Today's Confabs

I joined a tetrahedron of phi guys today: DF has been studying the spiral; GS knows sacred geometry; DK (who phoned my cell while I was having Thai food with DF); myself.

Chatting with DF is always a pleasure. He knows lots of tricks I don't, just as CalTech has fared better at providing email to its alums, Princeton's TigerNet having caved under ambient conditions within Spamalot, our trashy cyberslum.

I'm boosting coffee consumption, beans from Burundi, cutting back on other calories (I have plenty in storage).

DF and I spent a pleasant quarter hour exploring the OED around "jerk," a real name for the third derivative at Boeing, where people value smoothness as a passenger experience.

r = pow(math.e, theta * (2/math.pi)*(math.log(phi)))

DF: the successively shrinking quarter-circles-in-squares in a phi spiral aren't exactly quarter circles. That f(x,y) = 0 would put too much jerk in the joins.

OED: another meaning is to "jerk out" something sage between draws on one's pipe, not quite the same as "blurting" nor "pontificating" either.

This association with witty, whip-like quips, is in stark contrast with another meaning of "jerk" as in "slow to catch on," "a dim bulb," a spectrum mirroring people's differing experiences of the same performance on occasion.

Judging was a major focus of our lunch as well.

DF's visualizations around the science fair model, of judges ranking projects with an eye toward awarding prizes, have been evolving for some time now, a fascinating process to observe and to learn from I reckon.

GS found me at the supermarket, looking for butter pecan ice cream for mom, mint chocolate chip for Tara. We then co-spiraled down the beer aisle.

I returned DK's call from earlier. He's recovering fast from an injury, has almost finished the new garage.

Always a Marine

I just listened to John Rushing's latest interview with Terry Gross, regarding his new book and career as a correspondent for the English language version of Al Jazeera.

Given the etymology of this blog, and my tracking of Rushing's career, I feel obligated to comment; the relevance quotient is so high.

And my comments are very positive. Count me a Rushing fan, even though I don't get Al Jazeera on my DirecTV.

sa:

Computer Anatomy

My last upgrade to Camtasia Studio cost me easy access to sound features within the application, owing to my exotic integrated RealTek circuits, stardard on these HP Pavilion a1630ns, but that still doesn't mean there's a huge intersection of app users willing to press for a solution (by running diagnostics, sending screen shots and so on).

In the meantime, as new C stuff is hammered out, tech support advises that I slip into something more Soundblaster-compatible. Here's the polite letter, which I'm not complaining about, simply sharing:

Hi Kirby,

We found that this is a specific issue with Realtek intergrated sound card. We are currently working on ways to accommodate the rare integrated type of sound cards that seem to have issues with Camtasia.

In the meantime I would recommend purchasing a Sound Blaster sound card as we have always had good success with those working with Camtasia.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Kind Regards,

Mike
TechSmith Support

OK, so I could dissect the Santa Cruz card out from KTU2 in the basement -- the unit swapped in to replace Jennifer, once I repurchased the latter from Derek for display in the Pauling House as a generic, well performing Ubuntu box (from where I'll sometimes post to my blogs, such as during Wanderers meetings, like when not lugging my wireless Toshiba Satellite) -- and transplant it into KTU3.

On the other hand, those Camtasia movies were more "proof of concept" and're still out there doing work, so I'm not all that knickers-in-a-twist (as Brian might put it) over the vacation I'm getting from making more mathcasts and/or pilots for ~M!. Let's give would be sponsors ample time to evaluate the merchandize. I don't believe in being too pushy.

Oceans 13 (movie review)

Some friends invited me to this on the basis of free tickets they'd received, handed out by Regal in compensation for some glitch, Jimmy said minor, in some HD showing of Pirates... on a big screen in the multiplex across from Lloyd Center, the one with the parking lot from which Robin Egg was stolen, our Subaru wagon pre Razz, along with her bicycle rack. Miraculously for this Friday night, Jimmy found a space right at the entrance.

In the mood for mindless fun, I gave this movie big benefits of the doubt. None of that could actually work in real life, starting with floor plans, which is why they had too many to show. Everything would be totally broken, starting with the lame explanations for how a tunneling machine could be run by one man. The audience gets taken. The casino wins again.

But the point isn't the claptrap, the bells and whistles, but the clear friendships and utter competence of the guys in the foreground, a rat pack for our age. This is a shared vehicle well shared, by a sensitive bunch of Oprah lovers, what can we say. Not quite as high level as Shark Tale perhaps, but still a crime family drama, and those tend to be good once we're above certain cut offs.

Greco was the furthest off the mark. So what he (a thinking computer) detects short term deviations from average outcomes on the tables, and so what some big winner acts not innocently surprised, but like he expected it. So whatcha gonna do, big guy? Deviations happen.

Control Panel Fragment

My default screen is a personalized one of Google's. I play around with it, swapping gizmos in and out.

I get a Buddhist thought for the day thing via RSS, which I don't always check, but I popped it just now:

War can only be understood and put an end to if you and all those who are concerned very deeply with the survival of man, feel that you are utterly responsible for killing others. What will make you change? - J. Krishnamurti

That reminds me of some stuff I wrote awhile back, but I'm not finding it right now plus I'm noticing lots of badly formatted pages at my grunch.net web site. I need to go into janitor mode again and clean things up some more.

Patter About Poets

So I'm to understand from today's park meeting with Mitch that Emerson had no problem with all the sex in Whitman's poetry, but maybe from a coaching angle encouraged him to throttle back.

Plus T.S. Eliot was of course quite a bit later on the time line and in a very different social situation, must have disdained Whitman's work for being unschooled. "Poetry is not mere metered exuberance" -- but nor is Walt's.

The proof of transcendentalism is in its pudding. We eat our own dog food as some geeks like to say.

These remarks are with reference to this excerpt from my Connecting the Dots:

Emerson liked Walt Whitman a lot but thought there was too much sex in his poetry. Whitman refused to back off -- much to the disgust of T.S. Elliot -- probably with his future HBO-minded American audience in mind (i.e. he was prescient).[i]

Fuller of Harvard comes later in the game, dubbed “World Game” by him, with “Guinea Pig B” a star player. Fuller, an inventor, invented his own namespace fairly completely, after taking time off post 1927 to thoroughly divest himself of any unwanted “reflex conditioning,” and laying the groundwork for some life-long self-disciplines, somewhat described in his penultimate non-posthumously published magnum opus Critical Path.[ii]

---

[i] Per my conversation with Johnny Stallings, actor, at Common Ground on Hawthorne

[ii] my biography of the guy is available here: http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/bio.html

So I probably need to study the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg to better understand cultural currents linking the 1840s and the 1960s. Could be some fun airplane reading.

Pioneer Century

:: tinkerbell ::

Today I joined Chris and Larry for Pioneer Century, one of Oregon's oldest organized cycling events.

We chose the shortest loop (45 miles). Whereas the workout was a real pipe cleaner for me, it was even more of a milestone for Chris, who started noticing troubling health symptoms during this same event last year. This year she conquered the course.

