youtube.

Hit Run for the demo, output appears below.

Wanderers 2017.06.13

That's June 13, a Tuesday night. Carol of WILPF (my mom) updated us on the UN Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty, slowly making its way to passing, by enough of a majority to warrant the ratification phase, wherein each nation takes a copy home to debate about.

But will they debate? Some pundits only mock the UN as some globalist nonsense they never agreed to, and they're right, they had no direct exercise of veto power.  People made this stuff up.  The UN framework.  They didn't ask us about ketchup either.  So many of them, only one of me.

The New York Times has given it some serious press.  It fits, it's news.  I operated the laptop (the olde Air) while Carol talked, mostly flashing up Wikipedia pages on the various treaties we went over: non-proliferation; comprehensive test ban; arms trade; and now this new one, with most nations supportive.

The discussion was lively, with our currently youngest attending member reassuring us there'd be other ways humans could commit mass suicide even without their beloved atom bombs.  As anyone who watched Wonder Woman recently well remembers, we have our gases and simple diseases.  "We" being collective humanity, some of whom we can't completely explain.

I helped field questions as Carol is hard of hearing, and I could repeat from up close.  She had a lot of information about the history leading up to this point.  She has a lot of perspective.  I invited her to bring up the Kellog-Briand pact, but by that time we were pretty think tanked.

My day was somewhat complicated in that I'm immersed in preparing a next lecture series, printed textbook, while plowing through a Coursera Mooc.  Dr. Harris I think it is does an excellent job guiding us through his Internet of Things world.  I'm talking to my Arduino.

At the same time, I'm bouncing down to the viewing room monitor and immersing myself in Gettysburg, a dramatic reenactment of a deciding battle in the US Civil War, a defining chapter in the region's history.  The topic is more than I want to dive into in the context of talking about Carol's presentation.

The conversation twisted and turned.  As projector operator, I could jump to my Photostream with recent pictures of a Little Red Riding Hood looking character, our friend and former house guest Lindsey Walker of Nepal, Oregon, Georgia, Florida (reverse chrono).  On her way to Corvallis.

Don reported on Steve Mastin's health and promised to post where we might visit him, given the weeks of recuperation he'll need following a medical intervention.  I think I know the place.  Not where Tom Connolly was, but a similar facility.

Gettysburg came to me from Glenn Stockton as a two-sided DVD and as of this writing I'm still on the Last Day. I've listened to a long commentary track full of illuminating insights from several perspectives (historian, director, cinematographer).

Lo and Behold (movie review)

This documentary by Werner Herzog examines the birth and evolution of the Internet from several angles.

The very first ARPA net Internet box, today enshrined as a museum piece at UCLA, was designed to be robust, yet its first communication on October 29, 1969, with Stanford, glitched on the letter G.  The first string being sent, character by character, was "LOG" but only got as far as "LO," giving us the Lo in Lo and Behold.

We've become highly dependent on our digital telecommunications networks, out to satellites. However these networks are poorly shielded against electromagnetic storms caused by either the Sun or by humans themselves, a frequently suicidal species (homicidal against itself).  Our way of life is always at risk.

Herzog also takes up serious downsides that have come with Internet technology:  addiction, new forms of illness, new threats.

Werner is a highly respected movie maker and parleys his reputation for access to some of the core gurus of our Internet age.  Great talking heads.

"Have the monks stopped praying?  They all seem to be tweeting."

Are tweets the new prayers?

Media Sphere

I'm joining much of the North American polity this morning, though most need to work, in viewing Congress deliberate, in the presence of private citizen Comey, formerly FBI Director, regarding what's up with the Russia investigation, which no one has any doubts about being real (and serious).

To that end, on the advice of various parties, I made myself a Bloody Mary (aka Headless Chicken), which in these parts is an accepted breakfast drink, even if alcoholic.  You'll find some good ones at Beaches, at PDX International, starting around 6 AM (I was sipping by about then too, and making a cheese, spinach omelette).

Per ritual, we're supposed to use Russian vodka, for irony, but I didn't have any handy and went for the Swedish brand, Svedka, I found in my downstairs closet awhile back.  Never opened.  I bought the tomato cocktail mix at the OLCC store on Hawthorne & SE 47th (Asylum District), McIlyenny Co Tobasco brand. Also by ritual we're supposed to chuckle "covfefe" or maybe use that as a toast.

