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.