Another 21st Century Curriculum

What is it that I expect to accomplish through curriculum writing? For some decades, I've been this working class dweeb who teaches online programming classes, on the basis of earlier decades developing computer applications, having majored in philosophy at Princeton, but always finding computers cool. 

But then my online content isn't entirely about teaching programming. It's about thinking about geometry with a 3D computer graphics tool at one's elbow. A ray tracer in my case. To make the ray tracer do what I wanted, I had to feed it programs too tedious to write by hand, so I'd have another program do that, and control that one at a high level.

Let's take a look at some code I was writing yesterday:

The raytracer I use is called POV-Ray, a free open source tool that renders slowly compared to say Blender. I don't mind its slowness in the context of what I use it for, to generate animated GIFs such as the one above.

POV-Ray expects to read and process files with extension .pov and in the code above we see I'm opening a .pov file to receive a lot of stuff, through the arbitrarily so-named fileobject: out. I bring polyhedra into the foreground as objects: Icosahedron, PD, Octahedron. PD stands for Pentagonal Dodecahedron. I also have an RD, a Rhombic Dodecahedron. The code for those is in the same module, but once defined, I have a pretty succinct syntax for conjuring them, manipulating their properties, and writing them out in Scene Description Language for POV-Ray to process.

Am I saying I expect other teachers to simply copy my code and use it verbatim? Sure, to start with, one may clone or fork my codebase, slides too. But then many teachers will be more into using their own methods, while picking up on more of the shoptalk, around BASKET modules, Quadrays, Synergetics in general. For them, this material may all be a gateway to 20th Century History and a telling that includes what the Boomers were doing (USA namespace) to propagate the "4D" memes.

As a boomer myself, one who propagates "4D" (e.g. 4dsolutions.net), I'm a student of intellectual history and so my classes and lectures tend to have elements of that. My knowledge is quite limited. I'm a fan of CJ's commitment to comprehensivity but accept, as he did, that omniscience is not necessarily the objective. Carve out a patch and cultivate that, and you'll receive news from afar in ways you might use, within your own garden (not walled exactly, but protected, perhaps even encrypted).

I'm also a political cartoonist, and my work with Holdenweb and Open Bastion was more along the lines of event producer. The logistics supervisor work in hotels in years prior set me up to be at home in such institutions. Not that I don't still have much to learn. At 66, I'm still a noob. But a noob with some experience, I'd be foolish to deny what little I've got.

Finally, I fancy myself a type of science fiction writer, but within the context of curriculum writing and general systems theory (GST) more generally. Science fiction becomes a stand in for what my dad did: regional planning. That field has its specific techniques, over which I am not a master, let alone doctor (he had a PhD), but the idea is similar: conjure a possible future by means of narratives, stories, blog posts, and other artwork.

More Political Rhetoric

:: ranter ::

I've been clear on Facebook that I'm voting for Harris this time. 

I voted for Hillary in 2016 (she'll be speaking in Portland in a couple weeks -- I won't be there, not a fan). I'm ready for a female president with an ordinary, average, representative background, more like Obama's, meaning complicated and multicultural, like America itself. 

The last thing we need is yet another golf clubby rich guy, another aristocrat.

Per an email to a friend:

BTW I'm still voting for Kamala. She's proved herself highly malleable, flexible, not tied to specific positions. She's compliant and works well with the oligarchy. Trump had his chance. I also like that she has female characteristics. Putin and I see eye to eye on this one. Doesn't mean she'll win, but it'd be more instructive for people if she did.

USers are such backsliders, endowing their scapegoats with superpowers before sacrificing them to the gods when all their hopes and dreams don't come true. As if it were all up to a president. Such monarchists. Why not just devolve into Brits then?  Forget we fought for freedom from such ill-begotten superstitions.

