News We Could Use

Stories we'd like to see:

• The Obama Administration today signaled its interest in Old Man River City as a possible public works project. Community leaders familiar with the design have been invited to the White House to discuss its prospects. Clearing the construction site could begin as early as next year.
  
  
• Sarah Palin acknowledged today that as former Governor of Alaska, she was quite familiar with the Bering Strait high voltage linkup proposal, but thought it needed more study. CNN will be running a series of special features focusing on the global electrical grid, its history and prospects.
  
  
• Google Earth has created a new data overlay showing electrical grid information. The recently implemented fold-out options show the entire Earth in one view. The Fuller Projection is one of several available.

• The NCTM has officially endorsed "tetrahedral mensuration" as a worthy topic for inclusion in K-12 mathematics curricula, based on results from several pilot studies, and expert advice from key professors.
  
  
• Students in Flint, Michigan will be among the first to test drive the XO3 tablet, the next iteration of the One Laptop per Child line. Company sponsors include a long list of familiar brands, including Kellogg and General Mills.
  

Reality checks: OMR is currently shelved and rarely if ever mentioned; Governor Palin and CNN never mention the Bering Strait electrical hookup (not the same as the Bridge to Nowhere); ESRI ArcGIS 9 includes a Fuller Projection but Google Earth does not; NCTM does do some "non-traditional" tetrahedral mensuration on an obscure web page; it's unclear if the XO3, with more skeptics than sponsors, will be available by 2012 (or produced at all).

Post Game

I'm not planning to analyze the Superbowl, which I saw quite a lot of, not even the commercials. LW was too busy working on her community garden to catch the game, but did confidently predict a Saints win, based on early season previews she'd seen at one of her sports bar music venues. I announced her prediction before the game, injecting a plot element.

Speaking of work, I missed most of the half time show, instead went off to a secure area to pace back and forth and call another attender in our Multnomah Friends directory, seeking more feedback on AFSC matters, given all these emails going around. I have some official duties to look after. Did The Who sing Won't Get Fooled Again? Apropos if so.

Earlier this afternoon I joined Overseers in slogging through a long agenda. Quakers work hard in their various jobs, take them seriously. These are stressful times for all of us, as we seek to find our way forward.

We met in one of the classrooms, the one with the Fuller Projection. The maps on either side have some features in common (a family resemblance): the National Geographic one to the left has no nations, while the older Mercator on the right is more drastically distorted.

The Fuller-Sadao projection is North Pole centric, which suits no one's political agenda all that much. This has always been an esoteric map; cool to have Quakers using it some, part of our shared heritage.

I encourage high school teachers to use it too. Tell some of the stories behind it why not? What's a projection? Which world maps are the most commonly used? What are their properties? Basic stuff, hard to justify bleeping over, if one takes geography at all seriously.

Google Earth and the various map engines get some focus here too, if the school has an Internet connection.

The practical matter of getting directions between points A and B, finding one's way about in one's own terrain, is legitimate geographic content and of immediate relevance to teenagers. We call this a "place based" curriculum. Around here, that means studying the Columbia Gorge, it's geological history, the dams, the grid they feed.

Yesterday morning I wrote another essay on this phi/sqrt(2) business, bussed it out to some influential contacts. I'm thinking we've got a discovery here, one that's accessible, doesn't take a fancy degree to appreciate. There's an audience for this kind of thing.

Yes, a little setup is required, like the shift into tetra-volumes, but then that's easy enough to grok, something we wanted to share about anyway. Then shift back to hexa-volumes, the well explored option, not about to fade out.

Should we compare shifting between 60-degree tetrahedra and 90-degree hexahedra to shifting between decimal and hexadecimal bases? Ten is a triangular number (60-degree), sixteen a square one (90-degree).

I also put in some positive words for WikiEducator, encouraging its use, given the discussion on edu-sig (Python community) has returned to open source curriculum writing. That's what Wikieducator is all about. The new WYSIWYG editor makes it even more accessible. Getting started is a piece of cake. Master the intricacies as your schedule permits.

