More Negotiations

יִשְׂרָאֵל

I've had lots of contract boilerplate to eyeball lately, nothing signed yet, on advice of attorney. The applied mathematics were intriguing, though not what I'd be tasked with specifically.

Regarding Iran, the initiative to criminalize nuclear weapons around the world is of course a principled religious position that many take in all faiths. I'm pleased if that's an official position within the Islamic orthodoxy. Whether this means the IAEA has complete access to US, Chinese and Russian facilities remains a point of controversy I suppose, although not for me.

This thing about calling the whole earth Israel and using a Fuller Projection to talk about the "no state solution" sounds kind of radical, even for the Laughing Horse crowd, but of course many rabbis already take the position that Israel, like Nirvana (or Samsara for that matter), relates to something more existentially primordial than some nation-state, even so in ancient times. That's esoterica however, in that most people only think in literal terms, about Persia etc.

When you virtualize, you make the whole earth the game field for any responsible planning, meaning one is taking more consequences into account. There's no contradiction in having cyber-nations or virtual nations assume responsibility for the whole earth, given "responsibility" doesn't mean dictating or behaving in some tyrannical fashion. The geek world's meme of "world domination" is related, and may be translated as "self mastery". So-called "desovereignization" may result in more responsible governance simply because the thinking is more realistic, less side-tracked by yesteryear's legal fictions.

Back at Laughing Horse

A lot goes on around here I don't know about, duh.

Just tonight I learned that one reason Lindsey was able to join the Laughing Horse Collective, was that some holocaust deniers had managed to jump on board and stage an event here, then departed, creating vacancies. There have been some lasting repercussions.

This news seemed kind of freakish, as the collection is packed with holocaust videos, many of which have come through HQS for review. I bought a copy of Hilter's Willing Executioners here (to the best of my recollection), mom a book on Hitler youth.

I'm doing door again tonight, a no-alcohol event. This benefit is for Laughing Horse itself. Julia is here too, advising potential customers. She also paid back some of her IOU ($15), made a note in the book.

Regarding the Fuller syllabus, I've had our state-free world projection on display here (briefly, like at Circadia), but won't claim the political left has made him an avatar, any more than the political right has (Laughing Horse leans left, in case you were wondering, calls itself radical).

Around Portland, Fuller (a subversive and a radical) has gotten more attention through OSCONs (not only through me), Esozone (through Trevor especially), and of course through Portland Center Stage.

I would certainly like OMSI to get in on the action, perhaps with some tetrahedral mensuration sculpture and/or some cool dwelling machine exhibits. Something both futuristic and humanitarian, consistent with our Portland spirit (which Portlandia personifies (she's a radical too)).

Getting more synergetics-informed geometry on that Omnimax screen would remind us to keep thinking outside the box. Some of us have been dying to see something along those lines.

Lindsey's friend is helping with the door, so I'm able to focus on the Wittgenstein thread I was following earlier today. Wittgenstein was a contemporary of Hitler's; not saying I believe they were acquainted, although some say they were.

Mike D. of Duke's Landing is here next to me (he's a member of the Collective). He's been upgrading the company XO, got us a developer key.

For Credit Curriculum Games

Geocaching was invented by Dave Ulmer, early bizmo engineer and pioneer. His on-board GIS systems led him to many a frontier find.

However, in thinking of physically strenuous mathematical exercises, a genre, we need to accommodate lots of urban teens, may not simply assume easy access to rural areas with the wave of a magic wand.

Introducing bus and subway maps from around the world as topologically correct, yet highly simplified (schematic) is a standard data visualization segment. The next step, of actually riding the bus and train systems, in search of some treasure, is where this becomes a sport.

Student-friendly urban establishments such as coffee shops, subsidized to operate this program, might provide welcoming environments.

The video game aspects of the course would have this familiar indoor ambiance (already associated with scholarship), as students swiped their ID cards for points, went through the cartography and geography quizzes, touched base with on-line referees and/or judges, perhaps sitting in booths with branded swag (sponsor regalia).

Then its on to the next puzzle (some algebra required?).

This would be another meaning of "busing" (or "training"), as you would get small groups going between zip codes, creating more shared awareness of a city. This isn't a race or game of Survivor in which there's only one prize or winning team, although perks for being faster or first might pertain, depending on the game's design.

The point is to actually explore one's environment and not settle for a "virtual world" on one's desktop. The incentives need to be far more reliable and real than winning the lottery. You might not get cash, but you might get a 25 pound bag of organic brown rice, as one of your computerized options.

The reward system will focus a lot of human ingenuity, with participating schools getting much of the credit at an institutional level. If your school fields some teams, that may be your school's ticket to some interesting benefits. Your school will get noticed, its reputation boosted.

