Back to School

:: pooh gets a bigger brain ::

For context, we were seeing a Planet of the Apes situation developing in western Asia, with various groups clinging to statehood amidst missiles flying in every direction.  The whole idea of "sovereignty" was going up in smoke.

More people escaped Gaza than I'd realized (still not nearly enough), but there'd been no cruise ship convoy nor other highly visible rescue effort. Most of the evacuation was under the radar and largely unreported 

A similar exodus from Lebanon is happening now, as the Netanyahu regime extends its carpet bombing campaign to more cities and towns. Not that Israelis are staying put either. When the missiles start flying, civilians leave in large numbers, if allowed to.

My code school colleagues (Python, data science etc.) and I are these days gearing up for another cohort. I haven't been actively instructing a cohort in awhile, but the workflows are not unfamiliar. I'll have time to get ready. This is not my first rodeo.

Of course the notion of statehood isn't about to fade overnight. The plot line axis hinges around "globalism versus nationalism" where there's some attempt to map these terms to "left versus right" respectively. 

Radical lefty libs like Soros & Son versus righty tighties like Trump wanting non-porous borders, and the freedom to not be pawns within globalist agendas. That's a gross oversimplification of course. This much is sure: there's no way to avoid acting locally, whether or not one is able, or wishes, to think globally.

As an Epistemology group member on Facebook, I recently questioned the whole idea of "left vs right" as "too low dimensional" invoking the notion of Principal Component Analysis. Even Myers-Briggs, akin to Cambridge Analytica's fave personality test, has more than one dimension.

Why do people take it for granted that the terrain we're dealing with is a simple left vs right one-dimensional line? Data science is all about not imprisoning one's thinking inside decrepit obsolete models.  Are we so one-dimensional in our thinking?  

My Princeton prof Walter Kaufmann did not think Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) was that great of a thinker, but then it doesn't take a genius to realize the English language is garbage, out of the box, when kept to factory defaults, but is potentially expressive once fine  tuned. Wrestle with your native language if your goal is to be a philosopher.

Western Metaphysics

More Escapism

RT_E

RT_T

Both RTs have a unit radius IVM ball inside, but only the RT_T is small enough to let it poke through. The RT_E enwraps the uni-ball completely, its body-center to face-center radius matching that of the ball's exactly.

The workflow or pipeline I'm employing is an old one for me, in operation since the 1990s, using POV-Ray the whole time as my final rendering engine, and Python behind the scenes to write the scene description language.

The above eight lines are sufficient to generate all of what's needed to get the above RT_T graphic. Note the 0.9994 which students of Synergetics also learn as an algebraic expression.

A question I get is what does it all mean? 

I usually say it means we have a ladder in spatial geometry for becoming more advanced at CAD (computer aided design). 

Fluency in right-brained spatial imagery is an end in itself, or one could say a skill that comes in handy along many walks of life. 

The ladder is accessible to middle and high school level students, with elementary school segments as well (e.g. All Sixth Grade Assembly).

At the college level, we're talking about America's leading positive futurist, getting smeared and then memory-holed by the Grunch, a monster he helped to foster. 

The fight isn't over however. As Bucky spelled out in Grunch of Giants, a mytho-poetic and prophetic work, the front lines run through our colleges and universities, with some presidents having the guts to allow deeper dives among faculty, in response to student demand. We want our positive future back.

The Global U is coming together, helping to fill the power vacuum left by a fading nation-state system, with the Middle East already in the blender. 

Even as I write this, we're seeing Bibi quit the UN after lecturing legacy diplomats about how he's surrounded by non-nations he doesn't believe in (Jordan, Lebanon...), mere lines in the sand, against a backdrop of targeted explosions and terrorism among the well-armed paramilitary gangs. 

The political data layer is in turmoil, as people try to wrap their heads around the new post nation-state status quo that pertains therein. These gangs help themselves to factory-fresh inventory, amassed and allocated under the cover of nation-state decals, as politicians on the take grease the skids. That inventory proliferates and propagates in a free market, as economists predicted it would.

That means Refugee Planet is here, and is going to need more asylums, places for people to go who aren't wanting to participate in all the outward violence. 

Even soldiers, most of them economic refugees themselves, stuck far from home thanks to low living standards, are not always on board with the oligarchic mafiosi. 

Getting bossed around by privatized criminal syndicates takes some getting used to. One must overcome any sense of patriotism or honor.

Prompt:  Uniformed soldiers and other economic refugees from many countries gather in a playful Epcot-like village featuring high tech yurts and electric ATV vehicles.

Oval Office

Prompt:  The White House tour guide explains to tourists, by pointing to a diagram, how the Oval Office is meant to resemble the human skull in cross section, a secret teaching about the inner president within each one of us, a secular picture of a high position with lots of overview and supervisory powers.