Does anyone disagree there's a trend here? Academic culture is updating its code of ethics to accommodate self-correcting copying and transmission (tcp/ip). We've been hearing this at conferences for years, so it's not like I'm reporting breaking news. Withholding vital information from needy students simply goes against the grain of a university, religious and/or secularist.

Over on math-teach, I've been enthusing about Dr. Chuck's contribution (University of Michigan). He's adapted an open source textbook that's already been through a number of changes. This is how teachers may expect to keep pace. Find some freely available raw materials and add value, engage with your peers.

I often tell people I communicate by blogging, but hey, what are cell phones for, if not to make calls during half time? Blogs have limited appeal, as do computers in general.

This was not at my place, the private residence where we congregated around an HDTV. Three of us piled into a car to get there.

I enjoyed meeting some older guys I'd not met before, including a taxi driver on break in 3rd to 4th quarters, grabbing some coffee and pie, heading back out.

On screen now: Metropolis (original version, 1927, Tower of Babel part -- I came in late). Yes, moving imagery has come a long way since those times, but in another sense not so much (the special effects are pretty impressive and intense in this black and white classic, the musical soundtrack just adding to the eeriness).

Speaking of tetra-volumes, David Koski has been busily dissecting the four hexahedra that make up the rhombic dodecahedron. The vZomes are pretty clear, although I abet with my cube of magnetic Mites.

Three half-couplers do the job, giving each a volume of 3/2. He's getting into the different permutations of As and Bs, a topic at the heart of Synergetics. Maybe I'll follow up on that soon.

Posting to Wanderers List

[hyperlinks added]

I appreciate your comments below Allen.

The problem here is we're all POWs, prisoners of wars we can't seem to get out of. It's not just a matter of a few people suckered in by video games.

Ironically, I think some people in the military are acutely aware of the problem, as they're trained to think about security and there's nothing secure about trashing infrastructure and wasting fuel when the world is in dire need of both.

What's missing from today's "civilization" is any shared vision of a positive future. Some of the oil rich states are attempting that, but so far it's just a playground for the rich disneyland vibe, not dissing Walt as I think EPCOT was a bold vision, before it got dumbed down and renamed to Epcot....

Keith's mega-projects are at least positive and philanthropic. Fuller's idea of Old Man River City was certainly apropos after Katrina, as it was built on the model of a huge sports stadium (domed of course).

However, given the investments that were never made, the only recourse was to use actual sports stadiums, a disaster. The stark contrast of where we are, and where we could be if not hell bent on squandering, is what we need to focus on, with an eye towards getting back on track.

What it comes down to is investment i.e. where do you put your energy and time. If there's not a positive future vision out there, then people default into fear, fall victim to fear mongering, which fuels investments in those very technologies that further deprive us of hope and options.

Where do I put my energy and time? Good question. For what it's worth, I've been collaborating on getting the Synergetics entry more fleshed out on Wikipedia. It was languishing as a stub page, and before that as a footnote to a different Synergetics entry (Haken's). Feedback welcome.

Kirby

http://www.bfi.org/?q=node/411

Notes from Lunch

I was just having lunch with Arthur Dye, whom I meet with periodically. We caught up from both sides to some degree.

Arthur is interested in the homelessness situation, especially along SE Belmont, has been looking in to what Methodists might be doing. I filled him in on how the art community, the musicians specifically, have been responding. Lindsey is out delivering a shipment of camping supplies, UPS delivered to the Laughing Horse collective just recently. Muddy Waters (soon to close) and Duke's Landing are among the dots of light in this network.

We went over some of AFSC's recent travails. Arthur's view is the Vietnam Era was so horrific, so unlike anything the agency had hitherto encountered, that it may not have recovered fully, is still crippled. Quakers were picketing their own meetings for refusing to declare Nixon a war criminal.