For the last three days, I've been huddled in a cross-country (multi-timezone) session on Python3, what is it and how does it work.  Although European in origin, we don't say it's Russian in particular, given Guido is Dutch.  Yes, Python is popular among Russian hackers. My days in Moscow were pre Python. I'd like to get back now that we have this computer language in common.

I have an Ornery class on Repl.it (ignore modal window -- or sign up for a free scratch space) where I show how the puppet strings are connected, square brackets to __getitem__, curved parentheses to __call__, etc. I use my Permutation class for the same purpose: to show off Python's __ribs__ (the "stack of special names" grammar).

That immersive process, run in East Coast time, is over now, and I'm at liberty to join the Media Sphere this morning for some live, if tightly scripted, events.

OK, lets get back to the session.  I've heard all the opening Q&A, but there's still stuff to get.

Oh yeah, I'm watching through CBS News through digital broadcast. I also have the app.

Wearing my anthropology hat, I think a lot of these stormy seas have to do with ethnic clashes betwixt a highly oiled business machine mindset, and that of a government built around more transparency, even open source principles.  But then tightly controlled, private enterprises gobble up open source, and even contribute back.  Meaning I'm seeing a lot of complex merging here, the formation of new alloys (hybrid cultures).

Learning to Code

I'm back to code school teaching Monday morning. This next one is immersive, for adults, but not a boot camp.

In code school lingo, boot camp is about putting in full days at the school, assuming brick and mortar, not virtual. PDX Code Guild hosts those.  These run for several weeks, say twelve to sixteen.

However, many courses of study, from MOOCs (massive open online courses) to community college, are less intensive than boot camp, yet still immersive.

These code school boot camps don't seriously involve boots, unless someone happens to wear them. I suppose there's a pun in there somewhere, regarding self-booting computers, but that'd seem lame.

Teaching a computer language is not unlike teaching a human language, including music.  We sing a music called "ordinary speech" and don't call it singing.  Then we have other forms of singing, notated using musical notation in some cases, not that there's just one such notation.

Likewise computer languages notate what the computer will do, the programmer being less a player (the computer plays itself) than a composer.  To program is to compose.  Sometimes the movies get it wrong and show some hacker typing lines of code at almost superhuman speed.

On the contrary, programming tends to be a halting activity, with frequent breaks to pace, draw on a white board, consult documentation, doodle, sketch.  And right, there are many flavors of programming.

Python, one of these computer languages, has a grammar and vocabulary, like J does, another language I've studied (J is a close relative of APL's).  Python inherits from ABC, with an emphasis on the C (inside joke, in the sense of CPython, not to be confused with Cython, nor Jython).

We grow in our awareness of Python through (0) its keywords and the grammatical structures they form (1) its special names, sometimes known as magic names (2) its core builtins, standard library and 3rd party modules (namespaces).

Namespaces build out the vocabulary, but in your core Python, you get the full grammar, a way of fitting puzzle pieces together.  Then it's just a matter of adding pieces, while continuing to use the same grammar.

Because of this difference between grammar and vocabulary, also real in human languages, it's possible to talk about mastering basic Python in three days of immersive hands on study.  That's not a lie.

People thinking one could never learn to play a musical instrument that quickly are correct: developing those reflexes takes a lot longer.  Music is played against time, at a fixed rate, and that's more like dance.

Programming is slow, with lots of "thinking about" and pausing, so it's the analogy that was maybe misleading.  You don't have to memorize all that much either, to master the grammar.

A vocabulary is like a shop talk.  Think how long it takes to develop familiarity with a tool set, such as for maintaining and repairing bicycles.  The heart surgeon has a tool set.  These are shop talks.  In learning Python, we're not learning to be bicycle mechanics or surgeons.

A computer language may have magic in it somehow, but that doesn't put it outside the natural limitations we're used to among human beings.  Step one in becoming a programmer is maybe setting aside certain stereotypes and misconceptions that only make the prospect seem more daunting than it is.

TeleRama

I woke up concerned about how to cross STEM with PATH, the meaning of each letter.  If STEM sprouts an A, turning to STEAM, should PATH cross on the A instead?  I always say "A is for Anthropology" knowing the Art folk may object. But what if we have a second T and make that mean Theater, as in screenplays for television.

There's an almost conscious effort to pry "programming" (as in television) and "programming" (in code) apart. We're too close to "brainwashing" though that's what it is, and really, what's so bad about mental hygiene. Why not turn it over to professionals, right?

