Current Affairs

The Referee

Another Ringside Attraction

Leading the Charge

Bioengineering Interlude

I don't claim that I was any kind of bioengineer back in the day. Seeing bioengineering as a field, with professional farmers, I was outside the inner circle, contract-consulted, as someone with relevant skills in the bioinformatics department.

I'm including the picture above (let's assume it still exists), in this instance, because of the Q-Cath box to the left. Inside is the manual I'd consult when developing code for parsing through what were called "prologs", a technician-entered time-stamped chronology made during a cath procedure, whether diagnostic, an intervention, or both -- a diagnostic might turn into an intervention on the spot if an indication were found.

My coding language at the time: Microsoft Visual FoxPro, a paid legal copy, although pirate copies were also out there, more so today probably since every VFP copy is officially unsupported by MSFT since 2015. 

My shift over to Python had everything to do with:
 

(a) the xBase language (VFP's family tree) fading away and 

(b) my steep involvement in education + reform (slogan: “reshape or die”)

(c) my involvement in the open source libre software movement

Meaning I didn't pick up Python in isolation, but in tandem with my K-16 teaching background. I plunged into the deep end, but more in a "philosophy for children" sense than a "look at me I'm a math whiz" sense. Learning coding and maths in tandem is not a controversial topic in this neighborhood (Silicon Forest), like of course we do, who wouldn’t?

I'm more a product of the Princeton philosophy department than its maths department however. I did study linear programming under Harold Kuhn. Mostly I dove into computer science through engineering courses. We’re talking undergraduate mind you, Class of 1980. My first love was APL.

My idea of liberal arts was more like Hugh Kenner's: let's know our letters, but also our figures, our numbers. At the cost of skipping Latin and Greek maybe, but, living in Rome, I got those by osmosis (in terms of cognates).

Where I might show the most ignorance is around music. One of my frustrations in reading Wittgenstein is he'll include some literal musical bars amidst his prose, telling us what he was humming and its significance for him. He reminds me of Schroeder in Peanuts.

However, as a kind of polymathic writer, I'm not obligated to display omniscience, which is not my forte, but simply to share my maps insofar was they maybe penetrate into some area of interest, such as bioengineering for example, or high school teaching. The trail system is of limited scope, I assure of that in advance. 

Funny Footnote (and more)

c9, mixed use, hosting space

Perhaps I should be saying "ironic"? You be the judge. 

What's synchronistic is right after viewing Trusting the Universe with Alan Watts at OMSI, one of my credit cards went missing, a business platinum (that's a color code only, only stiff plastic, a magnetic strip, and a chip, are involved in the card itself, no platinum per se). 

So now I get to trust the banking system to keep that particular card from getting used, so long as it's not in my possession. 

I locked it (through the bank website), and am gradually switching anything it autopayed to some other card, in preparation for declaring it lost.  I'm waiting for pending transactions to clear (including a balance payment) before I close it down.

Wanderers Cross Paths

I got to meet up with Sir Jon again yesterday. I'd seen him briefly upon is moving onto the campus, near Mt. Tabor, but this time we had a longer visit. I brought my iPad and jumped on campus WiFi so we could reminisce. I had quite a few pictures of Jon, that I'd bothered to label. A lot of my 80K pix lack captions beyond the camera stamp. Sometimes I go back and add verbiage.

Jon features often going back through these journals, but without any meetups for almost a decade I believe, as we stopped doing the coffee fund at Linus Pauling House and that was Jon's deal: he tracked contributions, purchased, and made coffee for our morning meetings. We also met alternate weeks in the evenings. Jon was not a night guy as I recall.

When we spoke yesterday he reminded me that the house I remember visiting him in, at one time a grocery story I'm guessing, given its shape, in the East Moreland area, on Harold, had not been his residence for long. He'd been on the west side before that, around 2nd, and after that he'd had another place built, and that's the one I never got to see, given we stopped doing the coffee fund or meeting weekly. 

We'd become a meet-four-times-a-year group even prior to covid as I recall. Jon would come to those gatherings, which we did even when we still met weekly. He overlapped with Doug Strain, Eve Menger, and many others in these blogs.

Jon's dad had been a major canvas artist, a painter who was conversant with cubism and abstract non-representational painting more generally. At one point he was regularly on public television, interpreting modern art to Portland audiences. I've seen snippets. He also had a large mural at the Portland airport (shown above).

