Wednesday, March 30, 2022

World Game Planning

 
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and  Vice President Richard Nixon
tour the U.S. National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, July 1959
from Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-2.0 license

Per my Facebook comment on Cynthia Lazaroff's profile (another 2D alum), I don't see in current affairs any reason to slow our GENI plans to effect greater electrical grid integration, including across the Bering Strait eventually.  

from the GENI website

Plans are inexpensive, which is why the Pentagon churns them out to keep the incinerators fired up.  We're free to dream in other words.  Plus there's no way to slow something that's already stationary.

On TrimTab (a listserv), we picked up on the Kitchen Debates and their backdrop, the Moscow Dome and these yurt-like kiosks, suspended from utility poles, that don't get remarked upon by most historians, but which I'll take as a throwback to the Dymaxion House idea.

Personally, I'm still bullish on Nordstream 2 (as of this writing, they're talking about closing Nordstream 1, let alone opening its twin).  I have nothing to do with the natural gas lobby behind all those senatorial gasbags in the Puppet Kingdom (aka the District of Columbia).

I'm seeing a day when we're able to work more dispassionately in the infrastructure sector, without all the faux nationalism.  I call it faux because it rings hollow.  There's a difference between true children and children who didn't mature, but spoiled instead.  To remain a true child in adulthood, one must regain or retain wisdom.


Saturday, March 19, 2022

Disambiguating

Barrel Tower etc.

I haven't noticed any slacking off in my contact with Russians through the edu channels I inhabit.  Some TCP/IP supplier was said to have dropped from the scene, but like a rock in a lake.  

The internet was designed to not have single points of failure.

That being said, we weren't on the same page in any case, given the Tower of Babel and the confusion of tongues.  How does anyone understand anything in such a polluted environment?  Good thing we have namespaces right?  import this (that's an insider Python joke).

Like ever since I've searched and more recently joined academia.edu, I noticed great market penetration for Haken's, but not for our guy's product line.  No one was intentionally jamming the frequencies.  Both 5G and some airplane altimeters want to use the same space.  That's an analogy.

Wikipedia has disambiguated the two Synergetics (Haken's and RBF's) for several years.  We have a link to and from Tetrahedron on the RBF side (one way to keep telling them apart).  So only now are some Russians starting to see double, and realizing the potential for cross-eyed confusion.

No harm done.  Language is always folding and unfolding, sometimes getting people confused.  Like I said at the outset, it's Biblical.

Hey, I just noticed the disambiguation page for Synergetics now has a link to Tensegrity.  Is there something to disambiguate?  And the definition that's given:  

Tensegrity, the use of internal forces to overcome external forces, as in a self-supporting sculpture.

...that seems kinda weird doesn't it?  Who gave it that meaning?  I suppose I could dig into it, but for now I'm just passing through on my way to other places. I reported my finding to FSI.

Thursday, March 17, 2022

St. Patrick's Day 2022

I had a good class today. 

Students have been working hard on their projects, with stellar results.

I gave them all top grades.

Now it's time for Spring Break.

We think of Dawn Wicca on St. Patrick's Day.

I'm in a pensive mood, slurping a Guinness.

Monday, March 14, 2022

Synergetic Andragogy

The last thing people want is a brainwashing, unless that's precisely what they want.  

However, what I've been presenting is simply a lecture that lets you see the duckrabbit, whereas before maybe it was only the duck, or only the rabbit.

Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics, somewhat dismissed, in favor of investigations only, does help with its notion of "language games".  The key term "dimension", aside from being "key" is really not that august or imperial that we need put it on a pedestal. Indeed, the dimensions of said pedestal could be very concrete, in terms of linear, surface area and volumetric dimensions, the "first three" (with volume relating to weight per properties of the construction material).

So for a few minutes maybe, you stop thinking of the space around you as "3D" (which it isn't anyway, thank you Einstein) and imagine it's "4D" but not quite in Einstein's sense.  That we all have "our own sense" of these words is diametrically opposed to the possibility of an establishment, think the authorities. But they're wrong.  