Anyway, having watched the only two seasons of the critically acclaimed Dollhouse, I used non-AI sources to suggest additional TV series, netting Chuck, Veronica Mars, and I Zombie.  I'm sampling the first two.  The Movie Madness computer claimed to have all three, however Chuck was filed before Chicago PD under Millennial TV Heritage.

Back to Theater and multi-tasking, and the need for retakes.  Live theater requires rehearsing the whole thing a number of times, unless it's improv. I'm not the expert.

Computer programming is similar in that once you get a working copy in the can, you can put the code into production and watch it do its job.  Recorded media are reassuringly deterministic, even if the circumstances in which they're played may not be.

Philosophy
Anthropology
Theater
History

Science
Technology
Engineering
Anthropology
Mathematics

Theater includes a lot of business management, workflow analysis, operations research and the like. We might introduce the idea of fictional versus nonfictional theater.

The two sets overlap on "A" because we're somewhat anthropocentric by nature, and need to keep the impact of our work, on our quality of life, front and center.  What are the opportunity costs that come with dumbing ourselves down?

Use It or Lose It

(Use | Lose)(it: any) 

Yes, that's a cryptic title, too cryptic in fact, for Blogger to wanna let me do it.  Use It or Lose It, where "it" my be anything, as in "any type of object". I'm not using the syntax of any real language that I'm aware of, although | ("pipe symbol" -- named for Bob's) has routinely meant "or" in many authoritative postings.

The "it" of this afternoon is getting on the Internet from some public mall with lots of sign-in opportunities, including a few without passwords.  Is this the official Lloyd Center hot spot? At Pycon we had FBI-Surveillance-van as a hot spot option (though I think with some auth).

At first, given the request for a texted code, I inadvertently got the smartphone on the network instead, so then tried to forward the laptop through a Bluetooth connection, no dice.  You might say "why trust public wifi?" but then I know about https and so feel that I know the answer.  Lets see if this posts...

I don't think the title is what's bad. Something lower level. I changed it anyway. A physical spider has been crawling my screen, a small green one. I let it alone. Even saving doesn't work. I think I'll jump to another network.  It worked when I came back.

On Facebook this morning, I relayed the fake news that the Committee on Taxonomy and Terminology has officially revoked our "sapien" status, as in "homo sapien". After further study, we are deemed to be "homo machinus" instead.  Hey, they demoted Pluto, happens to the best of us sometimes.

Philosophy of Science

Terry Bristol treated us to a lecture on intellectual history, using a big picture "macroscopic" approach. I brought my mom to this last Linus Pauling lecture of the season, and maybe for good, we don't know. Terry has a busy schedule.

My work takes me to Pycon, starting up this same Thursday, although I'm writing this from the following Monday's perspective.

The mind-meld (the seque, the synapse), twixt Pycon and ISEPP, was pretty smooth, in that software engineering blends with all kinds of engineering, just as computer science blends well with all science.

Terry maintains a somewhat insider "science versus engineering" thread, using these as two poles around which to organize different paradigms.  From outside his philosophical namespace, such a distinction might seem nonsensical at first, but that's how it is with namespaces: they may take awhile to penetrate (decipher).

I was please to see Terry's bringing in Vienna Circle thinking, even with his Karl Popper background. Popper disciples tend to be rather suspicious of Wittgenstein, but Terry is living proof it's possible to leap that fence.

Mom is somewhat hard of hearing and bleary of sight, needing new glasses, but in the darkened church was able to puzzle through the quotes pretty well.

I extol the ISEPP lectures, happening since the 1990s, in my Tying Off Loose Ends video presentation below (embedded Youtube).

Pycon Begins

Walking in, I spied Guido immediately, which makes it official, then I registered, no lines, the Oregon Convention Center seemingly almost empty but for the geeks around tables.  Looks are deceiving however: they're all in tutorial sessions, with lunch about to start.

I'm taking a low key approach this year, haunting the periphery more, checking out open spaces, or such is the plan.  In years past, I've been ravenous to not miss a thing.  Designing one's own experience is an art.

I grabbed a Max at the Hollywood stop, leaving a car.  I have a gig co-teaching at Laurelhurst PPS back near where I parked it.  Then tonight, rather than attend the Intel sponsored soiree, I'm heading into town for an ISEPP lecture, Terry Bristol presenting, Carol Urner (MVP, mom) joining me.  This is the final lecture of the season and will there be another one?

