Making Movies

I just watched the commentary on the restored version of Metropolis that Glenn retrieved from our library. The story line followed is closer to the original, not the distorted and overly shortened version that got through the censors of that day.  

That's what adults have to look forward to regarding our time as well:  a less juvenile take on world events that we get from our contemporaries, who have little choice but to react from the hip, especially if not well versed in history and generic patterns ala GST and all the rest of it. 

One of the movies we're making is about Pearl Harbor, and the water table, the drinking water.  A Flint-like situation is starting to unfold.  That's a movie in the making.

We have uplifting films too, about true heroes and great ideas.  Lots of people are ready and willing to star in these productions.  Old Man River City comes to mind.

The idea that a UBI is "for nothing" is maybe too squanderous a vocab.  You're being paid to get yourself educated and on to the world stage as a persona.  That takes doing homework.  You'll be grateful for a safety net.  Perhaps your elders didn't have time to plan.  Some of them did.

We talk a lot about Bucky on my Youtube channel.

Applying to Tlon

I went so far as to zap a resume to Tlon, the Urbit hoster.  Coincidentally, they were looking for a copy writer with React.js skills. My inbox is always humming with job offers, none of them usually at all a good fit.  This one leapt out at me.

Although I've read up on React (the client Facebook pioneered to make their complex update cycle work), the better to teach at O'Reilly (this was years ago), I don't promote myself as a Reactionary (joke, they don't call themselves that, I'm pretty sure).  

The Angular people could call themselves Crooks (as in crooked).  Angular meaning "bent".

I'd say I submitted my resume as a sign of respect.

Although the world domination fantasy is always inspiring, it's the kind of self discipline / self mastery it takes to get there that's appealing, whether one ever gets there or not.  You get a great set of abs by trying (that's a metaphor).  My belly shows off that other kind of six pack.

Linux was the same way, the eternal underdog against the behemoths.  That's somewhat of a romantic telling, as the giants got on board in the Giant Wars.  IBM wanted its revenge against Microsoft, which had veered away from OS/2.  

More to the point, when you're a behemoth with expensive proprietary products (e.g. Tivoli), what you want most is for your clients to run a free open source operating system (low barrier to entry) with no vendor lock in.  All the better to lock them in then.

However Urbit doesn't need to dominate the world any time soon, in order to start making a positive difference in the world.  The joy of Hoon + Nock is you get to think like a computer scientist.  

You have a binary tree in your head as you code ("the subject") and your tiny set of nock codes go against it, computing the effects of your Hoon expressions.  I've only climbed this steep learning curve for a week and already I feel smarter.  Wing expressions.  Runes (like bar-tiz or |=) for starting a generator of one arm, i.e. a gate i.e. a (battery payload) cell.

The effects get applied, in an atomic manner, and your whole machine is now updated, shades of Smalltalk, with its self-saving image.

The new media campaign is around the Crystal Ball Sequence, at OEIS, which links back to my websites. The idea is public schools with sufficient imagination to live up to our American heritage, will also share it (and by American, we're free to mean planetary, the same way we mean Chinese or Russian in the Global U).

Virtual. USA OS.

Some of the Urbit nouns seem to be German.

I already feel somewhat on the hook to a queue of clients and don't think my resume will actually percolate to the top, what with 18 other applicants, especially sans a cover letter, but I'd clear the decks and dive deep into React should a tour of duty call.

Back to Day Camp

We got a ton of boo hoos and bemoanings, of time lost and skills wasted, especially from two income families, which is most of them.  Not all of them get to keep their Zoom jobs, nor the kids.  Enough "remote time", back to school.  Good news for all.

Except a tiny minority of kids had some interesting adventures from the safety of a Zoom job, which is what we gave them, in place of classroom TinyDesks [tm] and a storage locker plan.  They got to be more like adults and in many cases got exposed to more real world relevant learning, sans the bullying, sans the insipid nature of the day care center's fake school.

Now I'm only using that language to empathize with that tiny minority, who had a good experience trying distance education.  We're told the vast majority hated lock down (who wouldn't, that's prison talk) and now have a built in reason to need remediation going forward.  The ones who thrived are not the ones making news, that much seems obvious.

As a teacher during that period, I went from middle to high school level in a hurry.  Drilling down in Python the way the schools envision, in big computer labs, in the day care setting, is different from staying home in a privileged nerd cave with high bandwidth.  We were clearly happier here, with our JupyterLab dashboard, in the high school of tomorrow.  I could use the same pedagogical techniques I used with adults, and andragogy often makes good pedagogy, I think any Muppet lover will tell you.

Some kids have continued with day camp, putting in nonstandard hours and not riding the bus everywhere.  Having kids off the streets, in cubicles, learning, more hours of the day than not, might be a good use of cubicles, if we ever decide the TinyDesks [tm] are not enough.  Shared MakerSpaces.  Elevators to classrooms on other floors, for when debate teams meet.  But debates could be on Zoom as well no?  When exactly do we need an auditorium?

I'm saying only a minority of education planners are given skyscraper type buildings to think about, as mixed use structures.  My model is more people spread about around town in more traditional dwelling units, more like the one I'm in, where the giant walnut trees fall.  High wind today.  One fell.

Machine Unlearning

Is tagging by race for ML purposes itself a racist practice, by definition?  ML = machine learning if you didn't know.  In my subculture, that's a given.  ML has taken off in recent years, refueling the dream of RI (real intelligence) ultimately emerging from AI (artificial, phony or mock intelligence).

I'd say in the neural nets of real humans, tagging by race was caught up in self fulfilling prophesy (or poetry -- Paine) of a religious nature, regarding the "place of each race" in some cosmological caste system. Without mechanized agriculture or quarrying, the vast resources had been commanded under threat of a whip in many cases.  Cosmologies (background programs) needed to support that status quo.

Per the book Caste, India's social engineers and Jim Crow have a lot to talk about, in terms of comparing notes.  May the civil rights movement in India continue on an enlightening path.  Obsolete stereotyping is the root of almost all evil (falling behind), whereas sensitive discernment of relevant traits is by definition not obsolete.  The advantage is in having the right models.

The Tower of Babel was the anchor for many civil warriors, up to the "confusion in tongues" part, which people tended to misinterpret from their bully pulpits.  God used extra- and/or epigenetic (outside chromosomal) reprogramming techniques to fix a major bug of the Noah Era.  The bottleneck of Noah's Arc had given rise to groupthink and monoculture, and to an idiocracy expecting its reward in heaven based on some taller-is-better ideology-architecture.  God again saw a need to intervene. Humans were still in fine tuning phase in the Book of Genesis.

Thinking in language runs "a miracle a minute" compared to the miraculous mutant-based morphing associated with geological time DNA coding -- unless you're a bacterium or other such simple-tiny self propagator.  

