Puttering with Sympy

 

A synergeoist on Synergeo wondered by what factor we would scale the icosahedron of edges one, to give it a volume of 20, i.e. what would the new edges have to be? 

We think of the Jitterbug Transformation and how s_factor = jb_cubocta / jb_icosa (snake case) i.e. jb_icosa times s_factor takes its volume from 18.51... (tetravolumes) to 20 (ditto). 

In other words, the factor in question is a 3rd root of the s_factor, since the latter scales volume, meaning its 3rd root is our linear multiplier.

The s_factor appears again when we morph the icosahedron into a cuboctahedron by a different route. Start with the icosa with faces flush to an octahedron's.  Rotate the tilted triangles to a minimum volume 2.5 cuboctahedral conformation.  Two applications of 1/s_factor does the trick.

More About Branding

Today's lunch conversation was about the physics of consciousness.  That's become the field.  I've questioned the priorities there, as a kind of psychologist, as what we need help with, as a faculty, is the unconscious.  Everyday dream time awareness, so-called consciousness, is something I tend to scoff at (just kidding).

Anyway, what kind of "psychologist" do I suppose I might be?  Do I hang out a shingle somewhere?  In the 1980s I think it was, the philosophers thought they might do this, making the claim that what ails people is more metaphysical than merely psychological.  

I could see the appeal.  Philosophy has been on the self help shelves in the past.  Stoicism and so on.

No, the psychology of individuals was my focus in the past, as a reader of Freud and like that.  Adler. But mass psychology, whatever that means, is more my focus today, and that means marketing and advertising, lobbying and propaganda i.e. changing the collective psyche i.e. politics.

Yes, I've called myself a lobbyist.  Once I realized the political process had a hand in determining curriculum, somewhat shocking to realize at first, I jumped into the business of pushing discrete math.  This had to do with high school level topics, and whether delta calculus would maintain its same level of dominance.  I posted tons to Math Forum about it, before the public forums were canceled.

But then of course Oregon Curriculum Network is more niche market than that.  Under cover, I've been an agent for Python Nation, not that our legals at PSF think there is such a thing.  

Guido's term as benevolent dictator was more tongue in cheek, somewhat mocking actual dictators.  That's true of Python Nation as well, similar to Rogue Nation (a brewery in Oregon) in taking the claptrap, the pomp, of nation-states, and using it for branding.

What's a nation-state, or a religion for that matter, beyond a brand?  One could say the difference is immeasurable as a brand is nothing without a substantial subculture to back it up.  Betty Crocker.  McDonald's. 

Exactly.  Ethnicity matters.  You need those subcultures.  The US had its deep believers in democracy.  The flag decals wouldn't mean anything without those old timers.  Other ideologies would adopt them.

Advertisers who believe in the Holy Ghost (a Zeitgeist) have an edge, one might believe, as a matter of faith. Or call them propagandists, as the Catholics do, or did, when everyone important spoke Latin.

Hollywood will tell you it's all show business.  I'm not saying that I disagree.  The show must go on.

If physicists want to be the next priesthood, or maybe that dream has come true already, we should get them involved in the treatments.  Help us with the mental health issues, war a chief pathology.  

That means curriculum development.  That means programming, as in television programming.  

But then television doesn't mean what it used to mean, either.  The internet (tcp/ip) has created the new groundwork.

I work at being a nationalist, a patriot, but for Python Nation, a science fiction virtual nation the PSF doesn't necessarily believe in.  That doesn't mean I've abandoned USA OS (my idea of a democracy, based on the one that died in darkness).  

I think we need practice in re-basing our nationalism in the cloud, more like the religions have done (the more successful ones).  

Cloud-based nationalism helps take the stress off the planetary ecosystem, freeing it from service as a mere backdrop for our nationalist fantasies.

American Polymathy

This notion that we should divert attention back to the Platonics and sister polys, has a few champions in every era, however the question is what have we new to say about this vista? The theory of Regular Polytopes was nailed down in H.S.M. Coxeter's book by that title, anchoring a consequent literature of n-dimensional graph theory, or topology we might as well call it.  Don't we teach that already?

That a next American pragmatist, literally an inventor, would present with a lot of new chatter about polyhedrons, was not necessarily a welcome development in Europe and/or the UK, except in rarefied circles.  Germany and the Bauhaus School still had a history of architecture to tell, and the geodesic domes had to be part of that, tracing to the Walther Bauersfeld planetarium on the roof of Zeiss company headquarters in Jena.  RBF could remain "an American architect" who popularized dome designs.

The graph of famous inventors in structural engineering had to include the man who patented the octet truss, popularized by other architects and likewise researched by A.G. Bell, the telephone guy.

Peter Sloterdijk, the famous German language contemporary philosopher, embarked upon his Spheres trilogy: Globes, Bubbles and Foams (each a volume), with our American scattered throughout, a vertex oft returned to.  That work, like Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era suggested the architect-only view was far too narrow.  