The more interesting versions of these games feature convergence points deliberately designed for group learning activities. Having coffee shops participate is a piece of the puzzle but not the whole story.

Many high schools already have some of the right stuff, so it might be a matter of organizing across schools, optimizing more.

On the other hand, here's an opportunity to do some basic rethinking and updating. A claymation studio need not be in the same building as a music recording studio, but better synergy might develop if they were. Include faculty from art and/or design schools among your advisers, would be my advice.

Designing these for-credit games is one thing, recruiting players another. The advertising needs to set realistic expectations. Some of the exercises shown will require mastery of prerequisite skills, meaning you might not get access to all that gear up front. That's what the reward system is about: equipping those ready for a specific work/study challenge (a role) with the requisite props (as in theater). The scuba diver needs scuba equipment and so on.

Doing some metal work for high school geometry credit is not as off topic as it sounds, if you imagine building a rhombic triacontahedron from scratch, or a geodesic sphere. But where might you go to acquire these skills in a safe environment? These are the kinds of questions our game designers need to be asking themselves and their communities. The answers will vary depending on town-gown dynamics, other factors.

Related reading: "Off Your Duff" Mathematics (math-teach, Math Forum, March 3, 2010)

Journal Jot

Math teachers in North America would appear to have first dibs on this heritage, but seem to have shrugged it off (can't be bothered).

Is this another chapter where the wisdom of the ages is kept in hibernation through another dark age, by Arabic speaking cultures?

I met with a teacher of that language this evening at The Bagdad, sent a link, just in case.

Lindsey is downtown attending a study group on legalized zombiehood (corporate personhood). There's a reason they called it Voodoo Economics.

New Essays

I have two major new essays in circulation, regarding:

(a) analytic philosophy and its potentially catalyzing role post linguistic turn (Nietzsche - Wittgenstein):

Re: Rorty's Sins (some autobio, WittrsAMR)

and

(b) the relevance of an executable logic with types, when it comes to learning concepts like multiplication really well:

Multiplication and the Importance of Types (math-teach at Math Forum).

By "logic with types" I simply mean a computer language mirroring mathematical objects already in the pantheon: types of number, polynomials, vectors, matrices... things that add and maybe multiply.

What I'm suggesting in (a) is that we encourage more philosophers to look over the hedge into the computer science neighborhood, where we suffer from logjams and stalled stories, at a cost to Global U students everywhere.

Our curriculum is in a shambles. Here we are in 2010, with stronger than ever 3D projection techniques, and yet spatial geometry is still in the dumpster. Thanks to "duck typing" I'm prone to blame quacks, but that's a pretty generic response to a dire situation. We should get more focused.

Reviewing my own essay (b) on Math Forum on Synergeo, I wrote:

About as clear as it gets, when it comes to encapsulating an approach, spelling out the whys and wherefores... Note the last section is a not-so-veiled allusion to the synergetics concentric hierarchy.

No kite this time, but you might imagine one as two sytes, somewhere on the menu.

We're enjoying a steely gray day in Portland, with lots of cold rain.

A neighborhood representative came by with the Richmond newsletter and we discussed gardening strategies. The truth about Portland is it's hard to go wrong, and people try many things, most of which work, in one way or another.

Alexia zipped through to use wifi between appointments.

Glenn and I are on tap through Free School, as teachers of Neolithic and Martian math respectively. The control room collective acts as a dispatcher, books venues, like on SE Belmont or wherever. Our next gig is in March.

python + povray
(feb 23, 2010)

A Parable

Sometimes Italian hill towns, tired of internal feuding, would outsource the mayor position to someone with a recognized track record. The crack team would come in, set up housekeeping, and maybe show the locals how it's done. Before long, the town would be running smoothly again, simmering issues resolved, hard questions confronted.

If the temporary managers saw themselves in that light, as temporary, not looking for permanent work, then the workflow would go smoothly. However, some might see themselves as wanting to become entrenched, to go for that pension.

In exceptional cases, this might be a welcome development, to have an outsider join the community in some responsible capacity, but for the most part, your outsourced team should move on, as the locals will eventually wish to reassert their steering functions, now that they've learned how to drive in a new way.

This same issue arises with mercenaries, ostensibly hired to protect against foes in neighboring hill towns. A corrupt force, taking money from all sides, selling services to all sides, will simply run it as a protection racket. In a monopolistic economy, that spells trouble for all concerned.

Teacher Trainings

I characterize teacher trainings as B2B, versus B2C, in this post to the Math Forum:

in business, we speak of B2C vs. B2B. That's business to consumer and business to business. I think of teacher trainings as B2B. Imagine Intel a sponsor, and teachers getting paid to be there (on the clock, serving the public).