Safety Nets

 

AFSC Stuff

I worked with Martin for many years via AFSC here in Portland. Mostly I was a program clerk meaning the token titular Friend meant to help with the curriculum, which in our case was youth oriented and started out as a way to address tensions between two demographic groups in the high schools: Latinos and Asians. They had other names for one another. Our program was named LAAP (Latin American Asian Pacific program) or something like that.

Another role I played was as apprentice contributing editor for Asian Pacific Issues News published out of our Portland office. Towards the end, I was briefly editor in chief. This newsletter is today very hard to find, a collectors’ item. We used it as currency to exchange for similar newsletters from around the Pacific Rim. We’d all read each other’s stuff, synthesize and summarize, and recycle. Such is a media ecosystem.

Why was I doing all this stuff? I had my skill set as a curriculum developer and had been sent to Boston to learn from an AFSC youth program there, as well as to attend Daniel Ellsberg’s Manhattan Project 2.0, about cleaning up post the original Manhattan Project (at Hanford et al).

Later, I tried to adapt my AFSC ideas, successfully implemented in the form of LAAP, staffed by two directors, one Asian, one Latino, to a different clientele piggy-backing on Glenn Stockton’s dream of an Institute of Integral Design. Glenn had enough skills to impart and inventory to share to fill a “maker space” (a term he despised — “maker” sounded too crude maybe, for craftsman). I would encourage learning moviemaking (skills I’d also like for myself)

For a short time, Portland AFSC itself was casting about for new digs, and we brainstormed this next chapter together (we had a committee). But the days of our youth program were over, at least here in Portland, and people moved on. Martin and I went our own ways but stay in touch over Facebook. I’m considered an AFSC Alumni Network guy.

I did have another AFSC role I should mention: as representative of our Yearly Meeting (NPYM), I was tasked with flying back to Philadelphia for annual corporation meetings. I’ve written a lot about those corporation meetings elsewhere, including when chronicling My Dinner with Kiyoshi (see comments).

Invective

Partly why my Pirate Party wants the USG to take more responsibility for schooling its own future officials, is leaving it to prep schools has been a bad idea by many measures. 

You get too many of these Elon Musk types who seem to assume their high status in life is God-given and well deserved, and that's why it's their burden to take the rest of us over some cliff or other. 

Victoria Nuland comes to mind, or Condoleezza Rice, or Madeleine Albright. I don't look up to these peeps as intellectually suited to their roles. But they managed to pull strings and get plumb positions, too bad for world history, looking back. Not to only pick on women: Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken... total disasters, from a USG point of view.

I think if the USG had boarding school opportunities starting for kids of a young age, not dependent on personal means or family finances, that we might groom (not a bad word) a cadre (not a bad word either) a cohort of future diplomats who were actually good at their jobs for a change, because of their well-conceived educations.

One obvious symptom of our weak privatized system is that big publishing can't turn on a dime, or even take off from a runway a mile long. The inertia is just too much to overcome. 

So whereas we should have been talking about America's greatest futurist subversive, Bucky Fuller, in the same pantheon as Martin Luther King, the only TV we got was either maudlin mourning or poking fun. Cry or laugh, neither serious.

NPR did a really terrible job with the Bucky narrative, botching the story completely. Given the high "spoiled brat" index of the people working there, that's not surprising. 

They didn't get any "Bucky math" in prep school and so assume there's no there there. That's the arrogance that comes with thinking your teachers really knew their stuff. Question authority more?

Anyway, I'm glad at least a few schools are showing promise this fall season (you know who you are) and we have some talent in the pipeline. 

In the meantime, we'll put up with Imposter Syndrome and pretend the USG exists, even though it doesn't for the time being. Uncle Sam is quite dead. In his place: the corporate version: shallow, vapid, devoid of real brains. A zombie. 

Patriots underground work on a next version of USA OS.

I just saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the Bagdad last night (crowded!), which might explain why I'm seeing Ghost House tropes in real life. The focus of that movie is phoniness versus what's really real. The difference may get pretty thin. 

When you've lost integrity as a being, a lot of automaticity kicks in and you find your life filling up with involuntary unfree responses. You start lip synching the party line and marching to the groupthink drummer.

Martian Math (update)

Martian Math has been heating up on the back burner. Now that it's "back to school" season, I'm pumping out the educational materials that any Silicon Forest teacher might need, to tell our history. 

Who was Doug Strain? How did his scenario overlap the AFSC's here in Portland (AFSC = American Friends Service Committee)? 

Answer: although Doug was a pacifist during WW2, a conscientious objector, he was not a Quaker, and yet he admired the work of the AFSC especially and so when Quakers needed a new meetinghouse, he helped arrange for that to happen, with AFSC gaining some office space in the process (from which it later moved).