Humans were split asunder not along genetic lines, but into their philological flows, which helped create the impetus, the mutually frustrating pressure, to wander far afield and start fresh, creating new versions of everything:  New York, Nova Scotia, New South Wales...  

The student body diaspora would eventually spread around the world and finally get that the campus was spherical.  A self conscious humanity would become a university of the meek, humble in its obvious ignorance.  Score one for God then.  The jealous angels could not say "I told you so" that quickly.

The whole US Civil War mentality started falling apart with the continued evolution of mechanized sea, bus, rail, and air travel.  Spaceship Earth became a nomad land, as its next generations of people, with their light-to-dark sun-blocking skin tones, resettled the Americas. 

The newer neural nets started coping with "world around" tourism, with some traveling themselves, others staying put. Either way, people coped with a shocking future, and continuing waves of migration.

The race tag was proving less and less a predictor of whether that stranger sitting next to you was conversant with quantum physics, knew English, had a gun.  Hard to know.  

The race-based language games were about making things simple, a truly uphill battle where human complexity is concerned.

The corollary to ML models drifting off course, perhaps thanks to "foundations of sand" tagging schemes built around race, is the emergence of tagging looking at authentic ethnic attributes (e.g. philological) versus these pseudo-biological ones.  

Nothing in biology precisely maps to the old civil warrior "races" idea because the race concept was forged in the wake of reading Genesis, not in the study of genetics. "Critical race theory" has morphed into "critical of race" theory.

In the evolutionary marketplace of ideas (extra-genetic in large degree, unless you're deliberately inbreeding some royal dead end) race-based ML is going to suffer the slings and arrows of strongly countering intelligence services.  

Their PR will be along the lines of "only the slow think in terms of race" which is condescending I realize.  Condescension is more effective when disguised.  Lets call it "mock pity for those who believe in breeding a master race" i.e. "too bad y'all will never be ruling class, not with crazy beliefs like that".

Explaining My Jargon

JupyterLab Control Panel

 

I'm not just twiddling my thumbs, though in my defense, if I were, isn't that a big part of being a Quaker?  Expectant waiting we call it.  I'm not the instigator, but wait for a way to open, as the jargon goes.  Is there any truth to the rumor that "Quaker" in American Sign Language is twiddling thumbs?

Describing a role (some still say "job") in terms of its personal dashboards is not a bad idea, especially if one is at liberty to stay highly metaphorical with the dashboard talk.  Recall how the UNIX crowd wanted a "workbench" or even a "bicycle shop" ambience, which went well with the "many tools, each good at what it does" esthetics.

What are the dashboards associated with high school?  A special desk and chair combination?  A locker?  Do you have an auditorium with a stage?  An athletic field?  An indoor gymnasium?  What I'm describing come from a stereotypical high school, a set of buildings, on a campus.  The home based personal workspace was the homework space.  Until the internet made more inroads.  Until social distancing became more of a thing.

My shoptalk had long featured the personal workspace (PWS) which could mean anything from a cubicle, to a home office (such as I often had), to the cab of a long hauler truck.  I thought in terms of a cockpit. 

The archetype is often a command center, a mission control, a situation room, a control room.  So here we are, in my Control Room blog.  The PWS is more like a BizMo, complete with captain's log (journal, diary), but on wheels or even just legs.  Control rooms dispatch.  A familiar model.

How should we extend the interior "pattern language" of high school to include our newer Zoom dashboard, with screen sharing?  What "nerd caves" do students and faculty inhabit?  Are we talking about multi-hour courses?  Who scripts them?  The process of passing the torch is ongoing.  Older generations shape the newer ones, but sometimes with push back.  Actions beget reactions, and results.

I've been looking at JupyterLab as a high school dashboard, one of many, compatible with the PWS motif. It's what I look at, when reading and writing Notebooks.  My curriculum flows around by means of these documents.

Curating Russiagate

 

 

More context: Another Russiagate Postmortem

Trucker Nation

I bring several associations to the "trucker nation" meme, first and foremost the tendency to tack on "nation" while meaning "space".  Oregon has its Rogue Nation, a brewery, including farms and farming, as beer-making is an agricultural process.  We don't take "nation" literally in the sense of needing to approach the UN on bended knee seeking a seat at the table in NYC and/or Geneva.  There's no need to take it that far.

On top of that, in addition, there's this tendency to add "planet" before or after, as in "Planet Python". I could go on to add "World" as in Disney World (or DisneyWorld in CamelCase).  Trucker Planet would be a fine caption to a Spaceship Earth picture, as is Global University (already in full swing).

These "nations" tend to bind globally, and without regard for contiguous borders. The topology is more complex.  An airline dots the globe with airport gates and counters, facing outward from its native space: data centers, maintenance hangers, office space, the air between tarmacs.  

Airlines have storefronts facing landlubber space, much as do shipping companies.  Many airlines no longer bother to maintain ground-level customer service offices for would-be passengers.  Brick and mortar is passe. 

My point:  the glue that holds a brand and team together may be strong, without the benefit of some lengthy contiguous border to defend.  These "diaspora nations" are more networks of "islands".  One of the oldest forms of diaspora nation is a religious sect, with its temples, churches, mosques and synagogues, but also schools and communities.

At the moment, the movement of container shipping is stalled around the world because of the intermittence of supply chain services, along the shore, and moving inland.  The system was fragile to begin with and with sars2 (a mutant of sars1?) hitting it broadside.  That world shipping hasn't capsized (figuratively) all together bespeaks its resilience if we want to accentuate the positive.

Trucker Nation represents a bloodstream level service, as vital, literally as well as figuratively, as the flow of nutrients through the bloodstream is where it's at.  Along arterials.  Along capillaries.

One of the chief complaints of drivers in the UK, perhaps among the most forthcoming with their grievances, and comprehensible to me, is a lorry will be sent down a country road that really has no business taking such traffic.  We do have a fleet of more intermediately sized vehicles, including designed for delivery.

Another chief complaint is drivers must abide by strict drive time rules, but when the time comes for a mandatory break, there's no pull-off, no parking, no truck services in the vicinity.  Routing software does not pay attention to random elements such as mandatory stop times.  Drivers will therefore stop early if necessary, because a destination has been reached, and then have to start up again at crazy times.

The pull-offs stink, are unmaintained, were not designed for drivers needing to relieve themselves.

In other words, Trucker Nation is both vital and oppressed and is in severe need of a redesign.  I've been forecasting more of a merger with university campus culture, merging a life of work-study, with that of hauling loads, at least intermittently in the course of one's career.  Outside of these blogs, I have more on Medium regarding the Trucker Exchange Program, which includes academic credit possibilities.

Synergetics Dict

 twin cobras

As many of my readers know already, I mix my Python teaching, and learning, with Synergetics teaching, and learning.  