Part of the reason physically active people live longer on average is they notice changes earlier, when pushing themselves to perform. Many illnesses are far more subject to treatment if caught early.

Only a few cyclists marred the event by disrespecting signage and taking to the middle of a busy highway. Local motorists, always courteous, put a bright face on these antics, accepting that some tourists may be prone to goofy behavior.

Yesterday I put some finishing touches on my sixteen page Connecting the Dots: American Transcendentalism Meets Pythonic Math and sent it off to the Europython folks, with strong encouragement from my community. I might tweak it again slightly before putting a copy at my website.

:: playground at the half way point ::

I came home to some terrible news about a friend's 22 year old son's fatal car accident. My heart goes out to my friend and his family during this time of painful separation. I am lighting candles and sending them metta as my dear Dawn would say (and do).

:: in memoriam: filepe gonzalez ::

Design Science

Last night marked the completion of my Python for Wanderers course, during which I shared a new storyboard for using Python in the field to teach analytical thinking.

We don't always call it math (~M!) as it's more a mix of subjects: philosophy, computer science, graphical arts... music.

We're hoping to leverage the capabilities of the new technologies, including these inexpensive laptops now coming on the scene.

Flextegrity.com has been investing in X3D recently, another way to make graphical material interactive and "fly through- able" (Octaga actually has a little paper airplane icon signifying "fly through").

I've embedded a screen sample. Plus there's been a lot of structural analysis going on behind the scenes. Sam was by 4D Studios not long ago, with the latest hardcopy version.

Yes, I agree, it looks a bit like the obelisk from 2001.

:: sam lanahan with
flextegrity prototype ::

Laptops, Intelligent use of

Intelligent use of laptops (setting): the lecture hall is large and the teacher far away, the chalkboards too. Given there's a camera or two, recording for posterity, it's easy to patch in to the camera feed and see what they're seeing (the producers in the control room), like sports on TV, everything close up and clear.

That's using a laptop, everyone with sufficient bandwidth to capture the feed, with headphones if desired.

Of course the temptation to multi-task presents itself. What did she say again?

Teachers like to day-dream that "undivided attention" is behind all those dreamy eyes out there. Laptops simply make it more public: no, other thoughts are happening too, get over it.

At least let 'em control their own thought process, how 'bout it?

So if you're a lecturer, you might see a lot of student eyes pointed not at you, but at a screen below eye level.

But they're watching you, through eyes on the ceiling or wherever they put the cameras.

Unsettling? Maybe. But at least it's easier on the eyes, plus your lecture is getting saved for future polishing/editing (spin doctoring), such that your "greatest hits" become a salable compilation someday.

So maybe you'll be free to retire from showbiz then, and try out other pastimes, thanks to all those royalties or whatever?

Middle School Program

Friends as in Religious Society of, with many lowercase among them, have gathered to plan future meetings, which sounds boring I know, but that's what we do: meet. For some, that's in anticipation of some future action. For us, that future action will minimally include meetings.

I served as chauffeur this time, escorting my middle schooler, lugging a laptop. I'm not trying to steer stuff at this level, got me blogs to keep current. So I'm back in a corner office while the meeting, after some pizza, gets under way.

Earlier today I wore my tie to some business meetings regarding this or that data, database programmer that I am. Not that I always wear a tie of course, but I've been shopping recently, and felt like road testing some of the combos, having tried out the completely new suit on my birthday recently.

OLPC on CBS

Lots of geeks were cued to watch this segment on OLPC on 60 Minutes this evening.

I was first to publish a review to edu-sig, Python Nation's "Python in education" list (hosted at python.org).

Excerpt: "Negroponte himself comes across as a class act, handsome, well spoken, an idealist we can love. So the XO uses AMD chips, so what?"

In other news, Jason has agreed to take on Python Meetups in Portland, via the Meetup.com infrastructure. Per Kevin's input @ BarCamp, we've created an official (python.org) mailing list for Portland as well. Thanks to Brad Allen of Dallas for hitting the restart button.

In my inbox: finish downloading Ubuntu Studio (37%), prepare and mail an NTSC DVD of my Dawn's bio & slides to Pat MacAodha; blog screen shots of Google Sketchup (free) doing domes 'n stuff; read more of George Tenet's "encoded spy novel" (I've enjoyed it so far, especially playing "musical chairs" in Georgia).

Sam called; we talked about poets. Dad'd be 77 today.

:: from the 3D warehouse ::

Incompleteness

:: rebecca @ island cafe ::

As it worked out, my surprise birthday present today was to hang out with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, our guest ISEPP lecturer, tonight rounding out the 2006-2007 series with a talk on incompleteness. Terry managed to schedule a quick lunch-focused trip on Captain Donzo's Meliptus, with me 'n Glenn on crew.

Rebecca did some hard time in 1879 Hall (Princeton's philo building), at the grad level (I was undergrad), escaping the limited options a trully orthodox Jewish curriculum could have provided a woman of her day. We gossiped and/or compared notes on a few of the big names for which Princeton is famous e.g. Kripke 'n Kaufmann.

Rebecca and I are both Sasha/Borat/AliG fans, so using my faux AliG voice I asked "if Gödel was on Myspace, who would his Myspace friends be?" Rebecca responded without hesitation: "Einstein and Leibniz." Me: "but Leibniz was dead." Rebecca: "They're all dead." At which point I broke character to speculate how three hundred years from now, Myspace might include as many dead as living (the info'd still be of historical interest no?).

Post lecture: Gödel would've nixed Wittgenstein as a Myspace friend at the time, especially as LW was being hailed as the god of logical positivism (a gross miscasting) whereas Gödel was into proving his brand of Platonism still held water. Rebecca: definitely one of Gödel's best Myspace friends.

:: rebecca chatting with nirel ::

Wanderers 2007.5.15

Scene One:

Mom got a computerized call in the wee hours of this morning informing her of a change of itinerary on United Airlines: her flight had been canceled, with the new one scheduled in at 8:30 PM instead of 3 PM.

Arriving early at the airport, given the pre-scheduled shuttle, she rebooked via Seattle but that flight was pulled for safety reasons, after passengers had already boarded, meaning she's now wait listed on the flight in at 8:30, with a backup confirmed in at 10 PM.

We call that "being jerked around" in the airline biz, but fortunately the customer in this case, age 78, is a veteran flyer and knows how to roll with the punches.

On my end, it's an ever-changing pickup time, meaning how much of Wanderers I'll make is still a mystery.

Scene Two:

Nirel did a great job laying out her dream of a cafe/lounge in this particular Seattle property that speaks to her. I've written about her project before in this blog. We all know I'm a big Nirel fan, in addition to being a Katie Couric fan. Count me a Condi fan too, talk of policies aside.

Scene Three:

Mom really felt for the airline clerks, especially this one who got 130 unhappy campers from the deboarded plane to Seattle, some missing international connections, all lined up and mad. Her own scenario worked out pretty well, with a comfortable seat on an Airbus that arrived some 20 minutes early, closer to 8 PM.