To another friend I wrote:

Regarding the presidential contest: I'm ready for a first female president and anyone is gonna have their flaws. "Laughing too much" and speaking in "word salad" don't seem that objectionable. Both may be assets. Plus her background is certainly more average. Like Obama, she wouldn't have come from an aristocratic background, far from it, and to me, that's a plus. If her dad was a Marxist professor or whatever, so much the better. More proof the Muricans have an open mind.

Trump, with his celebrity billionaire background, encourages popular backsliding into thinking a president has to be from some financial elite, in this case New York mafia / slumlord / casino world (one of many subcultures our great nation has to offer). I think a president should be closer to average, and their role should include reporting back to the people what the insiders are up to; a man or woman on the street elected to spy on the government. That'd be how I'd shape it, instead of going with an "imperial presidency" with a lot of pomp and circumstance ala Rome.

However I'm never so tempted to vote for Trump as when the Dems truck out their vile Russophobia and spew it all over the media. Such a stinky vibe. I'll be holding my nose as usual.

Me on Facebook, the text the in above graphic: 

If Trump did give Putin some gift of a covid testing device, that would’ve been a nice gesture. A more constructive relationship between the Kremlin and White House would have been a good idea, and remains a good idea.

Likewise any calls made by Trump-the-private-citizen to Vlad would not be that upsetting to me. As a free American he or I should feel free to phone anyone in the world any time. Of course whomever we’re calling should be free to not take the call. Bibi, don’t call me.

I’m skeptical though, as I think of Woodward as one of those journalists who believes what he’s told by various storytellers with the job of making up stories. These stories have the flavor of being unfalsifiable. But even if they’re true, I fail to experience any outrage, sorry.

I’m not a Trump supporter, but I do find Americans to be mentally ill when it comes to Russians. They’ve always been that way, since I was a kid. One of their least attractive qualities. I’m so glad I grew up outside the states in my formative years and never developed a lot of these crushing mental disabilities.

Back to School

:: pooh gets a bigger brain ::

For context, we were seeing a Planet of the Apes situation developing in western Asia, with various groups clinging to statehood amidst missiles flying in every direction.  The whole idea of "sovereignty" was going up in smoke.

More people escaped Gaza than I'd realized (still not nearly enough), but there'd been no cruise ship convoy nor other highly visible rescue effort. Most of the evacuation was under the radar and largely unreported 

A similar exodus from Lebanon is happening now, as the Netanyahu regime extends its carpet bombing campaign to more cities and towns. Not that Israelis are staying put either. When the missiles start flying, civilians leave in large numbers, if allowed to.

My code school colleagues (Python, data science etc.) and I are these days gearing up for another cohort. I haven't been actively instructing a cohort in awhile, but the workflows are not unfamiliar. I'll have time to get ready. This is not my first rodeo.

Of course the notion of statehood isn't about to fade overnight. The plot line axis hinges around "globalism versus nationalism" where there's some attempt to map these terms to "left versus right" respectively. 

Radical lefty libs like Soros & Son versus righty tighties like Trump wanting non-porous borders, and the freedom to not be pawns within globalist agendas. That's a gross oversimplification of course. This much is sure: there's no way to avoid acting locally, whether or not one is able, or wishes, to think globally.

As an Epistemology group member on Facebook, I recently questioned the whole idea of "left vs right" as "too low dimensional" invoking the notion of Principal Component Analysis. Even Myers-Briggs, akin to Cambridge Analytica's fave personality test, has more than one dimension.

Why do people take it for granted that the terrain we're dealing with is a simple left vs right one-dimensional line? Data science is all about not imprisoning one's thinking inside decrepit obsolete models.  Are we so one-dimensional in our thinking?  

My Princeton prof Walter Kaufmann did not think Marcuse (One Dimensional Man) was that great of a thinker, but then it doesn't take a genius to realize the English language is garbage, out of the box, when kept to factory defaults, but is potentially expressive once fine  tuned. Wrestle with your native language if your goal is to be a philosopher.