In the balance of this post, I'm giving examples of the kind of lore each teacher might adapt, translate, recast in terms relevant to those placed in her or his care. The teacher manages the classroom, and the curriculum deliberately encourages a place based approach: embed this material in local circumstances in ways that will help your students gain mastery over their own environment.

That being said, the stories are from all over the map, National Geographic style, and come from many parts of the time line:

1. factoring polynomials on the Italian peninsula, thanks to the new technology coming in through Pisa from Baghdad and places east;
   
   
2. Bishop Berkeley's vicious attacks against Calculus, when first unveiled by Newton and Leibniz (and the naming of UC Berkeley in his honor);
   
   
3. the rise of perspective in European painting and the evolution of XYZ coordinates in that milieu;
   
   
4. the impact of the spread of "cyphers" on the Italian Renaissance;
   
   
5. the emergence of 60-degree coordination (in contrast to XYZ) in connection with the discovery of the hexane ring, newly popular drawings of naturally occuring shapes.

Would a child in Borneo have any interest in such stories? She or he might well.

UN agencies, many school districts, some curriculum providers, prefer this "place based" approach. The geographic component gets a boost.

Math becomes more of an outdoor activity as navigating the subway and bus system becomes an exercise in topology or graph theory.

Counting calories in an energy conserving context is not off topic either, as foods and food values have their own calculus, worth learning. Calories connect to kilowatt-hours, other measures of energy. Conversion constants apply.

In some parts of Oregon, there's a trend towards schools having their own gardens, even in urban settings. This is par for the course in many parts of the world. Having "the field" be a gridiron and practice space for mostly physically dominant boys is likewise commonplace.

I've seen many schools with ample room for both a field and a garden. In some of these same schools girls share access to sports facilities as equal partners, with varying degrees of segregation.

Entirely segregated schools may be publicly chartered in your zip code area.

Language immersion schools may also be provided, with or without segregation.

Once you start getting into permutations, no one district may be expected to cover every possibility. An active exchange program will give your family access to other options, including overseas.

Doing the Math

The math problem at Peoples' Food Co-op was to figure out which eco-friendly dish washing powder soap had the most bang for the buck. The bulk offering said 3x concentrated, only a table spoon per load if your unit had but the one soap holder.

The two boxed offerings gave weights, but only one gave loads per box. The other had temporarily removed the word "natural" from its literature and wanted readers to know why.

My challenge was to use my cell phone as a calculator. This isn't one of those Droids or anything, not R2D2. I flubbed getting a decimal point, plus still needed to ask how much of the bulk item gets one those 64 loads.

Lindsey, much better at this game, volunteered to obtain this information next time, was just too busy buying to feed her army, at the time of my flailing. We were at Peoples' in service of another Vegans not Pigs at Duke's Landing (with chicken an option for carnivores).

These have become ritualized no-alcohol events, where we learn how to buy and cook effectively and tastefully, amidst live music provided by local bands. A more wholesome event would be hard to distill.

I brought a whole paper bag of Flextegrity icosahedra, cast-offs with paint on 'em, fresh from the Pauling Campus studio. I feel like one of Santa's elves. I piled some around an old XO for another photogenic tableau. Maybe this one 'll end up as a polyethylene billboard in Tokyo somewhere (just kidding)? G1G1 meets Radical Math (polyhedra are considered somewhat radical in 2010, check standard textbooks to gauge the level of our poverty).

One imagines these innovative subcultures, working towards a better tomorrow. In Portland, we have them.

However it's probably a good thing the Japanese TV crew didn't come all the way from Narita for this one. Troy has to DJ somewhere else tonight. There's not been much publicity to speak of. You won't find any mention of these experiments in The Oregonian or Willamette Week. We'll make do with the amateur film crew (me).

Evelyn just showed up, is joining Lindsey in the kitchen upstairs. Now here's one of the bands. My daughter is off at her debating tournament all day, is welcome to join us (too exhausted: "extem" with 30 minutes to prepare on any subject, no Internet, is a rough row to hoe).

Now that Pycon is gathered in Atlanta, we're getting some themes coming through on the PSF members list. If you scrounge around in the blogosphere, you'll likely glean more.

I spent another long day with the math teachers, yakking about my days at McGraw-Hill (Hugh Kenner important, wrote a column for BYTE). We should be seeing those recruiting commercials around now, for our new kind of math course.

Fighting about what programming language to use is somewhat beside the point, as that's for teachers on the ground to decide. One goes with the army one's got, as someone once said.

Mike D has installed Xtra Ordinary on his XO, an operating system geared more for adults.