Python is a well known and loved computer language, currently one of the most used.  

Synergetics is a still obscure set of disciplines carved out as a namespace by one Richard Buckminster Fuller and friends.  

I hasten to add the "and friends" because they rescued it from being a private language. As it is, Synergetics is still semi-private, with Fuller famous for his dictum that he'd rather be not understood than misunderstood.  

That he was willing to encrypt, to keep his real meanings out of the wrong hands, might be another way of putting it, shades of Descartes.

What helps bind Python and Synergetics together is the whole idea of a namespace, a set of names paired with objects in the manner of a lookup table, and called a "dict" in Python.  

Then we have (a) the Synergetics Dictionary (Applewhite) and (b) the conscious use of "dictionary" to mean something like "growing realm of experience" (as documented).  

In other words:  dictionaries, as a concept and as implemented as ultimate particulars, are both core to Synergetics and Python.

Although I think the dictionary makes a wonderful image and metaphor for how language glues to the world, each name to its object, what really happens in language is more like "wheels turning" (sometimes smoothly, at times grinding and gnashing).  

What goes on at runtime is way more intricate than any tabular pairing of names with objects would suggest, which maybe accounts for our retarded appreciation for language complexity, by centuries -- at least if we're dyed-in-the-wool Wittgensteinians about it (baaa!).

The dict is apropos, and the dict may get in the way of our appreciating "operational mathematics" i.e. the actual weaving of the fabric of meaning (lots of action, all going on in parallel).  That's where you get both dance, and sleight of hand.  We may get makeshift and improv (hacks), or "exaptations" as Stuart Kaufman calls them, from the front line.

As we get to the chaos of everyday wheels turning, we likely see a need for debugging, for maintenance, servicing. Words like VUCA and FUBAR pick up in frequency.  Runtime is unpredictable, and we anticipate this unpredictability e.g. try, except and finally are built right into the language, as Python keywords.

Tracking Tulsi

 

I never soured on Tulsi Gabbard in the wake of Joe Biden's gaining the throne in the White House. Perhaps because I had few illusions in the first place.  I see her primarily as a "Hindu-bot" with -bot a suffix one may add anywhere ("Jew-bot"... "Xtian-bot") to hint "set in their ways" and/or "programmed from birth" and/or "high inertia" (and possibly high caliber to boot).

I don't think the Lower48ers collectively have much of an ability to emulate or empathize with the reflexive tension one oft finds, on the Indian subcontinent, twixt Hindus and Muslims.  I'm talking about real Indians here, not about "Indians" in that backward "cowboy" way many sheepish Amerish stick to, as a matter of pride in their homespun namespace.

The Islamic Mogul (Mughal) civilization (Turkish, Persian, Urdu speaking) colonized much of India, and to this day one has a cast of Indian bureaucrats in the Arab-speaking states, so grafted together these subcultures have become.  Pakistan is hardly that secular of a state either.  Lower48ers forget they're children of The Enlightenment (many have no idea what that means in the first place).

One might object that the English superseded the Moguls and the most evident hybridization is thanks to remnants of the UK.  That's a bit of a straw man position though, as of course it's not either / or. The Amerish overlay the Japanese who overlay the Spanish when it comes to archeological layers in the Philippines, and that's only a tiny piece of the story.

I recall taking my computer problems to a Hindu family man, from India, and his letting me watch over his shoulder while he fixed my PC.  He liked talking geek with a guy like me (a geek).  Before long, he was warning me about the nefarious nature of the Muslim type, by which I gather he mostly meant people he remembered from in his homeland.  I doubt he knew many Muslims here in Greater Portland (not that there aren't any).

Tulsi is a militant, in the military, with that patriotic calling to serve her country, in Congress as well.  She's not a WILPF member, not an Ava Helen Pauling. 

She ran for president on the basis of calling for "no more regime change wars" not ending use of weaponized drones, and in doing so she was stirring up the ire of covert operations buffs, the types who count on the Pentagon's collusion going forward, in planning all manner of derring-do operations (drone-based included) designed to harass and disappoint, if not ultimately frustrate, this or that competitor in the market place of ideas.

Tulsi helped disrupt the fragile narrative around Syria, another point on which she is not easily forgiven, as that narrative has continued to crumble, much to the disgrace of various old guards operating mostly in face saving mode these days.  

Disobedience and defiance of the DNC became evident early, in her embracing Bernie Sanders in successive presidential elections.  The Sanders wing seemed too unlikely to prosecute regime change wars in a predictable fashion, with its wavering grasp of a worthy enemy.  At least the Pelosi-Trump axis was unified behind Juan Guaidó, the Wikipedia-ordained acting president of Venezuela.  Bernie does his best to sound sincere.

She also helped unravel the phony Russiagate hypothesis, by taking offense over being labeled as their tool.  The DNC resorted to name-calling too transparently in that case, crying wolf once again.  These were punishable offenses and in recent news cycles the neoliberal wing has done its best to bring down the hammer, and evict Gabbard from the DNC circle of cronies once and for all.

Somewhere, a contained conflict must be instigated, to perpetuate the war machine's profit-taking.  Tulsi is on board with that if that means targeting radical Muslims i.e. the extremobots she has a beef with and sees behind 911. She has plenty of room for a more liberal Islam, sure, but is ready to fight the fanatics, anywhere she's deployed.

The Lower48ers are confused about foreign policy and many of them know it.  Fantasies take hold amongst them and becometh as folk religion, which the priest-witch politicians know how to make roil and boil, to create a potent psychedelic (as in screen-cast) brew. 

Before long, the populace is collectively hallucinating, entranced by those long optical fibers called cable television, stretching back to the studios of mind control (an imprecise art to be sure).

As a Quaker type, I argued with my sister about whether it made sense for a pacifist to support a militant Hindu for president in any way.  However my rhetoric was somewhat nuanced.  I didn't think Tulsi could win, as Lower48ers don't "get" her that well (they can't related, only project).  

What we needed for a president was another crime boss, a mafioso type (not to specify an ethnicity here) which is what we always seem to get at the end of the day. 

Tulsi's way of thinking was too idealistic, more like a soldier's, when said soldier is eager for someone or some ideology to follow.  A tinge of idealism and hope for the future rubbed off, and helped some people stay awake, but most got their optimism through Bernie.

That Ms. Gabbard is currently taking solace from her remaining popularity with the right is not a problem for me.  She's a good antidote to the likes of Trump.  I don't think they understand her either, but they remember she called Hillary "Queen of the Warmongers" and stood up to those DNC juveniles.  That won her some respect at least.

Quadrays as API to XYZ Vectors

We learned the language game of XYZ vectors from Hermann Grassmann, William Rowan Hamilton, Josiah Willard Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside. 