Anecdote: when Richard Nixon was newly out of the army, first running for Congress, his mother Hannah phoned the then director of AFSC and conveyed her concerns, that her son was drinking a lot and had become a warmonger, and could you, Clarence Pickett, come out and talk to the guy. Director Pickett got out there by train (Philadelphia to LA is a long way) and indeed had two days with Nixon. However, shortly thereafter, Pickett died of a heart attack in San Francisco. No one knows much of what transpired during their visit.

Thanks to the Laughing Horse connection, I've seen a whole lot more American history, up close and personal in documentary form. Were I a degree-granting institution, I'd give myself one or two, as this has been a crash course and not especially easy to digest. Recent history is still not a mainstream topic, as Colonel Fletcher F. Prouty points out, in connection with the U2 for example. It's easier to fight about Darwinism and global warming, than it is to really look closely at one's own recent past.

"Nixon" has been among the examples of proper names going by on the Wittgenstein list, where Sean Wilson has been leading a thread. I chimed in with some stuff about EPCOT. If you're already steeped in this literature, you know that Saul Kripke writes about "Nixon" sometimes (as Google will disclose).

In terms of where Quakers might be going, Arthur had brought along a recent story (December 2009): Quaker Indian Committee disavows Doctrine of Discovery affirms Declaration. Said doctrine is a product of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Episcopal House of Bishops had already voted unanimously on their "Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery" resolution, the House of Delegates likewise repudiating said doctrine by a strong majority, during their 76th General Convention in July. The affirmed declaration (in the story's title) is the UN's on human rights.

The Parliament of World Religions in Melbourne, Australia (December 3-9) provided another networking opportunity, for those working this angle. Both the Anglican and Catholic churches have been called upon to respectively rescind a 1496 charter, and repeal some papal bulls. These are rather esoteric back office doings. I wouldn't expect to read much in The Oregonian about all this, but maybe in the Metro section some Sunday.

Quakers have a long affiliation with Native Americans, even though Pennsylvania was to some extent expropriated or commandeered. Power sharing continued, with Quakers then losing some clout by staying loyal to the "Indians" resisting war taxes to fight their friends. Arthur and I had both read the same Catholic pamphlet on this topic.

Arthur also reminisced about Floyd Schmoe, who spent much of his life working on behalf of Japanese families during the internment camps fiasco. Arthur remembered attending Floyd's 100th birthday at the meeting house in Seattle. Floyd had noticed the grass hadn't been cut and was working the lawn mower, making the place look nice for his party.

Speaking of Quakers and lives that speak, my mom Carol Urner and I were talking recently, about a productive meeting in Whittier. An Islamic bank in that area, operating by different rules, is doing fine as an institution. There's nothing to keep various types of bank from sharing the same infrastructure, plugging in to the same grids. This idea that it's either/or, when it comes to banking, is bogus. Diversity is what banks themselves preach (as in "diversified portfolio").

Wanderers 2010.2.2

We're a packed house tonight. The talk is on Spirituality & Religion. I was thinking it was on the Parliament of World Religions, but that will be another time. Milt has just the one slide.

Bill Lightfoot, my uncle, and maritime scholar, is here with me tonight.

Milt Markewitz is our presenter. He's somewhat the Jewish mystic, a Qabalist in some ways.

Bill and I had a good dinner at Bridgeport Alehouse, catching up on family in Bellingham. I talked about my search for a new line. We agreed that I'd likely do best as some kind of teacher. What school would have me though?

We floundered around, sounding a lot like philosophers. Wanderers have some rarefied views. Abraham Lincoln came up a number of times, as our most deeply spiritual president. I am reminded of president Obama's making a connection to that guy (rather deliberately and intelligently I thought, with that bible and all).

I was quite vocal, in my one interjection, in identifying Planet Earth with Israel, as in "promised land". Israel is not some little patch of dirt, a few state rooms on the spaceship. That's ridiculous, no? More PR for the PL. No one disagreed.

Of course my party line is consistent with the "desovereignization" meme. Buckaneers, like pirates of old, take nation-states with a grain of salt. They come and go don't they? Planet Earth, on the other hand, has a relative immutability about it.

