A M4W Rendering of Digital Math

School of Tomorrow: Personal Workstations

Biographical Note

From a text message to a family friend (slightly edited, links added)

Of interest about Carol (1929 - 2023). She was a huge St. Francis fan. And she knew things about his biography that most people don’t. 

For example, part of his inner circle was this woman named Jacopa. She was from a wealthy family based in Rome. The Frangipanis. They had a castle inside the Roman Colosseum! 

Anyway, she wrote a whole novel about Jacopa and Saint Francis called The Lions and the Lamb. It never got published but not because her agents thought it was bad. It was just too long and they were worried it would not be suitable for mass publication given she was a first timer. They don’t like to go with multipart books with a new author. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

Later, she managed to parlay her research for the novel into a masters degree from a Jesuit college in the Philippines. Ateneo de Manila University. That was pretty exotic and is shown in the picture.

Current Events

:: senators: TikTok is not your toy ::

Yes I've been paying attention to the Twitter Files.  I'm especially interested in the pressures exerted on the company (i.e. Twitter) to prove the narrative that lurky jerky bots were a problem we needed defending against.  I hadn't been aware of the Hamilton 68 subterfuge, nowadays dragging a lot of people down given its exposure as fraudulent.

Of course I'm tracking the Sy Hersh story on NS2, eager to see if I can keep working in a crazed BP PM. UK I mean.  BP, whatever.  I don't saddle Uncle Sam (US) with the blame, mainly because he's long dead. A resurrection story might be in the cards.  

As a global OS (operating system), USA values have worked their way into the woodwork, with the grain of popular public opinion.  That's not nothing.  Democracy still smells like roses, even if still over some distant horizon at this point. 

How is the human brain a democracy?  Some would say it's not, but I'm not so sure, starting with the bicameral nature of the design.  

In practice, democracy seems to feature polarity, meaning warring factions, meaning opposition.  Where there's opposition we find alliances and yes, "strange bed partners" (they'd mix it up at the Grange too -- what those dances symbolized, about life as a process).

Does opposition among the parts result in a dynamic equilibrium at the level of the whole?  Most true cyberneticists will certainly posit that possibility, and even give examples, such as the adversarial court system.  That's not to say every warring mess of factions evolves into a self governing self assembly.  A kind of phase change occurs at that point.

Beyond the left-right brain dichotomy and the proverbial war between the lobes (is it proverbial?), we have other internal brain organs.  Calling the brain a "single organ" is semantics more than logic.  Much as a car engine disassembles into separate subsystems, so do brains.  

You might say "that's an oligarchy then" and I might agree with you.  A democracy is never so simplistic as one voter, one vote.  The term has more to do with its rate of turnover and anti-fragility.  Like the blockchain, in principle, its tough for any one faction to pin it down.  You can only fool so many people for so long, to dumb down a well known Lincolnism.

A lot of landlords are coming under scrutiny for their decisions to endanger the rest of us for their personal benefit.  I'm talking about the warlord train owners and their devil may care attitudes.  Suppose the devil does indeed care?  Did you really want that kind of attention?

Unobtanium

Sam confirmed my fear that C6XTY would soon be more impossible to come by. Unobtanium. 

He at one time had large amounts, cite Lattice Gallery.  Designed in the Silicon Forest, Made in China. 

But "the west" (if we want to call it that) proved uninterested. No time. No space. Other priorities. 

So now a lot of it is gone for good, as Sam was not about to shoulder the storage costs all by his lonesome.

Chatter Boxen

Something unkind to say about a person is that so-and-so is a chatter box.  This kind of put down may be less necessary in cultures where people are more glued to their devices and therefore more likely to delegate chattering to the professional chatterboxen who do it for a living.

Bringing up Hugh Kenner at this juncture is a kind of no-brainer.  He was writing about Eliza and such early in the computer revolution.  I have a distinct memory of him getting Eliza and Racter to talk with one another ("talk") in an article in Byte Magazine (McGraw-Hill) for which he wrote a column.

One needn't have a highly developed sense of irony to see everyone cranking out variations of the same article.  The writer does some "research" (reads other articles), then "digests", then puts it back out there in a grammatical form.  Does the chatter box do any less?  The game is to get the next word right.  Stick to beaten paths.

Naturally the chatter boxen trigger various insecurities.  The automated dolls, the miniature robots, made by the French, were unsettling back then (around the time of The Turk).