Saturday, November 26, 2022

Synchronous Vs Asynchronous

Sy

Today I had a wealth of education programs to choose from, some synchronous, some asynchronous.  One should always prioritize the now or never synchronous opportunities, as a rule of thumb.  However "opportunity" means "affordably passed up" i.e. if it feels mandatory maybe they shouldn't pretend you had a choice.

You know the law has you pinned down when your only button is Accept, in the face of endlessly scrolling legalize.  What they know about you is you might sue if you find a loophole.  "Accept that we have our defenses arrayed against you" says the button.  You press it, if you want to continue with the installation and boot up experience.

As you can tell, I'm in favor of the shorter open source user end licenses, which boil down to "without warranty, go for it".  Then you learn to trust the various scouts as to what's malware or irkware or nagware.  People have different levels of tolerance, with some motivated by sheer curiosity to visit the dark side of the dark side.

Open source is more than that though and I don't mean to short circuit or take lightly the long hours of philosophizing distilled in discussions of the GPL and so on.  I've attended live Richard Stallman talks on more than one occasion, with Portland once billed as a capital of open source, back when that meant a lot to the computer literate.

What I ended up doing with my morning was engaging in telecommunications about pending business regarding acquiring a dog.  I was reminded of ducking out of a meeting at SNEC's founding, in DC, at a house hosted by R. Chu.  E.J. Applewhite followed me out to the sidewalk, curious to overhear what conversation might be important enough to take me out of this synchronous opportunity.  

Overhearing my side, he assumed my wife and I were talking about a servant.  We were actually talking about a dog.  My wife was in an awkward situation, having taken Sarah (our mutt) to a Quaker gathering, a camp, where said dog was not on her best behavior, or such is my recollection.  

I was amused Ed was thinking that (that I had a servant), or pretended to, and that he got me telling the truth in short order.  SNEC = Synergeticists of the Northeast Corridor, an acronym since jettisoned.

Next, I'm going to hop on Protonmail and write about Dark Horse comics (not as a know-it-all mind you, more as a know-nothing).  I'll be overlapping with the TrimTabbers, who were meeting about Applewhite's Cosmic Fishing this morning.  

That was one of my synchronous opportunities.  This will be another way of jumping in on that thread, asynchronously.

Monday, November 21, 2022

Conehead


I'll summarize these couple hours so you don't need to watch them, not that I'd try to talk you out of it. Times 2 speed? Or sample. That's what I do a lot.

That said, I come off like a conehead, a term you may not know, so time for Wikipedia, right? 

More literally, I'm holding the camera very close to my face in extreme closeup, but from an angle that makes my forehead towering, so I look like a conehead, and to some extent sound like one too, no doubt.

The backstory is I only got clear on the time of this event right when I'd just decided to walk to a food pod for food cart Thai food, then come home and fix Carol's dinner.  Dr. D. was in the mix.  How could I do that and be on Zoom at the same time?  Answer:  phone apps.

I've used Zoom for years, but never saw a need to cram all that bandwidth into the palm of my hand.  However with Bluetooth and Airpods, not only was I able to tune in the meeting, I was able to jump in as a talking conehead.  Peter Meisen was in a similar situation:  surrounded by peep noises, yet poised.

So yes, I managed to move forward on several fronts (cooking and other logistics) while having my head popping up somewhere near Philadelphia.  CJ couldn't be there this time.  Shrikant was his usual good humored self.  Everyone was pleasant.  They're very civilized back east, although Shrikant said he'd spent a decade in the Pacific Northwest and could attest to our having our own version of culture.

I was all thumbs however, this being my first time to use Zoom in its phone app format.  I kept swiping the entire app off the screen, meaning I'd kill it and have to sign in again.  That happened at least twice.

The bottom line is I've been tracking (as in lurking in on, usually after the fact on YouTube) this 52 Living Ideas meetup for some time now, as I recount in my self intro.  I've hosted backyard meetups of folks loosely known as Wanderers, with Shrikant and/or CJ on the iPad, sharing the picnic.

P1310101

Saturday, November 12, 2022

Martian Math in the Review View Mirror


I enjoyed this interview.  

I'm not advocating for colonizing Mars so much as converging Mathematics pedagogy with science fiction, ala Martian Math.