Cramming Again

"Cramming" is a term used by Global U students when feeling up against a deadline to produce in some way.  In my case, we've just finished Session 8 of 10, adding to a 40 hour course on the Python computer language.  That's just one of my gigs.

Once mastery of core Python (keywords, builtins, special names) has been achieved, we branch out in two more of the five dimensions: Standard Library and 3rd Party.

A fact of life in the high tech world is we're awash in toys but with little time to play with them, someone's idea of a joke perhaps.

Like, Python is cram packed with interesting little gizmos, feats of genius, and future generations inherit a goldmine of possibility.

We only have time to mine a little in our day.  Mostly we're running from negative phenomena, many of them self inflicted.  Humans are not on the side of humans.  The movie Wonder Woman looks into this.

Heading up the Python tree, a first branch is into web development.  Are we behind an HTTPS / HTTP server and if so, do we also need a database?

Web servers have become the way to share files.  You don't even need a landing page for human eyeball browsers.  Your clients are other computers and they're hungry for JSON, not HTML.

One of the most used web servers in this regard is the Jupyter Notebook server.  Most researchers install it locally and serve themselves, from localhost:8888 or one of those.  In this case, we do want HTML, but also a running kernel capable of interpreting language X, which might be Python, but could also be JavaScript or SQL.

Given the Python marathon, and all my recent victories around Synergetics, I'm content to post less to math-teach and more to the Python websites, regarding the explorations I've been undertaking with D. B. Koski.

He takes the LCD triangles (spherical) of the 31 great circle Icosahedron, which relate to the 25 of the cuboctahedron, and turns them into plane nets about four modules:  the E (each a 1/4 slice of the 30 rhombus 120 LCD triangle Rhombic Triacontahedron, radius 1); then: Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum (taking pronunciations from the fairy tale).

A shared edge of the Fe and Fi, which latter has E's volume "phi down" (phi^-3 scale factor), has a length we've taken to calling the S Factor, likewise the ratio of VE:Icosa both of Jitterbug fame, and of S-to E-mods (S/E): about 1.08.

The icosahedron embedded within the volume 4 octahedron, of edges 2, from whence the S modules are carved, has edges that same length?  I hadn't tuned that in.  I'll use Python as a kind of spreadsheet, or dataframe, to explore more in that direction.

In this way, I'm able to keep my fingers on a keyboard, composing with mathematical concepts, while staying in shape for my morning and evening seminars, not to mention the time in schools.

I'm a big believer in a varied diet, so I'm not painting the above regime as some frieze of the rest of my life.  However, I think having coding and/or geometry as a frequent mental activity serves the same role as walking a mile a day or visiting the gym.

Use it or lose it right?

That's what the professors really mean when they say "publish or perish" as usually how we know you haven't lost it, are using it, is we get to peer review.

The S Factor should not be confused with S3, Fuller's published constant for volumetric conversion between a Cartesian XYZ cube of edges sqrt(2) i.e. sqrt(2)^3, and an IVM-based cube with the same edges, but embracing a different "unit of volume", in this case a 2-edged Tetrahedron.

Thanks to a theorem, the IVM volume (tetravolume) is of said tetrahedron-embracing cube is 3, giving 3 / sqrt(2)^3 as our S3 "currency conversion" ratio of about 1.060660171779821 (as computed in Python), see Table 986.209.

982.32  The cube formed by a uniform width, breadth, and height of sqrt(2) is sqrt(2^3), which = 2.828428. Therefore, the cube occurring in nature with the isotropic vector matrix, when conventionally calculated, has a volume of 2.828428.

An interesting discovery of Koski's regarding S3 is it's also the ratio of SuperRT / VE, i.e. the classic D-edged VE of tetravolume 20, in a Jitterbug relationship with D-edged Icosahedron, when multiplied by S3, gives the volume of the RT formed by said Icosa and its dual, the Pentagonal Dodecahedron (we call that SuperRT, "phi up" from the 120 E-modules RT).

:: left to right: Fum, Fo, Fi, Fe ::

Wanderers 2017.10.17

I got Sellwood Middle School's guest Wifi unblocked from MIT Scratch web services.  That means I won't need to use Verizon for my Show & Tell station.