Yes, there's a counter-culture aspect to these operations, in that we're documenting how Portland's underground was carrying the torch forward. When it comes to tetrahedral mensuration, world game, octet truss, tensegrity, flextegrity, global grid etc., the avant-garde was on SE Belmont, with Laughing Horse and Pauling Campus among the back office collectives. Lets keep this in mind as other institutions crowd in to cash in.

:: next week ::

Fear Mongering

I'm seeing all those worries about Iran, but then I'm thinking the diplomatic corps has been amply endowed with all the raw materials necessary to implement confidence building measures.

We don't just want better nuclear medicine in Iran, we want a stronger power grid feeding the Middle East, including states with no right to exist (all of them).

Don't blame the religions for not getting along, as I think those problems have been mostly resolved. You've got a bunch of weak kneed politicians running around drumming up fears, but that's hardly to work for one's pay. If fear mongering is all you've got, why not just admit to incompetence and gracefully announce retirement?

OK, harsh words from the peanut gallery, I admit it. However, the "give peace a chance" meme didn't start with me. Lots of great ideas for geodesic mosques, worth trying, Allah would like it I bet. Many interesting civilizational innovations ahead. To ramp up towards war is definitely anti-Christian, as well as anti-Muslim etc. I wouldn't go running to the corner guru for an excuse.

Wallowing in the nuclear weapons world is just poorly thought out. We need to stop proliferating, obviously, but we also need to keep cutting back, decommissioning. It's a long slow process and requires ongoing verification.

Iran is neither the first nor the last player at this table, just one more among many. So let's get on with the real work of disarmament, starting with the big powers as usual.

Necklace Theory

People glance in my cage and wonder what makes me so fanatical about Polyhedra and such. What's this guy's problem. Writing today:

Regarding 60-degree coordination, we have this focus on the tetrahedron instead of the cube. In this case you find many published books, some coffee table arty, some on the web, magazine articles, web pages, Youtubes, other scholarship, and *still* it's almost impossible to get the time of day from busy (too busy) people.

I'd say it's the Necklace Effect that I'm after, in that the 60-degree aesthetic forms a glue language, a rubric, like a string, with concentric hierarchy, octet truss, Fuller Projection, world game, geodesic domes, high tech eco-villages, healthier lifestyles... mom and apple pie, all beads on that string.

Yes, I note the family resemblance to "domino effect", well exploited in the movie Robots.

The concentric hierarchy is the best bead to keep nudging, because it's so mathematically correct. Those defending the bastions of rationality tend to close loopholes with hard logic, if any might be found.

Or will they try to fake it? Using some flavor of CS BS perhaps? Is this about Computer Science versus Neo-Platonism? Ghosts of Bourbaki? What do the artists say?

You'd think the intelligentsia might at least appreciate the marketing challenge. Here's a fun puzzle for you Madison Avenue types. Is this a "too bitter a pill" scenario? What sugar might we coat it with? The eye candy is already tops.

Once in, we find the concentric hierarchy is a bastion of rationality in its own right, and worth defending.

Then it's on to the adjacent bead, and so on down the line, like firecrackers going off. Some kind of celebration?

Getting Phi in the Game

:: vZome by Koski ::

Kirby Urner: in the calcs below, the assumption is always tetravolumes, meaning we've calibrated to the concentric hierarchy with the volume 20 cuboctahedron.

The icosahedron with that same edge, of volume ~18.51 is the icosahedron of volume 5 Φ² √2 mentioned below.

The pentagonal dodecahedron is its partner in the rhombic triacontahedron, inside of which one finds these unit-edge cubes (but not of unit volume in this schema).

David Koski:

Icosahedron edge = 1 in tetra volumes (blue)
= ~18.51229587
= 5 Φ² √2

Pentagonal dodecahedron edge Φ^-1 or .618034 (orange)
= ~15.35001821
= (Φ² + 1) 3√2

Rhombic triacontahedron diagonals 1 and Φ^-1 (red)
= ~21.21320244
= 15√2

Cube edge = 1 (purple)
= ~8.485281374
= 6√2

Crazy Busy

I was wigging out on Facebook, between praying for Pat and Aunt Betty, Aunt Evelyn, dear friends. Because of this looming ski trip. Who were the adults? Tara was organizing skillfully, but teens deserve role models. I greatly appreciate those stepping up to the plate. I'm less stressed in that dimension.

LW is loading the company car for another fundraiser. I'm likely out the door in a different direction, but that's for the future to bring.

I checked in with Dr. Tag earlier, walking to and from. She was expecting to overlap with some Mercy Corps staffer, with news from Haiti, insider perspective.

I at least conveyed the good news about our green light for the math teachers (talking about those kites at the NCTM website): you're officially free to teach our Renaissance shoptalk, in tandem with standard fare. Be generous with those polyhedra, why not? Think geodesic.