I brought up the painting yesterday, saying my best information, which was maybe not that good, is that the painting was preserved in storage and there were plans to bring it back in the newly remodeled airport. Portland's PDX has undergone a major overhaul, not the first, but one of the most major. 

The luggage collection floor is mostly the same, the the 2nd floor departure area is completely different, with ticket counters perpendicular to instead of facing the front of the terminal, with much more relative floorspace devoted thereto. 

Random shopping by non-passengers might not be so encouraged anymore. There's already lots of shopping right nearby (Best Buy, Ikea...), where loved ones might say their goodbyes before those leaving head for the terminal. Once checked in, you might as well go through to the passengers-only concourse areas. But maybe there will be more pre-security stores than I realize; the remodel is not done yet.

Jon at first didn't remember the "cube" he had 3D printed per his instructions. Each face contains a funnel to the cube's center, where the funnel tips touch. 

Although a professional musician, I'd say Jon was also a visual artist, in terms of his artifacts (polyhedrons sometimes) and in terms of taste. His home was museum quality one might say, in terms of what he'd curated over the years. One felt in the presence of culture. 

He'd gone to Catlin Gabel before it was called that, and then attended an east coast school, so lets say he had an elite education, in the sense of first class, what we'd wish more could avail of (by choice, if desirous), not fewer, although what counts as "first class" is a moving target, like I'm not saying we should always stay stuck in the same mud, like fossils.

Bracketing our visit with Jon: we dipped into the campus theater a couple times, where the movie De-Lovely was playing, about Cole Porter. I was pretty much entirely ignorant of this story. Now I have some more culture too (it rubs off).

Fall Term: Synergetics for Teachers

If you've been presenting the Cascadian Synergetics slide decks I introduce in my channel, then you've realized there's a lot of overlap and you'll probably have opened different decks in different tabs to exploit this advantage. 

Depending on where you want to take your presentation, you can treat the slide decks as a kind of switching yard, like a "hypertoon". 

Visit the slides in an order that makes sense in terms of the storytelling you're most engaged with. 

Are you diving into the technical details of the computational geometry, or are you discussing the interpersonal relationships we find in Graph Theory. Or are you doing both?

Google slide decks on tap:

• "Dimension" in Synergetics
• Quadray Coordinates
• BASKET Modules
• Graph Theory

Python: Just Use It

:: kirby on quora ::

:: a slide from the BASKET deck ::

Clonable Assets

The physics of private property was upset by the uber clonability of digitally etched electrochemical patterns, as now obviously valuable and useful assets could be duplicated with high fidelity, meaning pixel-perfectly and bit identically. 

The physics before was: a valuable bauble, a gemstone, a geegaw, would be one of a kind and worth coveting, even stealing, and for the thief to gain possession, the victim would of necessity be deprived of the thing’s use. 

But now a generous soul could distribute digital copies freely and western civilization was driven to its knees over how to do the books and make profit.

The FBI was called in, to put scary messages on children’s television. A campaign to scare kids silly was mounted through the schools. Rather than rethink the economics, given the boon of engineering advances, the bounty, the humans would be sacrificed, to the gods of making money.

Rather than adjust to the utopian possibilities, the choice was made to perpetuate the pre-existing squalor and postpone any reckoning with the “new magic”. Devices could be dumbed down, and the FBI would continue to scare people. Some were driven to suicide.

The loaves & fishes miracle was not welcome in the temples (meaning the banks), that much is clear. 

The inability of capitalism to respond rationally to its good fortune is pretty damning if you ask me.

However the engineers who understood best about these powers did manage to free themselves from a lot of the dreck, creating a design science revolution of sorts, based on redesigned social contracts (I’m talking about the free open source movement, as documented in old movies like Revolution OS).

I watched all these developments unfold from my perch as an educator. I got called in, along with another guy, by a former FBI guy, a policeman, to help break the cycle of fear by teaching the kids of the Silicon Forest all about Linux. 

You wouldn’t think the police would have to do that (teach Linux), but the school system had been completely co-opted by the capitalists, the ones who couldn’t wrap their heads around basic principles in engineering.

The police set up Linux Labs in the housing projects, on the model of Tux Labs in South Africa. The experiment seemed pretty successful from my vantage point, but then my part of it didn’t work out so well, is it would have meant kids coming to the police station itself for Linux training. 

Some did, but not the “at risk” kids we were trying to attract.

Yes, I’m being vague on the details, but I’ve got this whole thing written up in detail in other places, such as on Medium and like that.