Object Oriented Thinking

I was hanging with Deke (@dekebridges of Twitterverse) the other day.  You don't get 50K followers or whatever it is by being a bot.  Deke is a Penrosian Node in a non-computable space, a neural net given over to meme filtering, amplification, and propagation.  He's an instrument of the Zeitgeist.

I'll call him Lawn Mower Man for short (just kidding, insider allusion).

The thing about Deke is he likes Wendy's and one in particular.  He's brand loyal, to this instance (the special case), and to the class or template, the species.  This is Python talk, the computer language, just like Java jive at this level (Smalltalk, C# or whatever).

There's the pie-in-the-sky Platonic Wendy's in a Platonic strip mall (which need have nothing to do with stripping or strip bars, no need for see-no-evil monkeys to avert their eyes), and then there's the actual brick and mortar on-the-ground site-specific Wendy's, which typifies the ideal in an actual instance.

It's a Wendy's with a self, to continue the Python talk.  And it's not just a mindless affiliation in Deke's case.  He sincerely likes the chili f'rinstance.

Anyway, as we were driving around he suggested we might stop at Wendy's.  I said "I'm a Taoist, I don't fight the Way, when with Deke, go to Wendy's" and we did.

Deke just called.  Gotta go.

ISEPP Kick Off: 2013-2014

Terry picked a great speaker to kick off the lecture season this year.   Eric Drexler is a clear thinker who really helped get the ball rolling on nanotechnology.  Skip Rung, ONAMI director, gave the intro for obvious reasons.

Drexler was very aware and conscious of this being a Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture.  Not all of our speakers take that so much to heart, and they're not required to, but it so happens that "nanotechnology" was greatly aided and abetted as a field by the work of Linus Pauling.  Eric tried to convey how some people become so important and pervasive in their influence that you don't directly name them anymore.  Speaking of which, I think he managed to not say "fullerene" the whole lecture, though nano-tubes and graphene were key themes.  We don't have to cite Newton every time we use the word Gravity either.

What happened to nanotechnology is that the term became highly politicized, such that Eric has to do extra work up front to carve out the space that most interests him:  the space of building very tiny nano machines, like with gears.  These would work together in nano-factories to produce nano objects by the billions.  This kind of thing already happens in the electronics industry.

We're already surrounded by nano-devices and maybe don't call them that.

The future is bright, in terms of "more with less" continuing to mean something.  It twas a "Dymaxion Evening" with "dymaxion" being Fuller's coin for the "more with less" concept.

Eric's chart about exploratory engineering reminded me a lot about my GST "limits of language" poster.  He colors in a "forbidden zone" where realistic science fiction cannot tread, more the realm of fantasy.

However even within the "allowed zone" one might boost living standards to a point where the "war no more" people had a winning hand.

Silent Running

The above screencast, by David Koski, was meant to have sound.

He narrated over the phone what was going on.

I thought I could keep it in my head, but the zig-zag pattern of three tetrahedrons in the frustum is frustrating to memorize.

Start with ye regular old tetrahedron then move a face outward from its opposite vertex to make the edges phi (1.618...) times what they were.

The three zig zag tetrahedrons inside are now 1/phi, 1, phi in ratio, where 1 = the volume of the original tetrahedron.

You may generalize this result to non-regular tetrahedrons.

Related reading:
Constructing the Desert Tetrahedron (Dec, 2013)
Multiplying Desert Tetrahedron by PHI (Dec, 2013)

Before / After

:: before ::



:: after ::

Pacific Islanders Meet

For those unfamiliar with history, after Washington, DC imposed its post WW2 victory and Pax Americana in the so-called American Lake (the Pacific), it proceeded to betray a lot of peoples, starting with

• the Vietnamese whom it sold out to its former colonizers after getting Ho's help against the Japanese
• then the Filipinos, whom it liberated only to reimpose a heavy hand (having enslaved the Filipinos in an earlier chapter) and then of course
• the Pacific Islanders, who saw their homelands turned into a nuclear testing range, with entire islands obliterated and/or rendered uninhabitable, while generations were subjected to previously unknown levels of long term low level radiation, the effects of which are still making themselves known.
  

This evening, a group of Marshall Islanders got together in Portland to reminisce and celebrate small victories.  DC had taken away their eight year driver's license, treating them as "undocumented" on their own islands.  They got that overturned.  Now they'd like their medicare back.

Their major atoll, Kwajalein, was taken over by a culture-crushing, despotic military, the same one that destroyed, and/or pushed to the edge of extinction, so many native American cultures.  DC has been lying ever since, about the true magnitude of its ecocide in the Pacific.

Getting that City of Morons off the backs of free peoples in the Pacific is a worthy goal, but is difficult given DC, like Rome before it, counters open defiance with brutal aggression. 

More effective:  laugh at DC behind its back and work around it.

Private corporations may be effective as DC understands and obeys those with means.  Money talks to politicians even when few others can make sense of what money is saying.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, "if money could talk we would not understand it" -- unless privy to one of the code languages the monied use amongst themselves.

Carol was too busy packing for her semi-annual migration to make this event, but I had Giff Johnson sign a copy of his book for her.