Spice it up, share the lore, build bridges to other ethnicities.

Math is about reaching out, not just introspecting. Philosophy that much more so.

Midnight gardening anyone? Sounds kinda kooky I realize, but the front side pile, the result of a welcome thwacking, was just calling out for attention -- of a kind I don't need.

So I filled a thistle bin, hauled some twigs (giant ones), moved stuff around. It's not like we're over-staffed or anything. I do what I'm able, as a man of modest skills, still trainable.

Thank you to well wishers, co-conspirators, hangers on. Blessed be.

What is a Textbook?

[ reposted from math-teach @ Math Forum ]

I think what's probably obvious to all of us is that the word "textbook" is becoming decoupled from the medium, or was never that coupled in the first place. A textbook has a specific format and purpose. In a math teaching context, a textbook usually comes with exercises, perhaps a teacher's edition and so on (many criteria pertain).

Is it a PDF? In wood pulp? On a Kindle? An XO-3?

We don't know, just from the word "textbook".

In the case of books through Google, the author may have already chosen a public license, so free copying is not an issue.

Good example.

When I teach a "Pythonic math" course (math using Python), I'm free to point students to free textbooks on the web, other writings, and not dictate whether they order printed copy or not.

Some may have valid and necessary requirements for hardcopy. I have that myself, in part because some people don't believe a book exists until it weighs something. Sometimes you just want that airplane seat copy, with no need to haul out a fat laptop.

News We Could Use

Stories we'd like to see:

• The Obama Administration today signaled its interest in Old Man River City as a possible public works project. Community leaders familiar with the design have been invited to the White House to discuss its prospects. Clearing the construction site could begin as early as next year.
  
  
• Sarah Palin acknowledged today that as former Governor of Alaska, she was quite familiar with the Bering Strait high voltage linkup proposal, but thought it needed more study. CNN will be running a series of special features focusing on the global electrical grid, its history and prospects.
  
  
• Google Earth has created a new data overlay showing electrical grid information. The recently implemented fold-out options show the entire Earth in one view. The Fuller Projection is one of several available.

• The NCTM has officially endorsed "tetrahedral mensuration" as a worthy topic for inclusion in K-12 mathematics curricula, based on results from several pilot studies, and expert advice from key professors.
  
  
• Students in Flint, Michigan will be among the first to test drive the XO3 tablet, the next iteration of the One Laptop per Child line. Company sponsors include a long list of familiar brands, including Kellogg and General Mills.
  

Reality checks: OMR is currently shelved and rarely if ever mentioned; Governor Palin and CNN never mention the Bering Strait electrical hookup (not the same as the Bridge to Nowhere); ESRI ArcGIS 9 includes a Fuller Projection but Google Earth does not; NCTM does do some "non-traditional" tetrahedral mensuration on an obscure web page; it's unclear if the XO3, with more skeptics than sponsors, will be available by 2012 (or produced at all).

Post Game

I'm not planning to analyze the Superbowl, which I saw quite a lot of, not even the commercials. LW was too busy working on her community garden to catch the game, but did confidently predict a Saints win, based on early season previews she'd seen at one of her sports bar music venues. I announced her prediction before the game, injecting a plot element.

Speaking of work, I missed most of the half time show, instead went off to a secure area to pace back and forth and call another attender in our Multnomah Friends directory, seeking more feedback on AFSC matters, given all these emails going around. I have some official duties to look after. Did The Who sing Won't Get Fooled Again? Apropos if so.

Earlier this afternoon I joined Overseers in slogging through a long agenda. Quakers work hard in their various jobs, take them seriously. These are stressful times for all of us, as we seek to find our way forward.

We met in one of the classrooms, the one with the Fuller Projection. The maps on either side have some features in common (a family resemblance): the National Geographic one to the left has no nations, while the older Mercator on the right is more drastically distorted.

The Fuller-Sadao projection is North Pole centric, which suits no one's political agenda all that much. This has always been an esoteric map; cool to have Quakers using it some, part of our shared heritage.

I encourage high school teachers to use it too. Tell some of the stories behind it why not? What's a projection? Which world maps are the most commonly used? What are their properties? Basic stuff, hard to justify bleeping over, if one takes geography at all seriously.

Google Earth and the various map engines get some focus here too, if the school has an Internet connection.

The practical matter of getting directions between points A and B, finding one's way about in one's own terrain, is legitimate geographic content and of immediate relevance to teenagers. We call this a "place based" curriculum. Around here, that means studying the Columbia Gorge, it's geological history, the dams, the grid they feed.

Yesterday morning I wrote another essay on this phi/sqrt(2) business, bussed it out to some influential contacts. I'm thinking we've got a discovery here, one that's accessible, doesn't take a fancy degree to appreciate. There's an audience for this kind of thing.