Clifford Algebra branches from Grassmann's Universal Algebra, steers around Quaternions (Hamilton), seeking a bigger slice of the physics pie (Hestenes) perhaps deservedly, because it does more with less.

Quadrays were not my invention. I thought I was getting them from one David Chako (who favored "tet-rays") and I was happy to call them Chakovian Coordinates as a synonym, as that sounds like something Borges might uncover, in one of his scholarly detective-like deep-dives into glass bead game arcana.  

Not that Magister Ludi (Hesse) was by Borges, just they have much in common.  Wikipedia traces the lineage yet further back, to other great minds, thinking alike.

Quadrays may or may not come with an overlay wherein the tetrahedron they define has an unconventional -- from an XYZ standpoint -- unit volume. To have this feature is to sync the Quadrays home base tetrahedron with the IVM of Buckminster Fuller, or "octet-truss" to pick a patented architectural version thereof, or "kite" to go with A.G. Bell.  

Four of them (1, 0, 0, 0), (0, 1, 0, 0), (0, 0, 1, 0) and (0, 0, 0, 1) serve as basis rays to the four corners of a regular tetrahedron (of edges one?) from the origin at (0, 0, 0, 0).

I use quadrays to develop a CCP (close cubic packing), as {2, 1, 1, 0}, meaning all 12 unique permutations of those quadray coordinates, point to the 12-around-1 ball centers surrounding a unit-radius ball center.

Regarding Social Media

Copied from The Ecology of System Thinking group on Facebook, comment by me, just now:

I like philosophies which remove the omniscient organizers who will provide the new game plans, and go back to cybernetic basics ala the invisible hand -- which gets caught red handed and visible sometimes, i.e. we get glimmerings of conspiracies as we grow our own organs of discernment (hypothetical faculties).

But in the final analysis, no management cabal is situated in some uber control room with puppet strings to the rest. The Dr. Evil types all have limited radius, as do the Dr. Goods.

Many reformist philosophies decry the status quo, but do buy the idea of "those at the top" who might institute the new designs "from above" and/or "from below".

More likely, the longer lasting new designs emerge from fragmentary attempts by the many factions, and do not bare the stamp of a conscious consensus. Hence all the complaining and protests by ostensive servants of whatever status quo.

Where we find the more consciously designed social agreements is at a relatively micro size, of under a few hundred humans, some living, some not. These are what I would identify as "ethnicities" which are always surrounded by other ethnicities (partially overlapping).

Retrospective: Nine Eleven

From A Polymath Group

I know in my case, the A in STEAM stands for Anthropology, the study of Humans, very encompassing, Art a tiny subset. 

I use the A to intersect with PATH: Philosophy, Anthropology (right here!), Theater, History. 

Yes, Theater (includes politics) and History (what's been happening) shmoo together with the others, but then lets not pretend STEM -- let alone STEAM -- isn't all shmooed together too. 

Put it all in a blender for a Universe, to drink and forget.

2D / Princeton

2 Dickinson Street

TrimTab

Curriculum Necklaces

Screen scraping some of my own postings, amalgamated with a couple typos fixed.

CJ was asking whether transcendentalism was a theology, i.e. focused on some deity or deities. D.W. Jacobs wrote I cogent reply, saying transcendentalism was more a philosophy than a theology.

What I wrote:

Conventionally (parochially) Transcendentalism was a literary movement, centered around Concord MA, that was tied off during, or shortly after, the Civil War between the two sets of states, the pro and anti slavery, with territories up for grabs.

The Philosophy shop talks have largely not embraced Transcendentalism as a thing, preferring to leave it in Literature, which is why Emerson doesn't get a lot of air time, despite Nietzsche's admiration for the guy's raw "Zarathustraness" (Nietzsche comes after Emerson, and before Hitler, going crazy around the time Hitler is born).

Connecting Bucky Fuller back to his great aunt Margaret and using Synergetics as a "next bead" on the Transcendentalist curriculum necklace, is not something anyone is doing aside from me, to my knowledge.

My curriculum, in recent times, has reconnected to a teacher from Princeton days (1976-1980), Richard Rorty, and his slim tome (borrowable for free at archive.org) entitled Achieving Our Country.

Rorty confesses to being a leftie by upbringing and sympathies, but he sees a path back to German idealism through such as Emerson, without mentioning Transcendentalism by name. One could read it as an earnestly nationalistic (in the sense of patriotic) work, which surprised a lot of people (didn't seem fashionable). Anyway, he advances the idea of an indigenous (as in American) leftism that isn't a Marxism. Imagine that. I think Bucky dovetails.

Then, I've been watching the Dalai Lama on Facebook a lot and seeing what he hopes and wants for India: "pool all your collective wisdom from the sacred traditions (of action and inquiry) but secularize it, bring it to that neutral ground where you're not advancing the agenda of some religion" (paraphrase).

Lots of people say stuff like that, but coming from him of all people... Anyway, again I think the Bucky stuff dovetails as he's calling for a design science revolution, which I think of as the ongoing open source revolution, an engineering project, not some revivalist sectarian carnival. Bucky is not a messiah. A bodhisattva maybe, like Richard Stallman.

Rorty's lefty liberal (in the best sense) patriotism fits well with Grunch of Giants, for its revolutionary globalism. I string these two works on the same "curriculum necklace" (so-called "reading programs" -- like beads on a string).

Go By Train

Bill Lightfoot at Papa Haydn in NW Portland, June 2021

My intrepid Uncle Bill Lightfoot, last of my grandma Esther's sister's kids, made it to Union Station (PDX) from King Street Station (SEA) this morning.  

He left Seattle around 7:30 AM and was here by a little after 11:00 AM.  My expectation is he'd return, as usual (this has been his routine), on the Coast Starlight at 4:00 PM.

Bill likes these day trips.  He usually only has a couple hours in town.  We typically squeeze in a visit to a brewpub, Ringlers maybe.  This was all before covid.  Since the pandemic, he's been down one time, in late June.

Anyway, contrary to my expectations, the Coast Starlight has been canceled perhaps until September 1st. Fires in the Mt. Shasta region (Dry Canyon Bridge) have damaged the tracks.  

Apparently there's no way to break the route in two and have a bus intertie.  That's likely because rail travel is somewhat redundant to air travel in the region, and the passenger rail system doesn't get to treat itself as especially critical.  It's more of a luxury, a form of entertainment.  

Freight rail, on the other hand, still sees itself as essential and has some way to reroute.

Bill favors Papa Haydn, the dessert place, when we can fit it in.  We did that last time, visiting their northwest location.  This time, we would in theory have time to get to the Milwaukie / Sellwood location, however both establishments are closed Mondays and Tuesdays.  Today is a Tuesday.

Yesterday we had another gathering in my backyard.  Derek ("Deke") supplied much of the food from the back of his roving pickup truck, a logistical link in the city's feeding program, decentralized and cybernetic.