In my May 5 lecture above (embedded Youtube), I exult about the ISEPP Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series and all the great minds it has brought to Portland.

Tomorrow the conference starts in earnest with the opening keynote and lots of talks.  I'm in one of the tutorial rooms as I write this; Applied Modern Cryptography in Python begins at 1:20 PM.  Maybe I can sit in for forty minutes to an hour, before grabbing a Max back to Hollywood.

A threesome next to me is yakking about the concept of "duality" as relating to topology and polyhedrons. I must be in the right place, huh.

At lunch I met a chief of Visual Studio documentation. Microsoft is making Python a top-level citizen in the VS ecosystem, meaning a direct install option.  That's CPython, not IronPython or Python .NET as some call it.  The consensus seems to be:  we use Python for machine learning and data analysis. Windows has also made it easy to install a bash shell.

A reason Python might be considered a "glue language" is it's bringing all the platforms together. One ring to rule them all...

Neil Raja, whom I know from Flying Circus, was haunting the hallway track. We ended up at an Anaconda workshop together, about dask, an open source project enabling the use of pandas (a set of data structures) across multiple gigabytes relatively painlessly.

David Koski is flying in Sunday afternoon. I'll be transitioning between Python world and Synergetics world.  Glue language.

Changing Channels

I accepting an assignment in Sellwood, given Monday evenings have cleared and I'm not anxious about traffic. Sellwood is on my side of the river anyway, and it's the bridges that are bottlenecks, especially with the Morrison still closed.  I'd never been to this picturesque little neighborhood school. We did a lesson on functions.

The debate on functions on Math Forum has been a little bit interesting but I just don't find much contemporary thinking going on, meaning I need to change channels.  I'm stagnating on math-teach.  Maybe switching back to math-future would be good for me.

Pycon is coming right up.  I'm also expecting a quick visit from my partner in arms David Koski, who is celebrating Finland turning 100 years old this year, same as AFSC.  David and I received that Synergetics Explorer Award back in the 1990s.  I've been living off the lump sum ever since (just kidding).

The new playlists on Synergetics I put out have been percolating through social media.  Osmosis is our friend. I notified many of the key players by Twitter, more to document my having done my part, regardless of how the network responds.  I'm upholding my end of the bargain at least.

In the last few hours I've taken a brief vacation from nonfiction to advance through Season One of Dollhouse, which came out quite awhile ago by now.  We're Joss Whedon fans in this family, when it comes to fictional storytelling. However that doesn't mean I'm always able to stay up to date.

Bardoville

Glenn clued me about this performance.

I was some concerned I'd not be able to fight may way back to my zip code in time (Asylum District), given rush hour traffic and my plan to wait it out.

After McKay Elementary (my assignment) I popped in to Shiraz Grill for some gyro, then migrated to McMenamins on Scholl's Ferry for pint number two, followed by black coffee. I got back to the hood right on time. The Facebook timeline has more of the details.

Bardoville was in a small church-like building (ParaTheatrical ReSearch PDX) buried in the Foster neighborhood, one of Portland's last traditional holdouts, still funky and unspoiled by the upscale franchises, unless you count Roundtable (I don't).

The wraiths writhed in the foreground, in black leotards, going through all the emotional states, while a priest with a blow dryer (religious prop) did his best to officiate.

An author, with his proverbial desktop and typewriter, bottles of beer and wine, broke in with his stream of consciousness, about this twilight zone between lives, pregnant with meaninglessness.

I think Bardoville might be a better name than Portlandia. It sounds less Utopian, and besides, there's more to Oblivion than meets the eye.

That's the whole point in a way: for something to constellate, you need a galactic soup like the Milky Way.

I wasn't clear if this troupe had come down from Seattle, or originated there awhile back. Glenn remembered them from Esozone in some way.

Quoting from the Southeast Examiner:

Alli, a professional astrologer, has authored many wild mind books on experimental theatre, astrology, and Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness.

Of the production he says: “The idea for Bardoville came about while pondering the current sociopolitical landscape and watching the world as I knew it collapsing behind me with the new world not yet in sight. This harrowing awareness reminds me of the Tibetan Buddhist term bardo which refers to the 49-day intermediary stage between human incarnations. As a culture, I think we are currently passing through a major bardo, an epic state between states, where the future remains unknown, yet also open to the potentials of creation.