Yes, a little setup is required, like the shift into tetra-volumes, but then that's easy enough to grok, something we wanted to share about anyway. Then shift back to hexa-volumes, the well explored option, not about to fade out.

Should we compare shifting between 60-degree tetrahedra and 90-degree hexahedra to shifting between decimal and hexadecimal bases? Ten is a triangular number (60-degree), sixteen a square one (90-degree).

I also put in some positive words for WikiEducator, encouraging its use, given the discussion on edu-sig (Python community) has returned to open source curriculum writing. That's what Wikieducator is all about. The new WYSIWYG editor makes it even more accessible. Getting started is a piece of cake. Master the intricacies as your schedule permits.

Does anyone disagree there's a trend here? Academic culture is updating its code of ethics to accommodate self-correcting copying and transmission (tcp/ip). We've been hearing this at conferences for years, so it's not like I'm reporting breaking news. Withholding vital information from needy students simply goes against the grain of a university, religious and/or secularist.

Over on math-teach, I've been enthusing about Dr. Chuck's contribution (University of Michigan). He's adapted an open source textbook that's already been through a number of changes. This is how teachers may expect to keep pace. Find some freely available raw materials and add value, engage with your peers.

I often tell people I communicate by blogging, but hey, what are cell phones for, if not to make calls during half time? Blogs have limited appeal, as do computers in general.

This was not at my place, the private residence where we congregated around an HDTV. Three of us piled into a car to get there.

I enjoyed meeting some older guys I'd not met before, including a taxi driver on break in 3rd to 4th quarters, grabbing some coffee and pie, heading back out.

On screen now: Metropolis (original version, 1927, Tower of Babel part -- I came in late). Yes, moving imagery has come a long way since those times, but in another sense not so much (the special effects are pretty impressive and intense in this black and white classic, the musical soundtrack just adding to the eeriness).

Speaking of tetra-volumes, David Koski has been busily dissecting the four hexahedra that make up the rhombic dodecahedron. The vZomes are pretty clear, although I abet with my cube of magnetic Mites.

Three half-couplers do the job, giving each a volume of 3/2. He's getting into the different permutations of As and Bs, a topic at the heart of Synergetics. Maybe I'll follow up on that soon.

Posting to Wanderers List

[hyperlinks added]

I appreciate your comments below Allen.

The problem here is we're all POWs, prisoners of wars we can't seem to get out of. It's not just a matter of a few people suckered in by video games.

Ironically, I think some people in the military are acutely aware of the problem, as they're trained to think about security and there's nothing secure about trashing infrastructure and wasting fuel when the world is in dire need of both.

What's missing from today's "civilization" is any shared vision of a positive future. Some of the oil rich states are attempting that, but so far it's just a playground for the rich disneyland vibe, not dissing Walt as I think EPCOT was a bold vision, before it got dumbed down and renamed to Epcot....

Keith's mega-projects are at least positive and philanthropic. Fuller's idea of Old Man River City was certainly apropos after Katrina, as it was built on the model of a huge sports stadium (domed of course).

However, given the investments that were never made, the only recourse was to use actual sports stadiums, a disaster. The stark contrast of where we are, and where we could be if not hell bent on squandering, is what we need to focus on, with an eye towards getting back on track.

What it comes down to is investment i.e. where do you put your energy and time. If there's not a positive future vision out there, then people default into fear, fall victim to fear mongering, which fuels investments in those very technologies that further deprive us of hope and options.

Where do I put my energy and time? Good question. For what it's worth, I've been collaborating on getting the Synergetics entry more fleshed out on Wikipedia. It was languishing as a stub page, and before that as a footnote to a different Synergetics entry (Haken's). Feedback welcome.

Kirby

Notes from Lunch

I was just having lunch with Arthur Dye, whom I meet with periodically. We caught up from both sides to some degree.

Arthur is interested in the homelessness situation, especially along SE Belmont, has been looking in to what Methodists might be doing. I filled him in on how the art community, the musicians specifically, have been responding. Lindsey is out delivering a shipment of camping supplies, UPS delivered to the Laughing Horse collective just recently. Muddy Waters (soon to close) and Duke's Landing are among the dots of light in this network.

We went over some of AFSC's recent travails. Arthur's view is the Vietnam Era was so horrific, so unlike anything the agency had hitherto encountered, that it may not have recovered fully, is still crippled. Quakers were picketing their own meetings for refusing to declare Nixon a war criminal.