Tara and I retrieved her, and her bags, from PDX. She was amazed and pleased that her bags had made it as well, given her earlier wait listed status.

OMSI on Mother's Day

::: wandering around OMSI; studying shelters ::

Prepping for Class

output from first draft of povtoyz,
after rendering in POV-Ray

Python for Wanderers, part three of four, is tonight, and I wanted to be up to date with part three for Saturday Academy, which I'm teaching @ PSU. To that end, I wanted something like VizToyz but geared to work with a ray tracer, POV-Ray, instead of VPython out the back end.

In writing povtoyz.py this afternoon, I finally noticed my polyhedra.py was eight faces shy of the full complement for my Icosahedron subclass, duh. I hadn't noticed because I was so focussed on the wireframe view, but once I got experimenting in POV-Ray, the defect became obvious, as faces, defined by POV-Ray's polygon primitive, were missing from I, Icosa (a menu option parallel to the one in viztoyz.py).

today's scribbles

Jennifer is presumably on her way over the mountains, if Judy was right about finally finding a rental car. Not someone I've met before, but she may come to Wanderers as a part of her tour of PDX.

Another feature of the upcoming Wanderers class will be to review my work with Dr. Bob Fuller and team, getting that Studies in Human Motion CDR ready for the summer '04 meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

I used Python + POV-Ray for my part in that project, starting from Excel spreadsheets giving the successive (x,y,z) spatial locations (rows) of several sensors (columns) affixed to a ballet student going through her moves in Lincoln, Nebraska. Each row became a frame in a POV-Ray film, with my Python code doing the conversion (included as open source on the CDR).

studies in human motion CD

At the Lab

Nick and I are waterholing @ Lucky Lab, connecting through PersonalTelco (he's on a MacBook, me the Toshiba, nowadays with a gig of RAM). Nick's just back from four months in Europe and Canada, including Ireland and Toronto, with lots of stories.

I was late to another power lunch with Arthur, the retired Ecotrust and AFSC VIP, because I was countering the carpenter ants in my garage. Arthur gave me his blessing on that, eco-unfriendly though I'm being. We ate at Portland Fish House, just a tad towards Mt. Tabor from Pauling's on Hawthorne.

Power lunch with Terry Bristol yesterday and Mio Sushi, just prior to a power walk with Trevor and Sarah-the-Dog to Laurelhurst then Ben & Jerry's. Trevor updated me on the twisted history of Oswald Mosley, with the partnership ending up buying the Obey Giant artist's hardcover magnum opus at Missing Link for $60.

Python meetup tonight, organized by some geek from Dallas. Looking forward.

I'm drinking Crazy Ludwig for beer, their signature Hawthorne Best Bitter being off line. The guy behind the bar said it was named for van Beethoven; I thought maybe that Neuschwanstien guy.

Sky Camp

I used this occasion to share my dream, of a helicopter lowered prototype in the wide open field, just there for the duration of the event, for Junior Friends to monkey in and around, then gone.

How we get there in just a year (with earlier prototypes showing up elsewhere in the meantime) is not by me joining the tiny planetary clique of billionaires, but by me exercising my skills as a director, collecting raw footage for the editors, using my connections, my chief forms of embeddedness, e.g. with the Quakers here. I only had a tent this time, and that might be it for me next time as well. No smorgasbord, no yacht parked in the lake.

The difference between my kind of movie-making and Hollywood's is the props are corporate sponsored as future real world, in some cases mainstreamed candidates. It's product placement of a kind, similar to what the military does for its theater-ready killingry. Livingry is cutting edge, ready for soap operas, and the backgrounds now compete more with the talent for audience attention, something for actors' guilds to get over (this is a genre, akin to the documentary, not a hostile takeover and/or ban on our favorite fictionalizing techniques).

We use fewer mock ups, more of an improv script, because this is "real time" (like ordinary life), not always with opportunities for "take two" type redoings. Not every director is trained to work in this way. Nor do I forbid myself the luxury of slow frame rendering, when such R&R type movie-making gigs get offered.

But this is a surge to Darfur and such places, a FEMA type scenario, with real lives at stake on the ground. So these languid pauses in Quaker boot camps nestled in the Pacific Northwest has this "save the children" urgency about it. The corporations sponsoring us don't take it all too lightly either. We're free to insert our Glad bag commercials, our SuperBowl XX..VI. But that doesn't mean we're not serious-minded about our responsibilities, such as these may be, to our fellow beings aboard Spaceship Earth, nonhumans included.

FEMA Villages

I met Arthur for a power lunch on Belmont. He's my former boss at CUE, during the Reverend Rodney Page era at EMO, and later a higher up at Ecotrust, a former xBase client.

He filled me in on some Quaker influences, as chronicled in Nixon Agonisties in Whittier, in South Carolina during the AFSC's participation in desegregation, and among the Klamath here in Oregon. Other gossip.

All that, plus the ongoing OLPC vs. CP4E thread, has me thinking of those FEMA Villages again, the ones not made of trailers by The Flintstones, more like a futuristic Dignity Village or Camp I Am.

They'd have a faster-moving queue of disaster survivors, with more slowly rotating staff managing the intake to placement cycle. Staff might be tasked to the different villages TSA style i.e. on a just in time basis.

These villages are not designed around any permanently located dwellings, but serve as removable temporary waystations twixt a disaster and a next chapter.

And no, a given FEMA Village needn't contain any geodesic domes, as if "by law" or anything like that. It's more a matter of who's coordinatin', exercising her or his artistic judgment.

Part of the Katrina Math curriculum (similar to Rainforest Math, but gnuer) is to ensure our HP4E thread continues, i.e. students at least have the option of designing and building geodesic domes i.e. we don't want this relatively new knowledge to get buried for hundreds of years, in some precious "dark age" of Flintstone contrivance.

Dish Chatter

So here's a question for you DirecTV jocks, somewhat rhetorical as I don't generally accept comments in my journal (too many iPod ads): should I initiate a trouble ticket regarding the circumstances recounted below?

So Tara clicks on 311 for America's Funniest Home Videos or whatever and gets 'searching for satellite' but no programming, though some other channels work just fine. Go to the other DirecTV box in another room, go to 311 and voila, no problem at all. And now Tara's got it too, like it just comes on. OK, go back to the other box, and now leave 311: and it's killed on Tara's in the living room, we're back to 'searching for satellite'.

Yet the behavior is unpredictable and seemingly not-weather related. Sometimes the main box seems blissfully unslaved from that other one, gets everything with no assistance and/or interference.

Whaddya say? I say it's under warranty, and I'm a new adopter locked in for a year, and I should explore my technical environment, so yes, let's initiate a trouble ticket. Also, my caller id went away, after a few days of service. I'm thinking confusion at Qwest, so I'll get a partner to check in to it during business hours.