A lot of people still believe the world is run by "bosses".  I agree we have many breeds of crime boss, managing their criminal networks (religions, cults, banks, corporations, gangs, schools, governments).  

However nature presents us with a more optimized type of efficiency, pre-human, pre-money, pre-conscious.  Some philosophers acknowledge these deeper layers of the economy.  Others are apparently oblivious.

Recruiting Drive

Whereas my curriculum writing might be interesting and suggestive, it doesn't tackle all the issues regarding workflow.  

How do the students encounter the material?  How do they demonstrate growing competence?

At this point, when I look for competence on my own terms, I look for teachers willing to tackle the main topic in my slide show, namely the concept of "dimension" in Synergetics.  

A willingness to take that on, shows a willingness to acknowledge the importance of semantics in this post Linguistic Turn world (namespace).

In addition, I'm putting my documents in a Github repo for a reason:  I'm encouraging forking, if not pull requests.  

My inclination is to keep my repos under my exclusive control while encouraging other teachers to use them as raw material for their own original works.

So yes, I'm at the beginning of my own recruiting drive, even though I've been recruiting for decades.  

I'm still looking for teachers willing to actually tackle a topic as exotic and esoteric as Quadrays.  

I think calling them "syntactic sugar", another "API" to the XYZ coordinate system, removes any sense that they're a significant threat.  

Sure, Caltrop Coordinates comprise a door into the Synergetics meaning of "4D" but that's a topic more in art and architecture than in Establishment Mathematics (EM). 

Unless you're into investigating the philosophical foundations of mathematics, Quadrays might remain an idle curiosity, a trinket, or a harmless gimmick.

Curriculum Writing

The workflow of being a professor and adopting a write-as-you-go approach to teaching, means getting a pipeline of textbooks flowing, with a captive focus group (to put it cynically -- in actuality they signed up voluntarily, for a front row seat). Anyway, it's a well known design pattern on which many capitalize, not only the teacher-author.

In the world of "free and open" the wheel spins even faster, as authors publish their updates through notebooks hosted on Github or one of those.  The world of wikis and repos now permeates academia, with librarians staffing a front door or gateway, in terms of providing training.

My latest project recapitulates old themes:  lets preview high school math through the lense of learning a computer language.  The executable scripting notation helps explicate the ancient Greek letter typography, involving capital Sigma to signify a looping construct, with a subscript.  

We write our own Sigma function in Python, passing in "any callable" (function or lambda expression) for driving a specific sequence.  Sigma provides the framework, of a start and stop index, and whatever index-driven expression, for producing the successive terms to be added.  Summation is the overall theme, ditto for the calculus Riemann Sum symbol, Sigma's analog.

Seeing the scaffolding in Python helps students bootstrap their appreciation for the original notation.

The process of using LaTeX in the context of a Jupyter Notebook teaches "school of tomorrow" level skills.  We can use it in Blogger as well, provided the MathJax Javascript library, invoked per this blog posts, comes through.

$$ \sum\limits_{i=1}^n i^2 = \frac{n(n+1)(2n+1)}{6} $$

You know how when your children learn to drive, and the professional driving school teachers invite the parents i.e. you?  

Perhaps you have no experience with that, but in any case my point is how driving gets taught, evolves over time, and parents deserve the updates, if only to appreciate how their children are being trained.  

Side mirrors splayed further apart.  Headlights always on.  Etc.

Imagine going through something like high school, revisiting of the basics, as a fully grown adult, every ten to fifteen years or so, because of how quickly things change.  You might be adding a career change on top of that, reinventing yourself yet again.

Since I went to high school in the Philippines, in the 1970s, they've proved the AKS Primality Test, meaning when we get to Pascal's Triangle, we really should take advantage and show off how prime row numbers evenly divide the other numbers on that same row, whereas composite row numbers do not.  

The Triangle's rows are self numbers, lets not forget.  We use a Python generator to get them.  The entries get big fast.  

The Binomial Theorem hangs its hat here, as do several figurate and polyhedral number sequences.  Even the Fibonaccis may be discovered in the shadows.  

Pascal's Triangle has long been a Grand Central Station in our shared curriculum.  

Now AKS takes its place, along with RSA.  That's right, we're making a grokking of public key crypto an attainable goal by senior year.  By way of Fermat's Little Theorem and Euler's generalization thereof.  

Euclid's Algorithm kicks off the season.  

If this doesn't sound like any high school your remember, welcome to the club.  I'm sure you never learned about Quadrays, either.  During a summer enrichment course, we get to preview what most will have missed.

These are mostly well-trodden pathways, just not usually associated with high school in our more left behind Global University communities. 

Into the mix come my Four Flavors, per Heuristics for Teachers.  

I'm prone to think in terms of: 

• Supermarket (logistics, databases)
• Casino (probability, prediction)
• Neolithic and (historical, visible)
• Martian Math (futuristic, ephemeral)

From a science fictive Martian vista we pluck ideas for our Earthian markets today, and design programs around risk mitigation (prototyping, test piloting) and adoption (continuous integration).  

Our living standards, still thankfully Neolithic in some welcome ways, benefit from our projecting what we'll need to be packing for Mars.  Projecting about Mars helps us terraform Earth.

We're doing meetups twice a week online, over an eight week period.

Recap: The Modules of Synergetics

A & B Modules by Richard Hawkins

It would be great to have someone go over the modules with us, and Kirby has agreed to give us a short presentation.

                      Curt

http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/plates/figs/plate03z.html

That's one of my favorite posters (Curt's link above).  So clear.  So "elementary school" in flavor.  

Yet so not shared with many kids. And I don't think because of any invisible committee or meritocracy coming to a conscious conclusion. Inertia and reflex-conditioning (robotic thinking, AI) explains most of what we're up against, in my own sociological model of the global university student-faculty. 

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

For those not on the call, here's a brief synopsis of my talk on the modules, with a few grace notes added, for this archived version.  

Curt let me screen share so that some of the web pages cited below were displayed in the course of my "lightning talk" as we call short Show & Tells in Python world (< 5 mins). 

====

On pg. 52 of Cosmography, Fuller mentions A, B, T, E and S "modules".  These are names he gives to tetrahedral wedge shapes that may be: 

(A) used in the assembly of other shapes (e.g. 24 A modules, 12 left and 12 right, build a regular tetrahedron of volume 1) 

and/or 

(B) treated solely as volume measures (like cups and spoons used for liquids) 

For example 24 x 3 = 72 A-modular thimble-fulls of water, would precisely fill a volume 3 cube with edges sqrt(2) and 2-R face diagonals inscribing our unit volume tetrahedron (where R = IVM ball radius; 4 such balls defining the tetrahedron). [0]

To actually assemble said cube from the modules (like a 3D jigsaw puzzle vs. just pouring grain or liquid) you'd need some B modules as well (same volume, different shape).

