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.