Followup (9:15 AM, May 1):

The Qwest tech detected a cross pattern and cut me a fresh F1 to the crossbox near Hawthorne, for which I'm glad, but a deeper problem is caller id and DSL don't play well together. The workaround was to simply connect the handset on my desk to a different jack.

The DirecTV tech traced our problem to a bad connector left over from CATV days.

I was pleased by the professionalism and prompt responsiveness of both service providers.

:: qwest tech ::

Errata

I've been something of a Dennis the Menace character of late, knocking out core services in two important (at least to me) buildings: at my house and at Linus Pauling's house.

At my house, I wanted a caller-id enabled telephone on my desk, but replugged it into the second line, daisy chained with the Qwest modem. But there's no DSL on line two, so my LAN went dead. Qwest was on the scene within 48 hours, and did some other troubleshooting as well. My linebacker insurance paid off.

At the Pauling House, when hooking Jennifer to tcp/ip, I also messed with the phone jack, and apparently replugged something back in incorrectly, just like at my house. Barton notified Glenn, who was able to troubleshoot the problem when reminded of the shenanigans at my place, at the center of which I was the common element.

Rest assured I felt suitably sheepish about both errors and thank my lucky stars that Universe had the competence to compensate for them.

But I haven't even gotten to my worst error, which was to ineptly secure Naga's aquarium tank, such that she escaped her abode.

The odds of finding a small, hiding snake in a big house were against me. Yet I found her. But not before experiencing this little rollercoaster: loss of Internet and Naga the same morning.

I've done a lot of postmortems on these errors, have tried to learn a great deal from them. In general I'm on a campaign to reduce entropy in my life, with Dawn, my late wife, a standard bearer and inspiration in this regard. I'm less the poor slob I was when she met me.

I did my first Python for Wanderers class tonight, which I thought went splendidly. The number of total combined computer-related man-hours in that room was impressive, although women still own and control computer science as a discipline, the way I look at it -- again with the Wiccan spin or something close.

More Meetings

I was somewhat busier than usual today, what with the banking, the lunch at Portland Fish House, snapping a photo of Jennifer, diving into gnu math exercises and so forth, followed by a quick walk with Trevor over to Belmont and back, followed by a trip to the pet store to discuss Naga's care and feeding.

Trevor and I talked submarines, including the Japanese ones and the ones my uncle Bill Lightfoot writes about in his excellent Beneath the Surface.

Over lunch, Glenn and I discussed literature by R.D. McGown, which in turn references Bunce on music theory i.e. lots of Wanderer action, a lot of it in the arts of memory tradition.

Returned to mom's cell's voicemail box my congrats on producing a successful Chalmers Johnson event, pre all this R&R in Washington, District of Columbia.

News on TV, local six but on satellite, spaghetti & tomato sauce (I rinse 'em too), some coffee, some staying up late to do laundry and blog.

Business Transaction

Jennifer @ Pauling House

The partnership decided to buy Jennifer, the Ubuntu box, from Derek, complete with keyboard and monitor, for $120. Maybe DWA'll be at least partially reimbursed from the coffee till, but that's neither here nor there.

Although the hardware was maybe priced a tad high -- the software is free -- Jennifer has sentimental value (to Derek too), plus I need a known quantity Linux box for my Python for Wanderers class, which begins next Thursday, in synch with my Pythonic Math class for Saturday Academy on the weekends.

Glenn was at work when I phoned and helped me set it up in the Pauling House. In just minutes we had an IP number and Google on screen, with speakers plugged in and ready to rumble.

Although I'll be projecting from a WinXP laptop a lot of the time, it'll be nice to demonstrate pretty much the same stuff running on this alternative open source platform. Wanderers wishing to familiarize themselves with a contemporary Linux distro will now have that opportunity as well.

recursive mural on Hawthorne

Wanderers 2007.4.17

Last night it was my privilege to present about Python Nation to Wanderer mathematicians and engineers, practicing and retired, some with years of programming experience e.g. both Bill (electronics) and Barry (banking) have an active knowledge of assembly language programming.

Given I usually teach this stuff to middle and high schoolers, I found last evening's venue a valuable opportunity to gear things a little differently. Jon made us coffee. Wine and beer were also available.

Part of my preparation process was to remove pretty much all traces of Python from the Toshiba laptop to start with, and install the 2.5.1 release candidate at the start of the talk. I wanted that "nothing up the sleeves" sense of bare Python.

Then I wrote, saved and imported all my code in real time, while projecting with the Optoma -- except when showing off such canned Standard Library modules as math and cmath.

I've saved the gist of my presentation as wanderers.py at my 4D Solutions/CP4E website.

Followup:
Class 0 (April 26)
Class 1 (May 3)
Class 2 (May 10)
Class 3 (May 24)

Rebooting Mathematics

Originally posted to Math Forum @ Drexel, hyperlinks added.

Back in the 1980s/90s I was suggesting a "makeover", then as now a popular genre on TV (plastic surgery channel, or just playing dress up). But the downside of such a meme is its "purely cosmetic" spin, inapplicable as that connotation may well be in specialcase.

So the new campaign uses words like "reboot" more often, while keeping "makeover" as a runner up.

Central to the reboot is this new focus on energy. We have Sol (our sun) like 92 million miles distant, as a primary source, and the relative vacuum of space (out past the orbiting junk heap) as our energy source. In between is what Dorion Sagan and others call the "solar gradient", which humanity rides kind of like a beach bum rides a surf board, piggy-backing on this vast tsunami of energy income courtesy of what Pharoh Akhenaten recognized as our biggest physical energy sponsor in these parts, to the tune of many terawatts per capita over an average lifetime.

What we then do is break this energy down into cycles, mainly the shorter swing weather cycles within the longer swing climate cycles, and our ability to tap in to those with "water wheel" technology, meaning these turbine like things (or literal turbines), feeding into the various distribution grids to the offices and homes and such, where the voltage is stepped down to like 220/110 at 50/60 cycles (visit geni.org for more info).

The mathematics comes in early, as we attach precise and engineeringly significant numbers to this picture, using spreadsheets, computer simulations or whatever you school curriculum experts have signed up for (as a parent, you may be downloading or purchasing at Fry's -- make sure you push for that homeschooler tax deduction as these supplies needn't be paid for twice). Solar gradient kwhs convert to grid kwhs which in turn convert to calories and kilocalories, joules and kilojoules. This is where we get to the food labels and the whole Super Size Me discussion around malnutrition (over as well as under -- an important component of any serious-minded public spirited self health curriculum, and just as appropriate under the heading of math).

Of course by now the purists are starting to object about all the french fries and milk shakes we're discussing, taking seriously as solar gradient income (hydrocarbons cycle). This sounds more like science class. But your counter, as one of the "gnu math" trained, is to remind parents that "geometry" is really "earth measure" and said earth is an actual planet, ours, Earth or Spaceship Earth as your text may call it.