As & Bs together brick in the cube, rhombic dodecahedron and the Coupler. Both A & B have a tetra-volume of 1/24. Two As (left and right) plus one B (left or right) make the Mite (minimum tetrahedron), a space-filler of no outward handedness (yet left and right may be distinguished in dissection).

I pointed out this chart (Inchbald, Steel Pillow [1]) and table (by Michael Goldberg [2]) showing how the shapes Fuller defines and describes in Synergetics in terms of A & B modules (e.g. Mite, Rite, Coupler...) already appear elsewhere in the mathematical literature, sometimes in the context of answering the question "what tetrahedra fill space, and with no need of left and right versions?" That's a question Bucky took up as well.

Fuller's focus on space-filling tetrahedrons connects him to Sommerville, Hall, Goldberg etc. however Synergetics is not the type of book that footnotes / cites all the previous lit on a given topic.  Nor do mathematicians usually see any pressing reason to cite outsider Fuller on these topics and/or use his vocabulary, or think in terms of tetra volumes.  What peer group would reward such behavior?  An anthropological question.

In terms of outreach, these points of contact suggest possibilities for the interdisciplinary diplomats among us. 

Michael Goldberg intersects Fuller's research in other areas as well, around geodesic sphere classification and hexapents (another name for which are "Goldberg polyhedrons" [3]). E.J. Applewhite got to meet him and liked him ("not a mean bone in his body" I recall him saying), even though citations to Goldberg seem to eclipse and occlude links to Bucky e.g. when Scientific American got around to narrating the discovery of the virus structure, and left Fuller out of its account, much to Bucky's chagrin (I had some access to EJA's archives).

Regarding the T & E modules, that's where I fit the "mind the gap" meme (a meme CJ has been using in a related context).  

Fuller had been seeking a volume 5 to join his family of volumes 1, 3, 4, 6 and 20, for tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, rhombic dodecahedron (RD) and cuboctahedron (VE) respectively (as "flower-arranged" i.e. "nested" in his "concentric hierarchy of polyhedra").  

At first he was attracted to some high frequency idealized sphere as his candidate volume 5.  But in retrospect, and after a battle with his "subconscious demon" [4] he glommed on to the rhombic triacontahedron (RT).  It would have a volume of precisely 5 if its radius were set at 0.9994... i.e. just shy of 1; the exact number may be expressed in closed form involving surds, notation which Fuller did not eschew, even though he did not subscribe to current axiomatic dogmas regarding the so-called Real Numbers.

120 T-mods assemble such an RT5 (30 diamond faces, volume 5), whereas 120 E mods assemble an RT5+ of radius 1 precisely i.e. the RT5+ "shrink wraps" (is precisely tangent to) the uni-radius ball of  the IVM (= CCP ball packing). [5]  We need them both.  The RT5, scaled up by 3/2 to volume 7.5, aligns with RD6 in terms of sharing vertices. T-mods have volume 1/24, just like A & B modules.

The concentric hierarchy is tight.  Compact.  Pregnant with so many relationships.  Worth sharing, even as a purely Platonic construct (pre-frequency, pre-time, pre-size, i.e. "eternal" in parochial-local synergetics nomenclature).

Finally, the S module bricks in the empty space between the octahedron of volume 4, and an inscribed, faces-flush icosahedron.[6]  I took us to a Koski Identities page.[7]  

Curt said David is enqueued to given a presentation sometime (he's vacationing in the upper peninsula these days) and had sent a bunch of materials -- including about phi pi (a close approximation of pi based on phi) which, of all David's research foci, I myself am not really into (I also tend to snub the snubs e.g. snub cube etc.).

I emphasized to the group that whereas Fuller endows his modules with energy-conserving and dispersing properties, and envisions cellular automata type studies that could somehow link his modules to CERN style particle physics, my own focus is on such low budget Platonic stuff, meaning I just stick to the pure geometry of it all and don't myself claim to be doing any high energy physics around the synergetics modules (I'm no Nassim).  I'm just a double-A battery low powered operation, like a wind-up toy bunny.

Should we have some breakthroughs in this area (where Synergetics meets CERN), that'd be another advance for modelability for sure.  For me, Tensegrity = Hypertext = WWW is already a CERN connection, i.e. the computerization of synergetics. [8]

Both Snelson and Fuller had high hopes their respective models would prove relevant to atomic studies.  Snelson focused on electrons, whereas Fuller hoped the atomic nucleus of transformable protons and neutrons could be modeled as closest packed spheres in some way with rhombic dodecahedra and his Coupler (8 Mites assembled in many different ways -- Chapter 2 discusses the permutations) in play.

====

ENDNOTES:

[0]  How could a cube of edges sqrt(2) have anything other than "sqrt(2) cubed" for its volume?  My slideshow on Fuller's meaning of "4D" begins there, by answering that question. Just as he challenges us on saying "up" and "down" instead of "in" and "out", he would have us question our most dogmatic (reflexive) use of "squared" and "cubed".

[1]  http://www.steelpillow.com/polyhedra/AHD/AHD_Chart.pdf (Archimedean honeycomb duals -- starting at its root with a handed half-Mite, what David Koski dubbed a "smite").

[2]  https://controlroom.blogspot.com/2021/02/early-bird-special.html

Table is from a 1972 paper i.e. pre the publishing of Synergetics.  

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0097316574900582

[3]  https://youtu.be/g0RTmVSCsiI

[4]  986.208  "My hindsight wisdom tells me that my subconscious  demon latched tightly onto this 5 and fended off all subconsciously challenging intuitions." (cite Mistake Mystique -- something CJ harps on).

More about T & E modules:

https://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2011/01/storyboarding-lcds.html

[5]  That's another point of contact by the way: IVM = CCP = FCC but for minor nuances and connotations. Dr. Arthur Loeb was the interdisciplinary diplomat in this connection, in both what he taught, and in his prelude to Synergetics.

[6]  https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/Python5/blob/master/S_Train.ipynb

Some of the latest research on the S module.  E.g. not in Synergetics 1 & 2:  S:E == VE:Icosa (same ratio) where VE and Icoas are related by Jitterbug i.e. same edge lengths. 

S/E as a factor (about 1.08...) takes us to explorations of a Jitterbug-like transformation, also in Synergetics, wherein the icosa inscribed in the octa (faces flush) turns into a *smaller* VE, faces flush to the same octa. Multiply that VE by (S/E)(S/E) to get the corresponding larger icosa's volume.  Whereas Icosa * (S/E) --> larger VE by Jitterbug.