We adjouned to O'Malley's, a neighborhood tavern, and watched the pizza guy make pizza in a most authentic fashion, sipping IPAs from Silver Moon.

Buddhist Ghetto

I consider myself lucky, fortunate, to live in what some call a "Buddhist ghetto". I learned that moniker from an Episcopalian at St. David of Wales. The phrase was not used with any malice or disrespect.  The parishioner (congregant?) was more demonstrating a kind of knowing awareness of neighborhood demographics.

My contact at Maitripa College was leading a guided meditation this morning and invited me to attend. I was happy to do so, not having set foot in this institution before.  We talked a little about Buddhism afterwards.  Serious scholars don't buy that "Hinayana" as opposed to "Mahayana" is a useful term.  I think the word "Protestant" sounds similarly condescending, as if "in order to protest" were this movement's defining feature (at one time maybe, but to be branded that way seems diminishing).

In any case Maitripa inherits mostly from Tantric sources, which goes by Vajrayana as well.  Having lived in Bhutan for some months over multiple intervals, I know more than average about the history. Bhutan is more "red hat" territory whereas the Gelug branch is more informally known as "yellow hat".  The Bhutanese Drukpa sect is considered a subset of Kagyu.

After my visit to the college, I stopped by the nearby Burgerville (Asylum District) for a seasonal strawberry milkshake (I don't drink milk often), then headed back to Harrison Street on my bicycle. Most of the rest of the day was spent studying programming, which is what I do for a living as well as for a hobby, a lot of the time.  I teach programming, even as I learn it.  In this case, I watched another David Beazley Youtube, from way back in 2013, when Python 3.3 was still the newest.

Mahayana Buddhism, if we wanna call it that, came up with the Bodhisattva concept, or so I was told. A Bodhisattva is a compassionate being committed to being more a part of the solution than a part of the problem.  The translation to "saint" and/or "savior" is somewhat inexact, given all the spins involved.  There's no guarantee any specific translation will work.  If we know how to get the eigenvectors and/or singular value matrix for some great translation, that'd be welcome, but in the meantime it's up to each scholar to evolve a private understanding, with public auditing.

Quakers tried to dispense with titles for the most part, opting for "roles" in relation to given projects or meetings, but occupied in rotation, not for life.  We each get a persona, a character to work on, an individual soul, as distinct from the body.  The idea that a soul is singular, or even exists in the first place, might be questioned, however in common language, we acknowledge "individuals".  Through individuality shines a guiding light, or inner light, according to Quakerism, which might translate as Void or Buddha depending on one's brand of Buddhism.

I like to use "void" in the sense of C or None in Python, given my programming habits.  Existence has no final "return value" in this picture, which I'd contrast with a more judgemental one, wherein someone's opinion ultimately decides on some Judgement Day, what the return value is.

For sure the Buddhist deities, such as we see them depicted, may come with an attitude.  They're not necessarily neutral in the face of suffering or evil.  Perhaps they're causes of same?  From a human perspective, we might think so I'd suppose.  Some forces seem unfriendly.

Deities in the Joseph Campbell and psychoanalytic traditions get to be eternal embodiments of various qualities, inheriting from the Greek and Roman pantheon.  Monotheism eventually eclipsed these polytheistic religions with the rise of the Jewish and Christian faiths, while preserving a sense of hierarchy and of lesser beings (angels, demons, human mortals and so on).

Code School Business

I introduced Wanderers to my topic with the write-up below.

During the presentation itself, I screened various learning tools I've seen used around Greater Portland, in connection with my code school work.

The slides merge coding with design work, as tool-making and tool-using is highly multidisciplinary.

What Does the Future Bode, in Terms of Learning to Code?

 The "code school" business is still shaping up in a rough and tumble world, full of uncertainties.

O'Reilly Media finally threw in the towel, closing its fledgling School of Technology. So then what happened to Wanderer Kirby Urner, one of the school's full time Python mentors (souvenir biz cards will be available)?

He's branched out into mentoring much younger folk, in addition to sometimes hosting a night gig for professional adults, off and on (a forty hour ordeal). He did a Python for Wanderers a few years ago, Allen Taylor attending.

Coding with Kids is the new company, based in Redmond, so you might be thinking Windows, but we use Chromebooks on resources in the cloud, what Kirby plans to project. After school, in schools (both public and private).

Given Kirby's unique perspective from the front lines, along with years spent developing curriculum for his Oregon Curriculum Network [1], we should get some interesting discussion going, starting with a 20 minute show and tell (projected) featuring some of the latest tools now in use in education. 