We're not using K-12 as a platform to promote some psychological "disconnect" from the "real world" ala some of the negative press about Ivory Tower PhD level math (much of it undeserved). That's not a goal. Pursue that brand of necromancy in college or in private scholarship if you like, but don't take it as a sign of weakness that we're anchored in the astronomical and geological data bases, when it comes to getting our most primitive concepts across. We're not about turning our back on Animal Planet. The object oriented paradigm (OOP), intrinsic to our self-executing math notations, is especially vested in animals and animation, per the various geek-architected pipelines already well described in this Math Forum archive.

That being said, don't therefore misassume we don't have proofs. Our grounding in real world open source energy planning type curricula does not mean we're unable to justify and/or prove the logical consistency of our approach, by a lot of the same means used by the competition i.e. by those otherworldly philosopher types, steeped in their continuum metaphysics ala the calculus. Discrete math engineering, at the higher levels, is well typified by such texts as Concrete Mathematics (sometimes used at Stanford) and Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. We're not apologetic for our more digital spin, think it flies, carries water, plus leads to interesting careers for our grads. Your mileage may vary.

Related Reading:
Brainstorming About an Early 21st Century Technology Curriculum (Shuttleworth Summit)

Night at the Museum (movie review)

Tara and I took this in at The Bagdad (right, no h). We both liked it, maybe for only partially overlapping reasons (e.g. the happy ending).

Like I was pretending to be a movie director, watching the camera angles. "Hmmm, competent" I heard myself thinking: just your basic storytelling, with some of our greatest comedy actors.

Dick Van Dyke turns out to have evil motives, but he's still chim chiminy under it all. And by the way, I do like the way Sally Field does her gig with Boniva.

Count me an admirer of this slightly (ever less a percentage difference, logarithmically speaking) older generation. Gervais: hilarious... Ben, you're great.

And Robin, again the president!

Run for the Arts

Can you spot Tara and Rose?
Note girl on stilts
(click for larger view)

Winterhaven students ran or walked laps for the arts this afternoon, an annual fundraising event throughout Portland Public Schools, over a period of several days.

Meanwhile, parents on the school e-list discussed what to do in the event of rain. "Run anyway" is a strongly expressed ethos around here, since that's what ends up happening so often.

I managed three pictures before losing battery power, then left Tara a can of A&W rootbeer under her dentist-brand water bottle (ironic).

Angi at OnPoint was most kind and efficient when I stopped by to converge the IRAs plus get another read on those interest payments on our mortgage (the IRS wants to know). 2006 was mostly about going in the hole on our 2nd mortgage (aka "equity line") to keep ahead of the cancer, the plan being to eventually pay down this debt with Dawn's life insurance policy (National Life, Montpelier, Vermont).

Later I wrote back to a young woman who lost both parents to cancer when she was still new in this country from Yugoslavia. Now, six years later, she works for AmeriCorps and has friends like family. I salute her "courage to be" as Paul Tillich would put it.

Wanderer Patrick Barton swung by 4D Studios for some wasabi peas, salmon jerky and beer. I showed him my propaganda mill (I was doing some stuff around mom). He's off to Prague next week.

Tonight: dinner at Jane 'n Dave's.

Extremely Remote Living (XRL)

:: desert moon ::

I had lunch with Ron Marson of Multnomah Meeting on Monday, meeting at Nicholas' Restaurant on Grand Avenue. We split a vegetarian meza plate, plus I got Turkish coffee and Ron had fruit juice.

Earlier, I shared some of the same XRL-related information with Trevor at Peet's on Hawthorne.

If Mercy Corps or other disaster relief outfit is going to deploy dwelling machines in extreme circumstances, it makes sense for personnel to train on the same or similar equipment in relatively safe local environments with similar terrain.

Ron specializes in teaching science and mathematics concepts using simple off the shelf supplies. His wife, Peg, does a lot of the art work. He has some background in Ghana, working for the Peace Corps.

I'd like him to present to Wanderers one of these days, about his experiences on the science conference circuit, working with NASA, his education philosophy and its translation into practice.

Trevor's presentation is already tentatively scheduled.

:: crooked river ::

Knotted Snake

:: Easter, 2007 ::

Spring Cleaning

I remarked favorably on the junk service guy's shoulder tatoo, calling it a Celtic knotted snake. He cited Neverending Story but also liked it for it's allusive similarity to the "mind of the Buddha" endless knot motif; he'd noticed, walking through our house, a lot of cool Tantric stuff.

Anyway, the two of 'em hauled off $239's worth of stuff by volume, including a wrecked electric lawn mower, destroyed portable A/C unit, and a much-abused double-sized heated waterbed from our basement.

I'd scored this latter when the Braithwaite's, hoping to relocate to Canada, offered it to our family. If I'd had my act more together -- was more of a handyman -- it might've provided a cool place to cop some Z's or otherwise loll. My bad that it never happened.

At first Tara didn't like this placement (below) for this bumper sticker, but I pointed out it is stuck to the bumper, just in a weird place. David Nally suggested we could put a Keep Portland Insane sticker right on the windshield -- smart cookie that David. Hillary made us some dinner tonight.

Competing Curricula

A theme of my writings of late is we need competition in order to remain strong and healthy.

Python competes with other agile languages for mindshare, true, but its best hope of staying in the game will involve developing countering forms of operational intelligence within Python Nation amongst its many subcultures.

We have some of that diversity even now, as evidenced by Plone, a promising sign.

Likewise, in the USA's pre-college public schools I believe we suffer from too much inbred complacency within the dominant math teaching ethnicity (not a genetic thing i.e. propagated by textbooks and memes more than genes).

Mixing it up more, on TV and computer screens especially, will help dislodge some of these dangerously retarding bottlenecks and logjams.

:: mite & two smites by dbk ::

Livingry

Drawing from the strength of Dawn's memorial service just completed, which drew us together from so many walks of life, I wish to transform our energy, our fire, into a sense of gratitude.

I am especially grateful to those who've come before us, blazing a way, including developing for themselves and for us these miraculous technologies of cars on freeways, jets in skyways, a growing toolbox of esoterica, some effective, against disease. Because of these things, we were enabled to experience a great healing in the wake of Dawn's life, an act of lovingkindness and a contribution to us all.

Humanity, bending technology to humane uses, has the potential to do well for itself, to alleviate suffering, to work, to enjoy.

I ask that I remain open to Mother Nature as a teacher for me, and as one who assigns me tasks. To serve God is not to turn one's back on the gift of creation, but to manifest a divine will in whose image we have our being.

Pan's Labyrinth (movie review)

The girls and I projected this on our living room wall, using the Toshiba + Optoma. Alexia fell asleep before it was over, Tara pronounced it a good movie and not all that bad, given she empathized so completely with Ofelia. Dawn had wanted to see this movie, given the title and buzz. In retrospect, we think she did fine without it -- but not that it was a bad movie or anything, just very violent (recalling her reaction to Lost City). Plus Dawn didn't much go for subtitles.