[7]  https://replit.com/@kurner/SandE-Modules#main.py

(hit green arrow to run the Python, eyeball the source code to see the groovy volume expressions for S and E modules:

φ = (rt2(5)+1)/2 # golden ratio

Smod = (φ **-5)/2 # home base Smod

Emod = (rt2(2)/8) * (φ ** -3) # home base Emod

[8]  http://www.4dsolutions.net/synergetica/synergetica6.html

Shooting the Breeze

About Python Properties and Goldberg Polyhedrons... Subgenius, Die Antwoord

Headmaster's Address (School of Tomorrow)

Asylum City Meme

Many an American suffers from a complication of Affluenza:  too much stuff.  If you have a garage or basement, so much the better, but many pay for storage lockers.  The standard way to cut down on stuff: Good Will.

An Asylum City along a train and/or truck route needs warehouses, apartment complexes, and scattered dwelling units.  EPCOT was a model (Walt's version, not the theme park).  We're envisioning "aerospace yurts" and "domed gardens of eden" for the dwelling units (Henry Ford Museum; Cornwall UK).  But do those moving in need to buy new stuff?  For the most part, they do not.  Bring your own stuff through the triage process, keeping most of what you want and contributing much of the rest of it to the commons.  

People come to Asylum City with a mindset of paring down, starting over, lightening up.  Those leaving have typically absorbed more "urban nomad" skills such that they're able to travel without a lot of stuff, but with appropriate gear.  You've got your yoga.  The dwelling units will increasingly go on a timeshare schedule, as original occupants decide to move on.  Golf carts from the bus terminal.  You didn't need to bring a personal vehicle.  Car ownership, like horse ownership, is mostly a drag.

Chinese Peace Corps

CPC is an old meme around here, by now.  The dire poverty of so many in the Western Hemisphere, is sometimes easier to address outside a competing hemispheric power, meaning India.  Getting exchange programs going on the basis of mutual aid, but also shared experience and language training.  Africa is just as worthy as Greater Detroit of course.

More Wikipedia Talk on Facebook

I don't see the A,B,T,E,S modules as an isolated topic in that they're constituents of the concentric hierarchy, itself defined in terms of the sphere packing lattice (IVM). The concentric hierarchy, with its Jitterbug Transformation, provides the beating heart core of Synergetics.

When we call Synergetics explorations of the geometry of thinking, we mean these streamlining, simplifying heuristics that have more whole number memorability than standard fare e.g. 10th grade "plane geometry" with polyhedrons in the back of the book and not always reached.

Descartes Deficit, Euler's V+F=E+2, and the spherical spin networks fit into the same tight little framework of interconnecting ideas, a "memory palace" of useful concepts. We get the language of systems, spheres of relevance (omnidirectional halo), concavity and convexity, frequency (time/size) and angle (eternal shape).

Given Fuller's (a) overall prominence independently of people reading and commenting on Synergetics and (b) folk fascination with polyhedral geometry, I'm somewhat shocked at how few papers since the 1970s, even if only about obscure corners of grade school pedagogy, deign to take up the concentric hierarchy from any angle. The volumes table in Wikipedia is practically nowhere echoed in the culture by any other authors. Yet that volumes table, which includes the modules, is what Synergetics is so much about.

Sure, there're a few of us, but way too few for comfort, who carry the torch. But I find it semi-incredible, yet true, that elementary and middle school teachers across the board have no exposure to A,B,T,E,S in the course of their training, either in math or in the American literature of the 1900s. People treat the concentric hierarchy as something deep that should be left to the specialists, whereas the actual subject matter is closer to kindergarten than college. By now, the 40 year gap in attention, the malign neglect of these innovations, has become the story, as much as the concentric hierarchy itself. What was the reason for this neglect?

A New Englander from Bear Island writes densely philosophical prose ala Poe's Eureka, wherein he celebrates the Individual, over governments and corporations, as the source of wealth and culture, and with a "hotline to God". Very Emersonian. And his great aunt was Margaret Fuller. To not classify Fuller as in the American Transcendentalist lineage would seem an error, not that such a classification is exclusive of other ways to compartmentalize. But for the sake of curriculum coherence, we've got a useful pigeon-hole. I've taken up the matter with a Transcendentalist group here on Facebook and received zero push-back. They're into it.

Probably the best argument that Fuller should not be considered a Transcendentalist is that by convention that chapter in literature has been tied off as a pre civil war phenomenon. The Buddhist idea of a "lineage" that goes for hundreds of years, does not seem to apply when telling America's story. Were it not for the convention of saying the age of the transcendentalists is over already, I'd say including Fuller within that lineage is a no brainer.

To my mind, Bucky waited until towards the end of his life to publish Synergetics because he knew a strong track record would help. Having people willing to work with you and take business risks with you is testament to their not thinking you're full of snake oil. We already have Applewhite and Loeb attesting from their two different angles that Synergetics is not a waste of time.

Ergo I think the Concentric Hierarchy was already sitting in clover (with color plates and everything) when a next generation showed up and maybe decided to neglect its cultural heritage.

This is not an argument from authority. I dove into the subject and checked the math. Koski has showed directions forward e.g. VE:Icosa = S:E isn't that spelled out. The whole game of using phi-scaled E and S modules to fill other volumes shows me his getting the Synergetics Explorer Award was not based on snake oil.

My story of Synergetics: The Invention Behind the Inventions is also plenty compelling, when you stand it up next to all the papers and lectures devoted to far less ambitious topics than Fuller's memory palace.

The reasons for all this malign neglect do not necessarily trace to shortcomings in Synergetics. Fuller himself put his finger on it in what Nature calls one of the most influential works on the topic of sustainability, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth: he said overspecialization was the biggest threat i.e. no academic department sees fit to tackle anything so manifestly multi-disciplinary. Easier to attack the messenger with all these canards about Fuller's lack of intellectual integrity. Smear tactics and character assassination. The car flipped over, the domes leaked, and every idea he had was a popularization of someone else's. He became a target.

I choose to side with Applewhite and Loeb over these featherweight detractors who are losing the battle for hearts and minds.

Martian Math Meets Electric Vehicles

Martian Math and the Alchemical Tradition (School of Tomorrow)

Part One in Coffee Shops Network (philosophy blog).

Teacher Training

This short talk gives the flavor of what's in latter day American Transcendentalist Buckminster Fuller's magnum opus. The content is highly geometrical, yet mostly prose and incorporates the word "metaphysical" running counter to trends in philosophy ever since the linguistic turn (Rorty).

 
This is Margaret Fuller's grand nephew we're talking about, the geodesic dome guy (he also invented a 3-wheeled car and an hexagonal house, the latter on display in the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan). He was Elliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard (1962) decades after getting expelled from same decades earlier, for treating the entire cast of some play to drinks on him, blowing his entire stipend.