RBF was in fact a polymath whose cross-disciplinary forays were a way of unlocking new synergies.  A pure mathematician might look askance at the tensegrities and wonder at their entanglement with physical forces.  A physicist might wonder how RBF could be anything but a crank if he actually believed in ESP, which he seemed to.  The risk was opening the philosophy department to ridicule, whereas it had already settled on its particular risk avoiding canon.

On the other hand, history moves on, and in the rear view mirror we have more thinkers to accommodate. What looked too embarrassing to include in one era, becomes embarrassing to exclude in a next. A survey course in philosophy without Bucky, is getting to seem like a survey statistics course without Bayes. The priors have changed, as the machines keep learning.

What was new about the polyhedrons had to do with the simplex, the regular tetrahedron in particular, and its ability to divide evenly into the others, volume-wise, even more successfully than the cube, the new "volume three" in this system. 

An octahedron with the same edges, is four times the unit volume, a rhombic dodecahedron six times, with its long face diagonals our unit tetrahedron edge.

Although the logic was there, and the context (closest packed geodesic spheres in a lattice, the octet truss), it was elementary, more like Wittgenstein's remarks on the foundations of mathematics.  Words like "concave" and "convex" and "spin" came in for grammatical investigation within a growing web of semi-tautologies, metaphorically cast.  Synergetics would have the hallmarks of a philosophy, and that would take some grappling with.

However the Continentals and the Analytics were both averse to this new American Pragmatism -- a lineage uncoiling forward through Rorty's work (one of my profs) -- but for different reasons.  

From Europe's point of view, America had outlived its role as an exotic upstart, a revolutionary presence, and was settling into the familiar mode of Roman imperialism, a model dear to many UKers but not one to admire or take instruction from. 

Why rock the boat with a retreat to Transcendentalism, with which this new flavor of pragmatism was blended?  Why think like Thoreau or Margaret Fuller, and question an expanding empire?  

Phrases like "legally piggily" (a whole chapter in Critical Path) melded with critical attacks on lawyer-capitalism and specialization itself...  how could such writings be good for the establishment?  

The mythos and ethos here, questioning authority at every turn, was more hippie-bohemian, even if somewhat engineering-savvy, and therefore too counterculture for any aspiring button-down corporate culture, what many universities aspired to be at the time, and still do to this day.  Yet Bucky always dressed like a banker.

Had the new language games with polyhedrons been buried in a jocular Scientific American article, say by J.H. Conway or Martin Gardner, and filed under recreation, then the spark might have more easily spread, but perhaps fizzled much sooner.  

The problem people had with this philosophy is that the new casting of the polyhedrons in a nested arrangement was supposed to be significant to children and to the future of humanity.  It was supposed to be important, and dared to clamor for attention.  

Teachers did not want to positively reinforce this message as it was subversive to their ongoing dismissal.  "Don't encourage disruptive behavior." "Ignore attention-seeking behavior."

The prospect of introducing some positive futurist science fiction within the core curriculum would have many implications and the easier course was to keep the lid on these developments.  Elon Musk proved disruptive in this regard as well, even if his plans were less grounded in a philosophy.  People were dreaming about the future again, and contrasting that with what the politicians felt able (i.e. unable) to deliver.

The chief advocates for introducing these education reforms no longer had their charismatic leader and their army seemed tiny and unimpressive, almost invisible.  The juggernaut of mainstream philosophy could afford to dismiss this new philosophy as irrelevant, therefore, at least for the time being.  That seemed to be the thinking, looking back.

German Pseudo Science?

Is racism a holdover from German pseudo-science?  People try to make a race out of everything, confusing DNA with ethnicity.  The two could hardly be more different.  Hardware is one thing, software another.  But then software makes sure hardware counts for a lot, in terms of how the sorting algorithms work.  "What race is he?"  

It still sounds out of line to reply "I don't keep track of races" as people think that's a claim to color blindness, as if one were literally unable to pick up the RGB value of someone's skin tone.  Well, put in those terms, maybe I am color blind, as I'm not "perfect pitch" going from an observed tone, to the actual catalog combo.

"He's what people call Black" is better, and for sure he has dark skin.  But then so do people considered "not Black" by some.  The use of the word "colored" never really went away, but became People of Color.

Anyway, the short answer is no.  German pseudo-science was bolstered by the eugenics movement, which was strong in North America, to the point of making laws.  Insofar as "racial purity" might be a thing, the eugenicists and the KKK had a leadership position.  

As an elitist, I might say the bottom half of the Bell Curve believes in races, but that wouldn't be an IQ curve.  A lot of people who do well on standardized IQ tests nevertheless believe in races.  One's ethnic conditioning is "orthogonal" to one's IQ, is how someone with a high IQ might put it, using an ethnic (as in niche) way of talking.

Some ethnicities obsess about race more than others.  To obsess about race doesn't mean admitting to being racist.  Few people I know would go with the definition:  a racist is someone who believes in races. That sounds as wrong as: a nationalist is someone who believes in nations.  "Of course we believe in races and nations.  That doesn't make us racist or nationalist."  That would be the mainstream view.