The film explores very strongly motivated characters each responding to a different set of cues. The little girl is the most off base, in terms of having a solid enough reality to walk through walls (in a manner of speaking). The military patriarch is self-indulging in some father-son cult that glorifies in death, and he ends up disappointed. In between is the Spanish civil war, more than ugly. The maid's scenario is the most heroic, next to Ofelia's, yet tinged with more realism (more machine world, less Narnia).

Monitored Enrichment

I'm not a huge fan of nuclear energy but recognize the technology is likely to stay with us, and could be less polluting than coal in some ways, once you factor in the scarring, although uranium mines can be ugly too.

Iranian consortia are well positioned to lead in enrichment, a vital step in the commercial supply chain, provided there's sufficient transparency, given their relatively clean track record thus far. Civilian fuel providers will contract with Iranian refineries for ready-to-install non-weapons-grade materials.

Given an historic insistence on secrecy coupled with a policy of first use, LAWCAP is in no position to be lecturing on the need for transparency in monitoring. Likewise, until the Grunch resolves its voting machine problems, it should maybe just shut up (in the Bill O'Reilly sense) about "exporting democracy." There's only so much hypocrisy an intelligent reader can bear.

Those fearing competition in a lucrative sector face an uphill battle keeping the Iranians from breaking in to the business. USA-based flagships could remain competitive however, if complying with the same IAEA-style transparency guidelines as everyone else. Competition will help keep prices down and should be encouraged by the WTO.

Any traffic aimed at nuclear weapons manufacture is equally criminal in every nook and cranny of the globe. That's easy to understand and therefore relatively easy to enforce.

Small Planet

Americans talk about withdrawing from Iraq as if there were some place to go to get away from all mistakes of the past, from any consequences for what's been started. Vietnam to the west plays a role in this thinking, as Asia seems peaceful right now, nonthreatening (except maybe for North Korea). "Will Iraq ever be like Vietnam?" many North Americans ask themselves, scanning the channels for answers.

Although North America pretty much stradles the northern western hemisphere, it's not immune from geopolitics, as our fearless leaders endlessly preach to us. But then do our fearless leaders have enough smarts to use a Fuller Projection, with world game models for winning against death by starvation, from exposure: twin terrors humans are naturally designed to fight.

This karma is not all bad let's remember. Baghdad has a bright future on many a storyboard, Iraq a strong, self-interested economy. Just because we've earned a thousand years of karma doesn't mean we're in hell. We Fuller Schooler geekazoids like having to work it all out on tiny Spaceship Earth, find this a very kwel planet. We want our designs to be dependable, reliable, high quality. Speaking of which, it's time to go get Razz from the shop.

Itineraries

Kudos to Southwest Airlines for juggling Alexia (and to Alexia for being a willing pin). The Chicago connection was about to fall through, and Seattle is too far to taxi, but an alert desk clerk realized a certain aircraft ended the day in Portland, so if Alexia just sat it out, passing through places like San Diego and Phoenix, she'd make it after all, which she did.

No bag though. It came through Chicago, and I picked it up this morning with Larry, blathering in both directions about geeky stuff (they'd've delivered but why not a $50 voucher, a chance to catch up with a friend?). Anyway, great airline work. And kudos to Greg by the way.

The mercy care team is also in high gear, performing its services. I just got off the phone with Ellen where she talked me through resetting the pump. Any TPN during hospice is a matter of landing the craft slowly and comfortably, less of a crash -- a shot of whiskey on the deck of The Titanic is how I put it (except Dawn was more a tequila fan, had given up drinking by the time I met her).

Gayle and Elizabeth were her two pilgrimmage sisters on that trip to Ireland's holy wells that time. She also flew on her own to Glastonbury and those parts, that other time, meeting up with sisters there.

Dawn was first introduced to the Kirby concept in the abstract. She was shown a small closet like room, told it was my office, while meanwhile Kirby himself was in Bhutan. Which was all true. Later, she and Alexia went to Bhutan with me, by way of Chang Mai (Thailand) and Calcutta (India).

As for the Math Wars, they're always ongoing. Our side is winning these days, which hasn't always been the case. I prefer ending careers to real battlefield bloodshed -- more civilized by a long shot.

Wanderers enjoyed some dynamite presentation by a Mercy Corps powerhouse this morning. I missed it, but all reports were positive. Glad to meet over Thai food with "our" Japanese exchange student (just turning 23) and her friend (same age -- I guessed right), bound for San Francisco today.

Rearrangements

I moved our wireless access substation from the bedroom to the living room this morning, so wayfaring guests, like our neighbor, might better access the Internet from Dawn's HQS. We've got a ship's log goin' (Laurie's idea), plus other stuff.

The substation hangs off the house AC, which communicates tcp/ip over these short distances. It's funny to think of my browser frames traveling through the fuse box, but such is the state of the art in these parts.

I told Wanderers I'm fine with like South Park doin' its version of the Al Gore movie or whatever, "because even if the science is right, the fear and/or spin might not be."

The Windows patches worked fine, as did my satellite checked Casio, but for some reason the VCR box hooked to cable didn't update, even after unplugging/replugging during the move. And that clock's what I happened to rely on when I woke up this morning, so Tara was late to school.

Wanderers 2007.03.07

Again, I missed it, needing to catch up on office work, plus feeling feverish a little, having spent the previous night on the river on a stakeout of the moon.

Glenn filled me in over Thai food: an accomplished engineer of vast environmental experience, Charles Lytle talked about how the instrumentation has gotten really good, to parts in a quadrillion sometimes, to where it's getting easier than ever to trace pollutants to their sources.

This level of technical sophistication is a problem for the politically minded, who'd rather not see those detailed maps showing up on flatscreens all over the place. It's harder to just nod nod wink wink in the presence of so much empirical data. Polluting companies therefore can't simply arm twist, hoping their exotic pavement materials, or fireworks fallout, will go undetected and unreported.

Still, despite these advances on the Sherlock Holmes side of the business, law enforcement has a tough job: rains from the other side of the Pacific often have a higher mercury content than local laws permit and overfishing hurts everyone, but how good are those eyes in the sky at really catching those heinous criminals, especially on cloudy days?

Late Night with Dave Koski

Koski is the David Letterman of T-module geometry, where the T-mod is this wedge, both left and right handed, and 1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron. A recent investor in ZomeTool, David has been assembling up a storm.

recursive construction of T with "remainder tet"

The other night, he reported finally getting around to the rhombic dodecahedron, the paradigm IVM shape, and finding it easy to build.

rhombic dodeca with embedded cube

Koski goes way back with this stuff, to the life of a scholar in and around Venice and Santa Monica, California, which is when we first met.

Thirsters Again

My borrowed copy of Burden of Dreams coming due, I swung by Thirsters again while in the neighborhood.

I partially caught up on a system for rationalizing English spelling, then tuned in a Reed College professor, ending up talking about R, which he uses to teach statistics, and J, which he hadn't heard of.

The political analyst across the table talked up corruption in Cook County politics, about how they paid people to knock new voters off the roles, other shenanigans, and about how Senator Wu seemed so circumspect (inscrutable?), despite recent press.