Just as we each have our own fingerprints and retinal patterns, so is our understanding, through neural wiring (some would say), all our own.  Private language and yadda yadda.

But when the show or program is over and you get your hat back, or whatever checked garment, you will have finished suspending your disbelief, the same way you've done countless times at the movies.  The world is 3D again, and you'll still butter your toast on the right side.

If you've seen my show, you know I get H.S.M. Coxeter in on the act, in that I dig up a quote from Regular Polytopes wherein he's at pains to distinguish the research he's doing, from the physics-minded relativity stuff happening just down the hall, say at Princeton (Coxeter was at University of Toronto, and the "4D" geometric philosophy I'm discussing was actually dedicated to him, now that he and Bucky were friends cite the Siobhan Roberts bio of Donald).  

Coxeter tried philosophy at Cambridge, with star teacher Wittgenstein no less, famous for his intimate classroom, with Alan Turing and others.  Even after Coxeter decided this language game philosophy was not for him, a career in Extended Euclideanism beckoned, he lent his cozy quarters to the Wittgenstein group, for a meeting space.

In other words, the 4D of nD machine learning, and its multi-axis data structures, indexed with (a, b, c, d...), is not the 4D of 3D + Time and the rotating axes of spacetime.  Those were, and are, different language games.

Then Bucky comes along, somewhat from left field, and tosses his own hat in the ring, in a bid to be taken seriously as more than a great architect.  How could Harvard allow that?  Sure, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had forsaken the path of ever higher education to boldly go, but into vast and respectable moneymaking enterprises, which may be forgiven even as the endowment grows.

But Fuller had failed in becoming a billionaire tycoon and settled for the role of verbal rock star, vagabond poet, instead.  How could a mere Bohemian be accredited, a gypsy, other than as another bard of mythopoetry?  But with Synergetics to his name, and all these other books, patents, inventions.  A treasure trove. Maybe he was some sort of Kubla Khan after all?  Recall Montreal 67.  The USG in its finest.

So maybe "stand up comic Bucky" was a great destiny after all?  I'd advocate doing more, as we have witnessed.  I've got my canned slides and lecture examples on Youtube, encouraging my colleagues to fan out and re-deliver, with personal spin.

The Charles Eliot Norton roster should be consulted again and connections made to William James and Peirce, not just Whitehead.  This is how we anchor our new Bucky in the Harvard matrix, through American Transcendentalism turning into Pragmatism.  

I've already provided a pretty clear roadmap, encompassing Rorty (one of my profs, along with Kaufmann and cast).

Tuesday, March 08, 2022

Five Letter Land

I was in Horse Brass again yesterday, loving Guinness.  That was after ascending Mt. Tabor, by means of the west side steps.  Then we (Dr. D. and I) descended to Belmont.  Deke was in the loop, and joined us later, from his beat.  Derek (Deke the Geek) is a generic community helper, delivering food 24/7, a discipline reminiscent of earlier gigs in less Mad Max conditions.

I was celebrating a successful restoration of drivability to my car earlier.  I'd made it out to Bethany Village and back.

The little private Silicon Forest school where I field test and further develop my online curriculum, consistently with whatever they hand me, has been a source of gigs for some time.  During the height of covid I only worked over Zoom, but these days I show up in person, masked and vaxxed for my own protection.

Our focus has been Number and Group Theory of the type that's relevant when developing coding skills, which these students very much are, and pretty quickly.  I like to showcase several technologies:  JupyterLab, Github, Replit.  Python features as one of many languages, not necessarily the be all end all. I'm somewhat partial to Clojure and could use some classes.  I'm 80% in student mode, 20% in teacher mode, a healthy ratio given there's always so much more that one doesn't know, than one knows.

For example, when the popularity of Wordle (which I still haven't played at the official website) took off, I found that famous five-letter word list at Stanford Graphbase.  Except at first I didn't know the size of this tiger I had grabbed by the tail.  Computer Science itself branches out from this file and some others, given the curriculum (that metaphoric set of circuit boards) we have today.