Anecdote: when Richard Nixon was newly out of the army, first running for Congress, his mother Hannah phoned the then director of AFSC and conveyed her concerns, that her son was drinking a lot and had become a warmonger, and could you, Clarence Pickett, come out and talk to the guy. Director Pickett got out there by train (Philadelphia to LA is a long way) and indeed had two days with Nixon. However, shortly thereafter, Pickett died of a heart attack in San Francisco. No one knows much of what transpired during their visit.

Thanks to the Laughing Horse connection, I've seen a whole lot more American history, up close and personal in documentary form. Were I a degree-granting institution, I'd give myself one or two, as this has been a crash course and not especially easy to digest. Recent history is still not a mainstream topic, as Colonel Fletcher F. Prouty points out, in connection with the U2 for example. It's easier to fight about Darwinism and global warming, than it is to really look closely at one's own recent past.

"Nixon" has been among the examples of proper names going by on the Wittgenstein list, where Sean Wilson has been leading a thread. I chimed in with some stuff about EPCOT. If you're already steeped in this literature, you know that Saul Kripke writes about "Nixon" sometimes (as Google will disclose).

In terms of where Quakers might be going, Arthur had brought along a recent story (December 2009): Quaker Indian Committee disavows Doctrine of Discovery affirms Declaration. Said doctrine is a product of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Episcopal House of Bishops had already voted unanimously on their "Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery" resolution, the House of Delegates likewise repudiating said doctrine by a strong majority, during their 76th General Convention in July. The affirmed declaration (in the story's title) is the UN's on human rights.

The Parliament of World Religions in Melbourne, Australia (December 3-9) provided another networking opportunity, for those working this angle. Both the Anglican and Catholic churches have been called upon to respectively rescind a 1496 charter, and repeal some papal bulls. These are rather esoteric back office doings. I wouldn't expect to read much in The Oregonian about all this, but maybe in the Metro section some Sunday.

Quakers have a long affiliation with Native Americans, even though Pennsylvania was to some extent expropriated or commandeered. Power sharing continued, with Quakers then losing some clout by staying loyal to the "Indians" resisting war taxes to fight their friends. Arthur and I had both read the same Catholic pamphlet on this topic.

Arthur also reminisced about Floyd Schmoe, who spent much of his life working on behalf of Japanese families during the internment camps fiasco. Arthur remembered attending Floyd's 100th birthday at the meeting house in Seattle. Floyd had noticed the grass hadn't been cut and was working the lawn mower, making the place look nice for his party.

Speaking of Quakers and lives that speak, my mom Carol Urner and I were talking recently, about a productive meeting in Whittier. An Islamic bank in that area, operating by different rules, is doing fine as an institution. There's nothing to keep various types of bank from sharing the same infrastructure, plugging in to the same grids. This idea that it's either/or, when it comes to banking, is bogus. Diversity is what banks themselves preach (as in "diversified portfolio").

Wanderers 2010.2.2

We're a packed house tonight. The talk is on Spirituality & Religion. I was thinking it was on the Parliament of World Religions, but that will be another time. Milt has just the one slide.

Bill Lightfoot, my uncle, and maritime scholar, is here with me tonight.

Milt Markewitz is our presenter. He's somewhat the Jewish mystic, a Qabalist in some ways.

Bill and I had a good dinner at Bridgeport Alehouse, catching up on family in Bellingham. I talked about my search for a new line. We agreed that I'd likely do best as some kind of teacher. What school would have me though?

We floundered around, sounding a lot like philosophers. Wanderers have some rarefied views. Abraham Lincoln came up a number of times, as our most deeply spiritual president. I am reminded of president Obama's making a connection to that guy (rather deliberately and intelligently I thought, with that bible and all).

I was quite vocal, in my one interjection, in identifying Planet Earth with Israel, as in "promised land". Israel is not some little patch of dirt, a few state rooms on the spaceship. That's ridiculous, no? More PR for the PL. No one disagreed.

Of course my party line is consistent with the "desovereignization" meme. Buckaneers, like pirates of old, take nation-states with a grain of salt. They come and go don't they? Planet Earth, on the other hand, has a relative immutability about it.

Sometimes it pays to look past our superficial differences, especially if we're claiming to some sort of spiritual adeptness. Nationalism is not the highest IQ ism, let's at least be clear on this obvious point.

I spent much of the evening gawking at Bill Sheppard's creation: an 8088 assembly language program for looking at medical imagery. He'd been trying to decode these dcm files, in which lossless JPEGs are embedded, but hadn't found the right open source utilities to decode them.

I was also treated to a Google Widgets Toolkit medical database application. The maintainer, using the Eclipse environment, maintains some clear Java, at which point the GWT machine converts it to Javascript for client-side execution. What I think Wanderers needs to do is start a university of sorts. We have the talent to staff it up pronto, that's for sure.

Happy groundhog day.