Actually, I think Wu was somewhat on target characterizing neocons as Klingons, not Vulcans. Plus I take some credit (not a whole lot) for getting those trekkie monikers applied to brands of Washington insider in the first place.

For example, I used the term "Vulcan" in May of 1999 with reference to the CIA's former executive director Nora Slatkin, her tenure overlapping Deutch's as then DCI:

Nora came from a background in defense, as did DCI Deutch. Some of us called her "the Vulcan Queen" or something like that. She was a tough cookie -- smart too.

But in calling her a Vulcan, I never intended Slatkin to be perceived as a neocon, who are more like Ferengi (I don't really see Condi as a neocon either though).

All this Star Trek talk led a Thirster from LA to talk about being one of the very few privileged enough to get on the Deep Space Nine set. I'd been talking about how Kirk's chair in the Paul Allen museum would never pass muster on HDTV (you only need detail to the limit of scan line or pixel density).

The Deep Space set was pretty detailed, but did contain Easter Eggs you'd never see on TV, such as Gilligan's Island lyrics on one of the space station's monitors (but "the real" Deep Space might've had those too, having a shared Earthian past).

More remarkable were the garish colors. What you need to do with color, to make stuff look good on television, is kinda odd sometimes.

Back to Thirsters, Lew assured me Gore's global warming road show rivaled the very best of the ISEPP lectures, and received high marks from the public. Lew compares Gore to Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, even if Gore's scientific credentials are more humble than theirs.

Lew himself is way above average, in terms of being scientifically literate, but then he's a Wanderer.

Speaking of Wanderers, Linus Pauling might be another role model, though I was assured yesterday that if you really took as much vitamin C as LP recommends, you'd generate some nasty Fe3+ oxidants, so better not.

Fred was going on about how the Irish really took it in the neck for awhile. Worse than slavery, for awhile. More like The Gangs of New York.

I also chatted with a musicians' union leader who thinks local radio stations should be required to devote at least a percentage of their air time towards advancing the careers of talented locals, i.e. by playing their music. If the airwaves really belong to the public, wouldn't that just go with the territory?

In some parts of the country, finding enough talent to fill the slots might be a problem, but not in Portland certainly.

Why No Cookies in Math Class?

I suppose that's a catchy enough title. Kids don't want to always re-enter the same passwords on a personal computer, a tedious exercise if you're not worried about spying on yourself.

But a browser typically comes with privacy controls, meaning cookies get blocked by default, meaning it's unlikely you'll be rescued from tedium, unless you know how to tell your browser from which domains cookies'll be OK.

It's up to you, the user, to set these policies.

So we throw kids into this virtual "oval office," surrounded with nifty freedoms, and then don't give 'em a clue. You get to be President Klutzo, some superhero Incredible who can't figure out how to work the netmeeting phone, drive the golf cart or whatever. What a wasted opportunity.

So you'd think math teachers, being the numeracy gurus in our culture, for little kids anyway, our having banned real geeks from actually teaching anything so elementary, except maybe on some exotic satellite channels you may be lucky enough to be getting, would be the ones to share this lore -- about how to allow cookies from Google, for example, but not from some fly by night with only a number, not even a DNS sig.

OK, well maybe the language arts teachers then? Actually that sounds about right, as XML and the DOM signify tree structures, like those old Outlines we used to do, with Roman Numeral major sections, like chapters, broken down into maybe a, b, c each with subsections i, ii, iii and so on, however the notation (this was all before those graphical "bullets" became available). Given language teachers already need to cover XML, why not let 'em handle the cookies part too?

Burden of Dreams (movie review)

This is the movie that goes with Werner Herzog's director's commentary track on Fitzcarraldo.

Werner plays himself as a crazed film maker, willing to risk life and limb (others' as much as his own) to get those special effects only obtainable if you do them for real. Tribal politics play a role, as the presence of indigenous Germans leads many to expect the worst and/or want a piece of the action.

Werner monologues about his existential problems with the Jungle's decadent opulence, plus shows a crazed Kinski losing it with the crew (bonus feature). Also in the bonus features, Werner eats his own shoe, for reasons unrelated to the making of this film.

For those skeptics and cynics who don't think this all really happened as portrayed, check out the clip from the first version (before the restart) featuring Robards and Jagger, as the split personality earlier cast for this role, and filled handsomely by Kinski once the film ran into problems (probably mostly around Werner's ego, though no one ever comes right out and say so on the director's cut).

This "making of" spends a lot more time on the rubber making process, rubber barons, and their love of opera, being so pivotal in the more fictive version.

Standards and Ramparts

So the typical scene is a wall (ramparts) with flags flying behind them. Or if behind, then presumably you're on the other side? Would that be outside or in? On a ball, a triangular walled city is really just an interface between two cities, both with three corners and three edges. Remember, Earth is a ball. Tale of two cities.

Anyway, so on my flag is this MITE, for Minimum Tetrahedron, and some initials RBF. We say minimal because tetrahedral but also because not handed: the right handed and left handed, inside out versions of one another, look the same. Then they fill space with no gaps, in terms of Couplers we might cast it, in our model of the IVM (a kind of holodeck for Scenarios Universe, our "show and tells," partially overlapping, eternally regenerative). Handed modules would be like the As and Bs, which comprise the MITEs but, like the left and right handed Ls in Tetris, can't just stand in for one another as substitutes ("some inside-outing required").

I took Carla and Scott on a mostly driving tour while Dawn underwent alternative therapies today. We left the GPS in the other car (their rental), so driving by feel, I approached Council Crest, only to veer around behind to Scholls Ferry (a road I'd haunted the day before, in service of my alma mater), winding to Hwy 24, into town via Rose Garden (made two passes at Portlandia), back under the cable car on I-5 to Humdinger on Barbur (near Dawn) thence to Grand Central Bakery in Multnomah Village, by way of old haunts (this was Matt's and my early boyhood neighborhood, pre Rome, my Markham Annex now a corporate campus, Piggly Wiggly gone too).

Cool interlude: we parked Razz at the Oregon Zoo lot and rode the Max elevator down to the station, hundreds of feet below through layers of sediment. Set into stone in this station is one vertical core sample, laid horizontally in a tube, with engravings suggestive of the millions of years that have elapsed, over the time of this core deposit's aggregating. Two trains arrived while we inspected the exhibit, one bound for Gresham (to the east) the other for Hillsboro (to the west).

Once Dawn rejoined us (chauffered by Peg), we proceeded to the Chinese Garden, which the three enjoyed, as I took Razz over the Steel for some gas. Scott and Carla fly home tomorrow. She works in an Italian restaurant. Her boy Steve wants to pit for NASCAR and like that (a worthy goal I'd hazard).

Yesterday was OMSI, fruit smoothies.

Control Room Collection

Mercator Projection

So given the name of this blog, which got started looking in on Al Jazeerah's (which has since come a long way), I feel it appropriate to mention others I come across, both fictive and for real.