Sometimes it pays to look past our superficial differences, especially if we're claiming to some sort of spiritual adeptness. Nationalism is not the highest IQ ism, let's at least be clear on this obvious point.

I spent much of the evening gawking at Bill Sheppard's creation: an 8088 assembly language program for looking at medical imagery. He'd been trying to decode these dcm files, in which lossless JPEGs are embedded, but hadn't found the right open source utilities to decode them.

I was also treated to a Google Widgets Toolkit medical database application. The maintainer, using the Eclipse environment, maintains some clear Java, at which point the GWT machine converts it to Javascript for client-side execution. What I think Wanderers needs to do is start a university of sorts. We have the talent to staff it up pronto, that's for sure.

Happy groundhog day.

Cosmic Accounting

We're hearing a lot about the massive federal deficit again. The deficit adds to the debt, which is more massive yet. The exponential interest on these amounts is supposedly the inheritance of future generations, meaning they've been effectively robbed of opportunity even before birth.

Not every economist has the same model of the global economy of course. The more realistically minded do remember to credit the sun for supplying our planet with a steady inflow of energy. Calling it "cosmic accounting" makes it sound too hippie or something, but we're really just talking about thermodynamics 101. Planet Earth is not a closed system, and anyone who tells you otherwise needs to do some more homework.

That the sun is driving vast energy cycles, which in turn drive a lot of our engineering, really has to be on the books somehow. Earth is like a nonprofit in getting this grant income. Some call it "surfing the solar gradient."

Economists with little training in science forget to link wealth creation to natural phenomena, especially extraterrestrial phenomena.

A gigantic fusion furnace, bathing the Earth in free power, just doesn't get much notice in these economists' bookkeeping. Out of sight out of mind.

We should divide economists into two camps: those give the sun credit for sponsoring our economy, versus those with no clue.

Next time you listen to an economist or read one's analysis, see if you can figure out which pigeon-hole to use.

Power Lunch

I am grateful for my friendships. I learn a lot from them.

Thanks to Ron, I'm now downloading Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade files on Sun's VirtualBox, newly installed as a guest operating system under Win7. The laptop is to my left, connected by ethernet on my home office subnet. I'm staring at Old Faded, my refurbished monitor (less frills than even at Free Geek around here some days (Ron and I used to work there together)).

This has been finals week for my daughter. She's off with her friends celebrating that it's over, in the neighborhood.

I thought Lionel's latest contributions with the Wikipedia page were substantive. Koski thinks we've done a professional job. Everything CJ Fearnley added is still in the mix, along with my earlier edits. I'm not thinking so much in terms of a "fork" as a "merge" at this point.

I'm scanning the horizons for breakthroughs, thought this virtual convergence of math teachers looked promising. Real work happens through cyberspace, even if we don't get to move in to our virtual classrooms. We still need to feed, shelter and clothe ourselves. Education Automation (an old title, not unlike Skinner's Walden 2 in some respects) requires logistics on the ground.

Recapping Some Threads

I brewed up a tempest in a teapot last year, on both math-teach and math-thinking-l, focusing a lot of attention on what I was calling a "digital math" (DM).

Then I'd wonder somewhat wryly if we were really up to implementing such changes in "the lower 48", implying Alaska and Hawaii might be leading the pack in this regard.

I also campaigned for using more electronic media in place of wood pulp textbooks, as more environmentally friendly and easier to correct (update, fix, otherwise improve).

Well, I certainly got some feedback, and I've needed to revise my approach.

For one thing, "digital math" is just not conservative enough for most teachers. "Discrete math" sounds dry as bones maybe, but at least it's a recognized topic.

I filed an update to math-teach earlier today, with a note to PSF members just to let them know I'd mentioned Python Software Foundation in passing.

My little media campaigns aren't widely reported on or repeated in any case, so chances are none of this was on your radar (dear reader) unless you've been tracking these blogs for some reason, or dove in through Twitter or Facebook.