HB2U Carol Urner

My mother Carol is sleeping most of the day away in the living room.  She slept through last night in this chair, me on the couch.  We talked at around 4 AM.  I sent an email to Alex and went back to snooze mode.  She knew it was her birthday at that point.  I'd also wished her a happy birthday at midnight.

As the day has gone on, she has had well wishers come through.  Eileen Gannon, Beth Read, Lucinda by phone.  Julie, Carol's daughter, is here for the occasion.

I'm on the hook to dive into numpy and pandas this coming week.  I'd started out hoping I could warm up with my 8th graders, but when they say "algorithms + data structures" they mean CP (competitive programming).  Anyway, I've filed my flight plans elsewhere, like on edu-sig.

Carol has been a lifelong peace activist, ever since she found out about radio-toxins in the milk (Strontium-90?). Her life, like mine, was against a background of endless wars.  Being a peace activist feels like working against the gain, and yet humanity seems to yearn for an opportunity to express itself with greater glory.  Maybe not against the grain of human nature after all.

I inherited a belief in non-violence as a way to go.  I stayed with Quakers, although I resigned membership in Multnomah Meeting at one point.  I wanted to pioneer the role of attender, and took it all the way to clearing people for membership.

I left a message with Sonya Pinney regarding it being Carol's birthday.  She called back a few minutes later. We had a good talk.  The Pinneys and the Urners were among the original families to express themselves in the form of Multnomah Meeting, some generations ago.  The meeting overlapped with Electroscientific Industries (ESI) in terms of facilities:  ESI sold its old factory to the Meeting for a dollar.

Machiavellian Country

On my end, the Orwellian Memory Hole theme (see previous blog post) resonates with the "verboten math" meme i.e. a strain within STEM that we'd maybe be better off not considering, if we want a career with the big guys.  Whom to salute?  In civilian life at least, that's not often so clear. 

Actually, I'm not entirely sure how to characterize the threat, or call it the risk, to one's reputation, and then there's always the other side of it:  what risk is one taking by overt obeisance to some status quo rule makers?  Will these be the administrators going forward?  Much to think about.

Academics might rib each other for past citations i.e. if Mein Kampf was a book you cited often, approvingly, in service of your own views, there might come a day when your peers gave you flak for this chapter.  I'm thinking of how professor Kaufmann was pretty unmerciful when it came to interrogating Herr Heidegger, while standing up for Nietzsche as having nothing to do with Germanic fascism.

Back to those toeing the line, being good minions beyond a safe pull date: a published disavowal might have helped notify the world of a change of heart.  But maybe you weren't sure at the time that it would help, and so on. 

In retrospect, you (not pointing fingers, if the shoe fits) played your cards rather inexpertly, but then so did a lot of people.  Factored in to one's playbook are one's predictions of who the winners and losers will be.  One gambles.  One might be wrong.

"Throwing one's lot in with" another is like "hitching one's star to" in terms of comparable idioms. 

Then there's "riding the coattails of" which comes off as more minion-like.  

The winning team appoints its own to the coveted desk jobs around town.  That's not scandalous or unusual, but evidence the system works as designed, assuming the power to overturn administrations was a built in feature.  

Monarchies may, in contrast, may have a hard time scripting their own demise, lets admit the obvious, not that orderly transitions haven't happened, in cases of an heir apparent.  Dynasties are certainly a thing.

Allegiances and loyalties, expressed or implied, are what we're talking about here.  Machiavellian Country.

What's true in our case is our subversive author was never entirely purged from respectable publishing, thanks to some anticipatory efforts by the Bohemian generation, in collaboration with Boomers in many cases.  

I'm thinking about Lars Müller Publishers, for example, still actively tapping the "verboten" roots of our counter-culture (cite Private Sky etc.), continuing to bring a positive futurism to light in fresh ways.

When I talk somewhat tongue-in-cheekily about our not indulging in "EU metaphysics around pi" i.e. concerning the "real numbers" (their theoretical foundations), I'm circling the wagons, so to speak, and protecting my West (the Americas) from the undue influence of Continental beliefs, religious and otherwise. 

We'll study their beliefs, sure, but not necessarily at the expense of suspending our own.  Our practice of globalism need not imitate theirs either.  

As an Oregonian, I'm not into picking elective fights with my counterparts in the Stans, for example, let alone in Persia.  The Pacific Rim is pacific for a reason.  We don't behave like we're a part of some Atlantic alliance, nor would it be a dream come true if we did.

Excavating Orwellian Memory Holes

Snow Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frequency in Synergetics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ruminations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti War Warriors

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pi Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homework Marathon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Workshops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Senator

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

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

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

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

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

Boot Camping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disambiguation

 

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

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

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

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

Happy New Year 2021 - 2022: School of Tomorrow

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

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

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

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

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

Some resource hogs are hell bent on continuing to waste.  

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

Opportunity Cost

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

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

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

Out to lunch in other words.

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

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

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

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

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

Metropolis (movie review)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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