In the fictive category, I just saw The War of the Worlds (1953 edition) last evening, and noted the huge Mercator they were trying to win their war with.

What I hadn't quite realized about the plot, was the good professors had the right idea, about using some biochemical counter, but succumbed to the generalized panic attack, ending up in church and without any laboratory solution.

While the idea from the pulpit may have been that prayers were what saved them, I think H. G. Wells was inspiring an even deeper faith in our Earth's design: it has an immune system (so best to stay on its good side (we've had some experience...)).

Fuller Projection

Corporate Screencasting

I've been graced with a new VFP 9.0 Professional, completely legit, thanks to connections and UPS Ground, and last night polished off a demo screencast of inhouse academic assets, stuff we use to harvest clinical data for outcomes research, in support of the hospital's teaching functions ("what works for how long" is, after all, critical clinical information).

Meanwhile, on edu-sig, we're on the subject of teaching Python to non-CS majors, people with only a casual need to code, as a part of some humanities major for example.

"Do we share about OOP (our so-called object oriented paradigm) with the tourists?" might be a good way of capturing a key question.

I say that we should, but leveraging recog over recall skills, i.e. we make it look easy, with cartoons and such, without putting lots of pressure on students to cough up or regurgitate, i.e. you don't have to try this at home (but feel free if you want to, not a dangerous activity (though frustrating and tedious at times)).

I still have a high opinion of Visual FoxPro as a development environment by the way. Xbase was never a stupid language (though it may be used stupidly), with its procedural pointers to tabular data, combined with fast relational indexing, exposed in control structures. Best of all, it has an interactive command line (the infamous "dot prompt" in dBase), like Python does.

Then came the OO revolution, with Microsoft buying Fox as a dBase killer, once Borland's plans, to stick with the brand "dBase" (Ashton-Tate's) became clear.

Did the language die an ugly death at Microsoft's hands? No, I don't think so. The product remains an elegant solution in many situations and I'm glad Redmond keeps putting muscle behind it, despite end users going gaga for Microsoft Access (a part of Office no less). VFP wasn't just about using objects from other languages (more the VB model), had its own class defining syntax, more like in "VB#" (i.e. VB .NET).

What's great about xBase is you have this procedural way of stepping through tables and you have embedded SQL.

Sure, I can see why we'd use Oracle, Postgres or MySQL as a back end, but when it comes to creating a usable user interface, I still think the "thick client" has a future.

Making everything work in a browser "just because we can" isn't a deep enough philosophy to persuade me otherwise -- not yet anyway, XUL notwithstanding.

The "Surge"

I haven't seen many journalists linking this verb "surge" to its ironic appearance in the CIA's literature, namely in Lindsay Moran's little book Blowing My Cover (ISBN 0-399-15239-3). I include this quote in my book review (January, 2005):

Ironically, in early 2003, not long after my return from Macedonia, I was "surged" to the Near East (NE) Division in order to help gear up for the invasion of Iraq. During my short tenure in Iraqi Operations, I met one woman who had covered Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program for more than a decade. She admitted to me, unequivocally, that the CIA had no definitive evidence whatsoever that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed WMD, or that Iraq presented anything close to an imminent threat to the United States.

Another CIA analyst, whose opinion I'd solicited about the connection between Al Qa'ida and Iraq, looked at me almost shamefacedly, shrugged, and said "They both have the letter q?" And a colleague who worked in the office covering Iraqi counterproliferation reported to me that her mealy-mouthed pen pusher of a boss had gathered together his minions and announced, "Let's face it. The president wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it."

Like former CIAer Robert Baer of Syriania fame (haven't seen it yet), Lindsay registers little beyond disrespect for the neocon ideology that resulted in America's biggest blunder. Baer: "I think the neocons have done more damage to the United States’ reputation and foreign policy than anybody since—I don’t know when. They’ve opened Pandora’s box in Iraq." (MotherJones, July 5, 2006).

The sad part was how these wackos, many of them "government insiders" (i.e. nut jobs in many cases), managed to infect the mass media pundits, by riding the post-911 wave of panic and hysteria.

Journalists are easy prey for cynical spin doctors in times of national distress. Let's remember that lesson and not repeat these same mistakes.

I applaud the CIA's decision to move some of its most important (mostly training) facilities far beyond the beltway, in part just to get away from all the corruption and crummy intelligence that goes with living around Washington, DC. Presidents have long sought similar getaway havens, even if only 60 miles away at Camp David. DC just gets too oppressive at times.

Followup (related news stories):
Pre-War Intelligence Acts 'Inappropriate,' U.S. Finds, Feb. 9 (Bloomberg).
Pentagon Watchdog Slams Prewar Intel, Feb. 9 (CBS News).

Synergeo #32395

In my first storyboard, I paid some attention to social service and academic achievement i.e. a design scientist is someone willing to mix it up in the real world, not just push for Ivory Tower credentials, as the latter without the former may be quite meaningless.

However, the main thrust of my storyboard was to find a bridge, starting in the known and moving towards the unknown (assuming a demographic still somewhat unfamiliar with even the basics of Fuller's metaphysics).

I start with the Qyoob (Cube) and use it to establish the 3D-hood of ordinary space. A 3-vector zig-zag on the corresponding simplex also combines these notions of "3" and "spanning basis vectors" but of course when the zig-zag is bent that way, you're thinking "spatial" the whole time, which is more the Synergetics mindset (we don't believe in Flatland per se -- a rickety old Victorian belief system, ala Abbott's scifi by that name).

Over on wittgenstein-dialognet, I'm chatting with philosophers about this namespace thing some more. coxeter.d and fuller.d aren't synonymous. That doesn't mean we put these two scorpions in a bottle and make 'em fight it out. On the contrary, both steam engines and diesel engines create torque from liquid fuels. The goal is to investigate the mechanisms, to reach an understanding of inner workings, not to prove one or the other "can't work" (as if there weren't ample evidence that they both do).

So in moving from coxeter.3d (Euclidean 3dness) to fuller.4d, I'm not trying to "make Coxeter wrong" in any important dimension. Rather, I'm juxtaposing two "ways of looking" with a nomenclature (a namespace) to suit in each case.

I think one of the gross errors in some of the secondary literature to date is this idea that "if Synergetics is right, then XYZ goes out the window". On the contrary, Synergetics is not about pushing any math to the back of the bus. Synergetics isn't going to stay at the back of the bus either though -- that's what academia is still trying to wrap its mind around (slowly, very slowly).

Anyway, I want to get more technical with the Coupler on a second pass, making this the bridge from XYZ thinking to IVM thinking. It's very easy to place 8 MITEs around (0,0,0), one per octant, and to see this as an entry point into IVM style cogitation, wherein two of the Coupler's equators become the "fish lip" rhombics connecting IVM (= CCP) balls, with the K-points as "tongues touching" perhaps.

I've segued from stickworks.py to coupler.py for the benefit of my Pythonic math teacher squadron. They'll be the first on the block to have a VPython view.

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/stickworks.html