Presenter's bio:

Kirby is a former full time math teach (St. Dom's in Jersey City), text book editor, political activist etc., an early childhood denizen of Portland with an upbringing overseas (Rome, Manila) and a degree from Princeton (philosophy a focus).

He returned to Portland in his later twenties to met his late wife Dawn Wicca and raise a family. (ISEPP was one of Dawn's bookkeeping clients back in the 1990s). Kirby specialized in writing programs for nonprofits and for medical research.

 Full resume: http://grunch.net/kirby-urner

Want to optionally do some homework ahead of time? Read these to bone up on the presenter's views:

On Medium:

https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the-new-high-school-30a8874170b https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/the-plight-of-high-school-math-teachers-c0faf0a6efe6

Ongoing Debate @ Math Forum:

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2852324

[1] Oregon Curriculum Network
http://4dsolutions.net/ocn/cp4e.html
http://4dsolutions.net/ocn/
http://wikieducator.org/Digital_Math

Portland Design Week 2017

Continuing the theme of HP4E, Hexapents for Everyone, today was the long-awaited debut of C6XTY as a camera-ready product.

Glenn and Deke came over to my place for the occasion, with Sam Lanahan, the inventor, bringing inventory fresh off the ship from China, more on the way.  You'll be learning more about this invention in future blog posts.

Good catching up with Trevor Blake this week.  He knows my HP4E campaign from the "design science" angle as well.

Likewise in the spirit of Design Week, I was able to get the Raspberry Pi talking to the Arduino Uno, by downloading and decompressing a nightly build of the Processing development environment.

As mentioned earlier, I'm plowing through a MOOC on Coursera, about the Internet of Things (IoT).

Wanderers 2017.4.26

I've been shaking a cold since Earth Day, last Saturday. Peter, retired librarian, used to working with the public, says those cold viruses usually take about sixteen hours to incubate to the point of producing a notable physiological response, so the notion that I actually contracted the virus at the march, or later at the studio in Sellwood, would be pure science fiction on my part.

This morning's challenge was to ssh into the Raspberry Pi on the same network for file copying purposes. I was unsuccessful in entering a valid password, so had to venture to the basement in person to yank the memory stick, without ejecting properly. Yeah that sounds bad.  Psychoanalyze me why don't ya? So the point was to get anti-aliasing working better on these high frequency hexapents I'm doing for Glenn, a specimen above should be coming from Flickr.  How long did that last?

However the workflow, starting with Adrian's antiprism, through POV-Ray (the rendering software), ending in a PNG file, is supposed to go on to the making of transparencies. The shading or shadowing the ray tracer applies by default, is maybe command line turnoff-able. In lieu of that, I spent some thirty minutes dumping paint buckets (a tiny icon) of perfectly white paint (255, 255, 255), atop the bazillions of hexagons, a few pentagons.  Not that many actually. However I was at least forty minutes late to Glenn's talk, amidst other unrelated distractions such as forgetting where I'd put my boots.

Today I'm co-teaching in an elementary school and must remember to pack an HDMI cable, as that's our ticket to the projection screen, where MIT Scratch will be revealed to these second graders.  They're ready, having prepped with simpler games on the company Chromebooks. I wonder if we'll have enough mice this week. Tracking pad practice is important too of course.

Later, I'm on the Internet radio, closed circuit, with my highly qualified adults. That's a gig I've been hosting for awhile now.  The format is quite similar to what you'll find in my Youtube channel, with regard to Synergetics, say, except in this context it's all Python, from built-in to user types, callables (objects that "eat"), making your own, up through context managers, generators, the usual object oriented patterns, found in so many languages.

Last week I shared the news from Stanford, about Javascript replacing Java as an "intro to" programming language. Harvard's CS50 has been using MIT Scratch same as us, just for getting feet wet, before plunging into C and out the other shore (by week eight) in the lush jungle of Python, and other very high level languages. One appreciates the latter more having experienced the austere starkness of simply C.

Glenn has taken to coloring the hexapents to bring out patterns. I'm not going to recap all that here. He had a copy of Popko's book on the table, but didn't lug the Sloterdjik volumes I noticed.  He might as well have, but then pretty soon you're introducing a whole truckload of volumes, just for the one talk. Why should logistics be that hard, right?  The talk was well attended.  Barbara Stross, Milt Markowitz, Steve Mastin, Jon Bunce, Deke Bridges, Don Wardwell, Steve Crouch, Glenn and myself.