That's Doug Strain of Electro-Scientific Instruments (ESI), one of our Silicon Forest parent companies.

Doug also funded the preservation and renovation of the boyhood home of Linus Pauling, thereby establishing a beloved landmark along Asylum Avenue (renamed Hawthorne Boulevard after said Asylum's head doctor), in the Asylum District where I live.

What I did today was add the above picture of AI King Hilbert (named for Hilbert Spaces) to the Storyboard: Martian Math album. I don't want my invisible army of Martian Math teachers (they might not call it that) to feel like I'm only catering to high schoolers and not taking it up to the college level.

When the Jesuits wanted to impress Chinese intellectuals with "best of the west" inventions, what came to mind was perspective painting, as perfected during the Renaissance. These canvases went hand-in-hand with another Jesuit-favored topic: the mnemonic arts. Memorize the floorplan of a public building, such as might be shown in a perspective painting, and create a VR experience wherein treasured memories could be represented as icons, and thereby organized on a "virtual desktop".

My understanding is the Chinese were skeptical that time-energy invested into realism was well spent, as paintings do not share the burden, later shared with photographs, of providing literal depictions of exactly what's present.

Without falling into a rift and debating these issues, I simply want to draw the analogy and say n-dimensional linear algebra is a technology around which humans are justly proud. They've made a lot of headway with their matrix-driven apparatus, including in the realm of metallurgy, where graphical processing units (GPUs) do matrix ops with blinding speed, allowing 30 frames a second and higher frame rates, computed in real time, within our computer games and simulations.

This pride will feed our willingness to devote considerable attention to conventional Hilbert Space presentations, in tandem with delving into the Martian stuff, with its four basis vectors at a mutual 109.47 degrees, ala the methane caltrop (molecular structure). CH4. 

Instead of XYZ and 3D space, we have the IVM and 4D space, but moving between the two has become smooth, owing to Qvector <-> Vector conversion algorithms. Qvectors are the 4-tuple "quadrays" used to map out the IVM, assigning unique whole number addresses to every CCP ball in the bunch.

Food Services (Global U)

When I want to model a minimal food setup, including for myself, I'm likely to think in terms of water (that's obvious) and Soylent, the white powder jokingly named, but also made of soy, so apropos.

In a place under siege, such as Gaza, it's not sufficient to have stockpiles of the powder, once the water goes bad. Brands like Nestles and Denali may come in too many small bottles, whereas the recipe at scale calls for tanker trucks.

What we hope and pray for, of course, are non-emergency situations. Two teams of scouts have agreed to a meetup, involving game equipment, say paintball, and for the duration of their engagement, canteens and or camelbacks of Soylent are all you get, in terms of nutrients. The point is to stay focused on the game and not get sidetracked into the intricacies of outdoor BBQ.

One may object to the cruelty of using humans as guinea pigs and I'd agree, assuming the collaboration of the humans in question is involuntary. In my own case, I'd go for days of only Soylent out of curiosity. Would my body die of boredom or send of signal flares in the form of cravings? I did not experience myself as self-hating. I was doing science.

What about pregnant women? Am I completely heartless?

Again, I'm more suggesting an approximation or simulation when it comes to Soylent, given the total calories per bag are easy to measure. 

We set up our Sims game "as if" they only eat Soylent, because we're in need of only so much realism, and no more. We keep the dry powder in sealed bags and add potable water as needed, at the point of service. 

Soylent users have been known to introduce alcohols at this point, to keep things lively and or to aid with sleep. If that's something we want to model, or experience for ourselves, that's an option. Again, coercion need play no part in this. I'm free to opt out.

Colluding on Confinement

When it comes to writing the historical accounts, I think we'll find it interesting that the Americans were calling for "a cease fire" but not for "an evacuation" even though Gaza was rubble by then, unlivable, outbreaks of polio.

 
Sure, it's an "open air prison" but you've gotta stay put, because we, the hand-wringers, the pearl clutchers, say so. Talk about collusion on genocide!

 
Obviously the denazification program was never completed in the American mindset. Ukrainians and Bosnians, even Syrians, got to leave the war zone. Palestinians though: they're supposed to love bygone olive groves so much that they'll put up with any amount of carnage. Stay in the cage with the rabid dog kids! They're nostalgic at gunpoint.

If I were a Palestinian, I'd use my sovereignty to get the hell out of there and never return. I'd have the right of return, but I wouldn't use it. Who wants to go back to a hellhole Americans worship as "a holy land"? Not me. I'll take New Jersey over Gaza any day of the week. But wait, I have no sovereignty, that's the whole problem. I'm supposed to just stay here and get bombed while the Americans fret and act stupid (what they're best at).

XREF:
Gazans to Guantanamo?

City of Morons

Why We Fight (movie review)