Picture me the headmaster of a tiny Quaker school in the Ozarks (I'm making this up, I'm in Portland and teach online for my Oregon Curriculum Network) trying to gain market edge by pushing the Fuller geometry down through the K-16 curriculum, all the way to kindergarten in some activities. 

Can geometry be literature at the same time? The subtitle of Synergetics (the magnum opus) is: explorations in the geometry of thinking.

I believe Edgar Allan Poe is usually considered more of a romantic (in the sense of gothic) writer, but then he wrote Eureka (1848), seemingly out of character. I've seen Synergetics compared to that work.

I share all this suggesting teaching and research opportunities, lectures you could give, that'd be off the beaten track, such as the tracks have been beaten.

Early Bird Special

from BEAST slides (2024)

I'm being somewhat tongue and cheek in this episode, as the "early bird" is finding a "worm" we've been following since the early 1920s.  Duncan Sommerville was hot on the trail of all space-filling tetrahedrons.

The "early bird" was also me, as I was up around 5:30 AM to get an early start on what I expected would be today's Youtube, for my channel.  I'm doing these things for free because I'm a teacher and I get paid in the cryptocurrency of Universe.

The night before, David Koski and I had the Goldberg Chart on the screen (above). He was looking from Minnesota, me from Oregon.  We also had onlookers around the table, a figurative table as this was happening on Facebook, not literally a book of faces either.

Before he introduces his three new "infinite classes" of space-filling tetrahedrons, Goldberg wants to survey what's known so far, about tetrahedral space-fillers.  He does a good job summarizing.

Another student of this same puzzle, who'd bitten off a lot, especially considering his life expectancy, managed to apply some fairly memorable nomenclature to this same set, but probably without consulting Goldberg's paper, because he left some holes in his system too.

What Sommerville had known about already, were what Fuller calls the Mite, Bite, Rite (both Sytes, i.e. made of two Mites).  That's three of the total five Goldberg identifies, other than his newer infinite families, not in the same table.

The Rite is the source of two more space-fillers, the quarter rite our "fourth Rite" and the half Rite. This very last, column five, was apparently not known to Sommerville, just as the fourth and half Rite were overlooked by Buckminster Fuller.

What's true about Fuller is he's boring a time tunnel of his own, on his own tour, partially overlapping his fellow time-tunnelers. Whereas Goldberg was able to complete Sommerville's work, and also add to the classification of geodesic spheres, in turn overlapping virology, as Fuller had, he wasn't looking to assign relative tetravolumes. 

Nor was the Goldberg Mite about constituent A and B modules, each of tetravolume one twenty-fourth. Those were Bucky's concerns. Coxeter showed a half Mite in his Regular Polytopes, what Koski calls a Smite, introducing it as the "orthoscheme of a cube".  

Overlapping nomenclatures.  

The scenario time-tunnels twist past one another in some multi-dimensional Hinton Space.

When you're planning to follow an author's tunnel, that's when you might at least temporarily adopt her or his nomenclature, at least some of it. You want to be able to follow the thinking, the explorations, and so commit to memory, a set of defined terms.  These may fade away later in some cases, even while leaving some valuable residue.

The myth about Fuller though is that he's always piggybacking on someone else, attempting to "popularize" and given that makes Fuller a lightweight, there's no need to swim alongside him and take in his shoptalk.  

Once that bubble pops, and you see Fuller belongs in the conversation, then it's on with mastering some of the vocab.

Initially, neither David nor I knew the half-Rite's shape.  We started speculating.  That's when I whipped out my green felt tip pen, a Sharpie.  The chart gave us numbers to go on and David focused on those.  We each independently arrived at the same place with our dissection, not surprising given the two (complementary) answers.

With the A and B modules, we may embark upon some interesting explorations of chirality, or handedness.  We may explore additional dissections, leveraging the one twenty-fourth volume. We may explore additional primitive assemblies, with pairs of Mites (Sytes) and pairs of Sytes (Kites).

Under Sytes we have the Bite, Rite and Lite (hexahedron).  Under Kites, we have the Kit, Kat and Kate.  These are the terms Fuller was distilling. If you fine tooth comb through his two volumes, you'll find some inconsistencies. The Bite and Lite switch places. No version control back then.

Anyway, not so bad, learning these ropes, especially once you have the cartoons, and/or vZome.

I recorded two drafts of the Youtube but wasn't sufficiently pleased with either.  Then I got sucked into the impeachment hearings, about Trump's alienating everyone, turning this into some foreign country, unrecognizable, bankrupt, defunct.  He had a lot of help.

Cyborgs in Cyberia

The realm of true facts (truths), whatever they are, under determines our moral and ethical response thereto, meaning objective facts are insufficient to provide an existential framework. 

We have to supply the interpretation, which is where free will enters the picture i.e. subjectivity, such as there is any. 

Objectively speaking, most thoughts and emotions arise just as mechanically as any other programmed phenomenon. 

Humans should not be afraid of being cyborgs. For the most part, that's what we are. And we're reprogrammable, our saving grace though perhaps insufficient, especially if we have no faith in it i.e. if we deny intuition.

TrimTab Book Club: Guest Appearance

Remembering MLK Day

I've continued to weave the net, keeping pages with pages.  The original Wiki, started by Ward Cunningham, explains the philosophy behind the Wiki design.  As a newly invited denizen of Citizendium, I've done a new autobio.  

Why not do double duty and link my Wikipedia page to the same page and vice versa?

On Facebook, I've been talking about my heros (a few of them) from the Civil Rights movement...

My superhero of the civil rights movement is Muhammad Ali. He stood up to the suits, who wanted to send him to Vietnam. He'd give up the world title before he submitted to the corporatocracy that was even then destroying our democracy from the inside.

I'm a big MLK fan too of course. I took in some of my civil rights movement lore from Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who worked closely with MLK's people on the March on Washington event. 

Kiyoshi was nearly killed by rabid racist cops in the south. Like Bayard Rustin, he was taking up gay rights as part of civil rights (being civil means not dictating / imposing the customs of some ethnic group).

Another healer I admire is Father Divine, the short black guy who professed to be God and who had a very mixed bag following (many walks of life and shades of coloration). 

Their idea of a cult was to live in big hotels and have lavish banquets. Pretty benign.

Civil Rights Gallery:

Bayard Rustin: Civil and gay rights activist. Nowadays celebrated by AFSC (libtard Quakers -- my brand too).

Muhammad Ali: One of the most effective equalizers of all time.



Kiyoshi Kuromiya: born in a prison camp for Japanese Americans; worked closely with MLK; gay rights HIV activist; colluded with Bucky Fuller on some of his most catalyzing works.

R. Buckminster Fuller: American Transcendentalist, worked with Harlem and East Saint Louis community leaders on megaproject futuristic visions, disavowed racism, celebrated Americans as the most cross-bred (mongrelized, with a pun on Christian) population ever.