Learning Programming

I'm always learning programming, or "how to code", coming from several angles. I'm ever curious to learn more Javascript, what with it's being a moving target and now having Node.

I've always been a REPL guy, meaning I like my languages interactive. dBase was my home base for so many years, flavors thereof, up through Visual FoxPro version 9, a Microsoft product. REPL means Read (the user's command), Evaluate (perform said service), Print (share results), Loop (do it again!).

I'm not some super-duper programmer who quickly embraces new skills or whatever. I struggle to have a niche in some environment with a fast moving current.  Geeks have that constant battle to remain current in a few areas, while lagging in others, and foraying on ahead in yet other respects.

Tonight I focused on input and output through file objects, using JSON and CSV files for my main examples.  I had Facebook stuff about me, sucked from their API some time ago, now just a text fragment.  We played "Where's Waldo" against data structures.  Kinda fun.

Worldly Affairs

The Synergetics 101 playlist is complete at least for now. I've turned my thinking towards Synergetics for Dummies or whatever.  In the meantime, I'm content to watch imitators pick up the dropped baton and carry forward and/or jump on the bandwagon.

I spent some time this morning, in response to an email, researching InnerSource, which is now mostly what OSCON is about.

Portland, an Open Source capital, whatever that means, no longer gets to have OSCON.

Moving what used to be the Perl conference to Austin sends a new message.  Portland is no longer in the loop as much. I wasn't able to offer any suggestions.

My MOOC is going well. I finished the first week, however the way Coursera works my report on the "AI bicycle network" has to be evaluated by peers.

I've been talking to someone just recently in Shanghai and comparing notes regarding how cities now may provide bicycle transportation to people who don't want the headache of actually owning such a device.

Portland's system is not quite the same as Shanghai's, in terms of scale obviously, but also in many other ways.

What's going on in the background these days in the mainstream media is some cabal with a lot of friends in high places is going ballistic about stuff.  Literally.

So-called North Korea is angering to various species of control freak, as it might be a threat of some kind someday.

A high ranking Pentagon employee just decided to use that establishment's biggest non-nuke bomb on an enemy. They say that sent some kind of message to the defiant NK. I'm sure that will inspire more patriotism among Kim Jong Un fans.

Then of course many people watched the cruise missile show on CNN etc., with viewers invited to gather around the HDTVs in sports bars, and maybe cheer on social media. Many complied I'm sure, though some maybe more out of a sense of obedience.  North Koreans understand I'm sure.

Quakers don't usually find outward war either sexy or attractive, so in my Portland-based circles we probably weren't as glued to our screens as some.

We don't ignore worldly affairs though as the brand of Quakerism I practice is not about grooming Friends to become hermits, much as the Internet of Things is making such lifestyles more attractive.

I don't know who at West Point is in charge of teaching about literary movements and philosophy, American history. You can't really fight for a nation you haven't studied or don't understand.  I'm pretty sure they read Wittgenstein at least.

InnerSource means using a lot of the same technologies used by public developers, including version control, Agile, collaborative teams.  How open source gained so much market share in the first place is the subject of Revolution OS, dated by now, but still worth a look.

One may own a bicycle privately, and still choose to use a public bicycle routinely.  Software works the same way.  Many people who work on public projects and contribute their time liberally to such endeavors, are also hired guns inside of private organizations, where their work is appreciated by a smaller audience.

Data Science

Yesterday was bright and sunny, and I got out on my bicycle, first time this year. Today is dark and stormy, with 50 mph gusts, quite melodramatic.

I got data science on my plate, more specifically pandas, not the animals, but the spreadsheet on steroids built from NumPy, available in the Python ecosystem.

Last Monday (at the start of this week), I was reading in from roller_coasters.csv, from within a Jupyter Notebook.  I'll get a screen shot.

Note that multi-dimensional panels, with more axes than dataframes, are multi-dimensional in a somewhat different sense than in regular polytopes.  Sometimes just adding a metric (distance formula) is all you need to bridge a polyhedron to a database.

I've signed up for a MOOC as well, in order to squeeze more value from the Raspberry Pi in the basement.  I've got a sponsor for that one.

My taxes went in weeks ago, however I have some loose ends to take care of.  I need to get printer ink for the Epson (also a scanner).