Now, hours later, I'm at Linus Pauling House. The house WiFi is down, perhaps by design, as I don't think external groups rent the building, whereas tenants supply their own?

Glenn is talking about collagen, macro-molecules, and new article in Nature:  Patchy particles made by colloidal fusion by Gong, Hueckel, Yi and Sacanna, pag 234, Volume 550.

He keeps up on multiple sciences, as sometimes only a layman can.

I say "layman" thinking back to the old E.J. Applewhite business card.  He thought this was a clever title.  I thought so too.

We're passing around the magazine.

Back on Verizon.

California Burning

Santa Rosa is ninety minutes south of here by commercial airplane.  I've made that trip a few times.  The airport is named for Charles Shultz, author of the comic Peanuts.

Oregonians got a taste of wildfires this summer.  Californians are suffering far more devastating damage.

I'm patched in through Internet, watching reports, getting news through Facebook. 

I learned this morning that one of my friends lost his house, made it out alive.

Bladerunner 2049 (movie review)

Welcome home to a dystopia we know well.  Los Angeles is more a melting pot than ever, and there's an LAPD. However there's no real sign of national governments, only Sony, CocaCola, Peugeot and restricted air spaces. We're in the mind of Philip K. Dick, or some facsimile thereof.

Sony has been researching hologram technology for some time now, in addition to acquiring digital rights. Here we get Elvis as a ghost in a dead casino, and Sinatra under glass.  The protagonist's girlfriend is a hologram.  But then he's not all there either, a synthetic human.

When we're able to simulate reality and use it to manipulate emotions, we tend to get lost in our own creations. Hollywood knows a lot about that.  Are we real, or are we Memorex?

There's a problem with science fiction though, which is we're so used to screen magic that we're not able to tell if these holograms are any closer in everyday experience as commercial products.

Some viewers may suspect Sony is sitting on some ability to generate building sized hologram ballerinas.  Most won't.  We've given up waiting for holograms at Best Buy much as we've given up on jet packs, as a part of that ever retreating mirage called the future.  Flying cars, yeah right.

The replicants aren't sure what's a real memory and what got placed there by clever advertising. Did I really have that birthday, or did they just stick it in my brain TV?

The protagonist, bred to think clearly, to do detective work, as a better grasp on the unreality of it all than most.

Wittgenstein Synopsis

Wittgenstein wrote in his introduction to Philosophical Investigations that it'd take a culture that "breathed a different air" to find his philosophy understandable.

Perhaps we're now in that culture, as understanding now spreads.

Brought to you by Operation DuckRabbit.

Busy Week

I'm super booked this week, having committed months ago to an east coast timed Python training. I just completed Session 2 of a west coast timed training about an hour ago.  I get to snooze a few hours, then dive in again, using a somewhat alien control panel.

Then it's off to Sellwood to launch a new Learning to Code program, the groundwork having been laid by parents, guardians, coworkers, school staff.  Then there's MIT Scratch and Codesters, the star e-toyz of our show.

Carol, in the meantime, is enmeshed with Friends on the UN Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty, which is up for signing. Thanks to many media still taking most cues from DC, a lot of our people don't even know the history.  They learn to switch media if wanting to follow developments.

Quakers and the USG have been on opposite sides of "abolition" before now, with some politicians able to think ahead.  Lots of medical science reminds us that nuclear war, even just preparing for one, is toxic and unhealthy.  We lose IQ.

Carol, a member of WILPF, is working closely with PSR as well.  This alphabet soup may not mean anything at the outset, but a quick search will get you in the loop, if that's where you want to be.  Some loops are intriguing, like Hyperloop One, whereas others are more noose-like, as useful as a dead albatross.

Also I'm on the warpath for C6XTY, an abbreviated way of saying my ethnic group has some strong biases in terms of what curriculum upgrades we need.  Getting those upgrades implemented may appear to be happening despite "over my dead body" style resistance, hence the warpath metaphor, suitable for "inward weapons" oriented Friends.