Getting more computer-savvy math courses, both inside and outside the 50 star states, remains on the agenda for lots of groups of course.

A goal is to reach out through teachers to a lot of underprivileged, not make this just be about elite schools pulling even further ahead.

Experimentation and innovation is the name of the game. Will we be able to engender the right spirit? What gets people in the mood to try new approaches?

What sponsors want to step up to the plate, put their brands on the line? Is this really about the government doing everything, while private industry kibitzes from the sidelines?

Anyone with semi-romantic ideas about capitalism should be arguing otherwise no? Industry leaders are wanted and needed on this one, both domestically and overseas.

Forging Ahead

:: 61-axes by vorthmann & hart ::

The Wikipedia project has been going OK (SNEC helping). I did some editing from Laughing Horse Books last night, after accompanying the collective on a recon mission under some bridges: the camp near Mercy Corps had been swept recently -- means the police had cracked down. Dignity Village and most shelters are full (need some new ones?). Met up with a church team from Tanasbourne, compared notes.

More editing today from Urban Grind. Then back to the Flextegrity workstation, keeping on keeping on.

Koski and I have both been focusing on great circle networks. He's got zonohedra and zero volume hexahedra to think about, some Pascal's Triangle rule.

I've been revisiting Fuller's trying to superimpose his A module's plane net onto his 120 LCD triangles, a result of spinning the icosahedron around its 31 axes.

David writes:

"Fuller states two possible icosahedra from the VE so 2*31 axis = 62. The whole enantiomorphic thing. Then adds the 25 great circles getting 87, but it is noted that the 3 and 4 axis of the VE are redundant, the three is part of the 15 axis and the 4 is part of the 10 axis in the five fold. Since he had doubled the 31 great circles he reduces the 87 by 14 to get 73; (3+4)*2 =14."

He's referring to this well-known figure (in geometer circles): Fig. 1132.01B.

More threading going on edu-sig, debating ghost policies regarding whether math teacher trainings through community colleges should be "objects first" or not. In Japan maybe? Intel says it's releasing funds, but money for STEM is like black ops sometimes. Where did it all go?

Like how many young women are getting some digital math in their schools, thanks to any kind of stimulus, public or private? Give us a breakdown by zip code area, thanks in advance.

Wanderers 2010.1.9

We're going around the table introducing ourselves. Our guests are from Borneo. Bawni (male engineer from near Kota Kinabalu) and John Paisley. Here's John's thumbnail autobio:

BSEE '87, came to Portland that year to work in test and measurement at Tektronix which lasted for 5 years when I discovered I'm terminally self-employed and went back into residential construction. Presently owner/president of John Paisley, Builder, Inc. I've worked with The Borneo Project since '95 protecting indigenous peoples' land rights from timber, mining, and other extractive interests, through projects such as community mapping, longhouse construction, village scale microhydro, solar-powered, satellite-linked internet at remote villages, and preschools for Penan (an exceptional group of hunter-gatherer nomads).

We have a therapist and zoo guide visiting with us tonight. She knows about orangutans, which is what took her to Borneo last year. She and I have chatted before, during the Appreciative Inquiry seminar.

I made a quick trip to Frys this morning. The Win7 laptop had a loud and vibrating CD/DVD drive, but seemed to work, until I pushed it to a limit, in trying to read an Ubuntu 9.10 iso. It burned OK, but would not read it, even though my desktops would. Frys graciously exchanged it. That's good, as this is a work machine. The 150 GB backup device came in handy.

Patrick and I were looking at Beautiful Soup at Angelo's this evening. This cool guy engaged us in talking about gauges versus metric. Turns out he's a glass blower and has this cool Youtube about trying to "blow lava" (as if it were glass, which it sort of is -- Pele's in this instance).

Small villages in Borneo, using micro-hydro for power, do manage to gain Internet access in some cases. Bringing in trainers helps minimize the negative effects of future shock. The communities retain control over their own adaptation process and that proves a more satisfying and sustainable process. Kids don't need to trek off to school, learn right there in the village -- a valuable development.