Exploring STEM

:: celebrating the summer solstice ::

Those of us on the PATH side often like tracking STEM-side personnel, meaning we find our people of interest and track them, not nefariously but as people with the usual search engine type tools.  Like last night the Captain and I were reminiscing about cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, as well as Sheldon Renan, a guest speaker with other ties to Wanderers as well.  

This was at the 2023 Summer Solstice celebration at the Linus Pauling House.  Terry, ISEPP president, was among us.

So like, wearing my anthropologist hat, I'm hot on the trail of Bourbaki, and yet I'll confess up front my knowledge there is still superficial.  A university gatekeeper would be underwhelmed were I interviewed, but I'm not applying for the Church of the Omniscient at this time.  I was more chasing after whatever Bourbaki became, and some claim that's Category Theory.

Once on Planet CT, what do you do?  Use your skills.  That's right, discover some key people, authors, authorities and start graphing their relationships. Are they contemporaries? Do they engage with one another? 

Casual searching today will bring up Tai-Danae Bradley and Eugenia Cheng among others. I came across the former with an already well-formed interest in NLP (natural language processing), and the later thanks to Andrius Kulikauskas, one of our "for wisdom" community leaders.

One of the keywords of STEM culture is "vector" which goes with "vector processing" along with "matrix" and "tensor" and whatever else is being appropriated by the Machine Learning (ML) crowd.  That's a big crowd these days, and with its star hooked to AI, only the sky seems the limit where bulls in the stock market are concerned.

The marrying of a vast corpus, stuff people use English for, with vector (so-called linear) algebra, has enabled a kind of nanotube extraction, meant metaphorically.  I pull threads from the hairball of some googleplexed vector space, coded to continually remind itself of what it's supposed to be all about ("attention is all you need").  I'm not the expert.  I'm a PATH guy attending to the various word-meaning trajectories in this neighborhood.

For example, Category Theory is seriously into "morphisms" meaning a generative pre-trained transformer will be finding "morphisms" in proximity to "functors" and "categories" and other such ballpark players.  Their vectors will be weighted accordingly.  The hair around them (same neighborhood) may then be extruded into sensible sentences.  The believable "predictable goo" oozes forth.

We've always allowed dolls, idols, fictional entities, to use the pronoun "I".  There's no crackdown on "dolls talking" or really any other object.  Through the comic book convention of a talk or thought balloon, pretty much any object is graphically capable of talking and/or thinking.  The strong expectation around AI is we'll have some "I" to talk to, "I to I".  What would Martin Buber say about ChatGPT I wonder?  Why not ask her ("hey Siri...")?  She'll oblige with her fresh-squeezed toothpaste.

An ulterior motive of mine, for learning some CT, is my wish to cover the obvious bases when it comes to exporting Synergetics to other namespaces.  CT is a "glue language" for Stemites in general.  I was thinking if I could use CT for bridging purposes, I might help Synergetics get some more crew.

Nonhuman Wanderers

No, I'm not talking about ETs.  Or I could include them, but right now I'm thinking of Ts (terrestrials), such as dogs and cats and like that.  Yes, and snakes.

In my vocab, a Wanderer is a type of flaneur, meaning a bystander-observer, which doesn't mean innocent so much as aware and willing to chronicle and communicate, a reporter, a journalist.  Nonhumans don't commit their observations to writing, but they do register and adapt.

We had an organization named Wanderers, just a coffee-sharing morning / evening coven, or whatever group word, a meetup.  We met (still do) in the boyhood home of one Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel prizes (unshared -- although his wife Ava Helen had a lot to do with the one for peace).

Humans on this planet tend to be delighted by their nonhuman companions, even as they slaughter them in droves.  Part of the satisfaction we get from our herds is our ability to eat them.  Not everyone is into it.

Planet Earth is still delightful, even if sometimes overtaxed by obnoxious behaviors.  Humans have a track record of adapting, but also of not adapting.  We need to accommodate our own slowness in some ways.  How do we cut ourselves slack, without crashing the plane, so to speak?

I'm not posing as the answer man, but I do share the view that humans learn from nonhumans all the time.  Sometimes we learn the basic value of companionship.  Other times, we're reminded to pay sharp attention and keep a lookout.

Play for Pay

Work ethic Yanks and other Americans, many of Protestant extraction, want there to be an "earning a living" game, such that the undeserving losers might be deprived of their livelihoods, there being some fatal insufficiency as it is.  It's only fair.  Work hard if you want a place in heaven.

The Yang Gang had an uphill battle championing a UBI (universal basic income), paving the way for limited testing over the sars2-covid years. 

People question "income for what?" implying not enough work is or was getting done, in exchange for the channeled and forwarded stellar energy.

Our research on the importance of play, and not just in childhood, suggests the UBI is about sponsoring your play, which again, in Protestant eyes, many turn into some Pinocchian nightmare, on Donkey Island, whereon people make irredeemable asses of themselves. 

Many stuffy adults equate "play" with "profligate depravity" and/or "irresponsible frivolity" i.e. what they themselves would indulge in if given more paid time off.  They're into policing themselves, and by extension, fallen humanity.

A lot more anthropology attaches here than I have time to think through, let alone scribble down.  

We have the memes of "hard fun" and "professional sports".  What a lot of people might do with their UBI scholarships is learn another language, or more of their own.

Players with talent get to make a living in their program, with the consent of their clients and customers.  Professionals get paid to fool around with all manner of equipment, and many love their jobs doing so.

A UBI would speak to the professional inside of one, yearning to attain mastery, through play, for some additional skills.  People do get motivated by images of a future self, a possible upgrade, especially if they sense progress right away, and if their ideal self also looks like a net positive for others as well.  Players want to be assets on whatever teams.

Even the Yanks will understand that, maybe.

Hypertoon Exercise

Imagine a lot of plastic transparent tubing snaking in an out of an abandoned factory building, not along the ground but in the air.  This snaking hose pattern represents the potential flight path of one or more drones.

Along any given segment, several tubes may run in parallel, but then peel away in various directions.  

We looked at models like this at the Field Structure Institute quite a bit, thanks to Don Bridell and Gary Doskas specifically.

From the point of view of a drone pilot, what unfolds on screen is a hypertoon, with segments repeating as the drone dives though a particular window, and coming to segues, where one of several maneuvers is selected.

Once these scenarios are all smoothly interconnected, one has the basis for a computer game of both chance and skill, given the decision points (segue hubs, peel off and rejoin options), and/or something fun to watch that runs on autopilot.

Camp Generators