Cosmic Accounting

We're hearing a lot about the massive federal deficit again. The deficit adds to the debt, which is more massive yet. The exponential interest on these amounts is supposedly the inheritance of future generations, meaning they've been effectively robbed of opportunity even before birth.

Not every economist has the same model of the global economy of course. The more realistically minded do remember to credit the sun for supplying our planet with a steady inflow of energy. Calling it "cosmic accounting" makes it sound too hippie or something, but we're really just talking about thermodynamics 101. Planet Earth is not a closed system, and anyone who tells you otherwise needs to do some more homework.

That the sun is driving vast energy cycles, which in turn drive a lot of our engineering, really has to be on the books somehow. Earth is like a nonprofit in getting this grant income. Some call it "surfing the solar gradient."

Economists with little training in science forget to link wealth creation to natural phenomena, especially extraterrestrial phenomena.

A gigantic fusion furnace, bathing the Earth in free power, just doesn't get much notice in these economists' bookkeeping. Out of sight out of mind.

We should divide economists into two camps: those giving the sun credit for sponsoring our economy, versus those with no clue.

Next time you listen to an economist or read one's analysis, see if you can figure out which pigeon-hole to use.

Power Lunch

I am grateful for my friendships. I learn a lot from them.

Thanks to Ron, I'm now downloading Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade files on Sun's VirtualBox, newly installed as a guest operating system under Win7. The laptop is to my left, connected by ethernet on my home office subnet. I'm staring at Old Faded, my refurbished monitor (less frills than even at Free Geek around here some days (Ron and I used to work there together)).

This has been finals week for my daughter. She's off with her friends celebrating that it's over, in the neighborhood.

I thought Lionel's latest contributions with the Wikipedia page were substantive. Koski thinks we've done a professional job. Everything CJ Fearnley added is still in the mix, along with my earlier edits. I'm not thinking so much in terms of a "fork" as a "merge" at this point.

I'm scanning the horizons for breakthroughs, thought this virtual convergence of math teachers looked promising. Real work happens through cyberspace, even if we don't get to move in to our virtual classrooms. We still need to feed, shelter and clothe ourselves. Education Automation (an old title, not unlike Skinner's Walden 2 in some respects) requires logistics on the ground.

Recapping Some Threads

I brewed up a tempest in a teapot last year, on both math-teach and math-thinking-l, focusing a lot of attention on what I was calling a "digital math" (DM).

Then I'd wonder somewhat wryly if we were really up to implementing such changes in "the lower 48", implying Alaska and Hawaii might be leading the pack in this regard.

I also campaigned for using more electronic media in place of wood pulp textbooks, as more environmentally friendly and easier to correct (update, fix, otherwise improve).

Well, I certainly got some feedback, and I've needed to revise my approach.

For one thing, "digital math" is just not conservative enough for most teachers. "Discrete math" sounds dry as bones maybe, but at least it's a recognized topic.

I filed an update to math-teach earlier today, with a note to PSF members just to let them know I'd mentioned Python Software Foundation in passing.

My little media campaigns aren't widely reported on or repeated in any case, so chances are none of this was on your radar (dear reader) unless you've been tracking these blogs for some reason, or dove in through Twitter or Facebook.

Getting more computer-savvy math courses, both inside and outside the 50 star states, remains on the agenda for lots of groups of course.

A goal is to reach out through teachers to a lot of underprivileged, not make this just be about elite schools pulling even further ahead.

Experimentation and innovation is the name of the game. Will we be able to engender the right spirit? What gets people in the mood to try new approaches?

What sponsors want to step up to the plate, put their brands on the line? Is this really about the government doing everything, while private industry kibitzes from the sidelines?

Anyone with semi-romantic ideas about capitalism should be arguing otherwise no? Industry leaders are wanted and needed on this one, both domestically and overseas.

Forging Ahead

:: 61-axes by vorthmann & hart ::

The Wikipedia project has been going OK (SNEC helping). I did some editing from Laughing Horse Books last night, after accompanying the collective on a recon mission under some bridges: the camp near Mercy Corps had been swept recently -- means the police had cracked down. Dignity Village and most shelters are full (need some new ones?). Met up with a church team from Tanasbourne, compared notes.

More editing today from Urban Grind. Then back to the Flextegrity workstation, keeping on keeping on.

Koski and I have both been focusing on great circle networks. He's got zonohedra and zero volume hexahedra to think about, some Pascal's Triangle rule.

I've been revisiting Fuller's trying to superimpose his A module's plane net onto his 120 LCD triangles, a result of spinning the icosahedron around its 31 axes.

David writes:

"Fuller states two possible icosahedra from the VE so 2*31 axis = 62. The whole enantiomorphic thing. Then adds the 25 great circles getting 87, but it is noted that the 3 and 4 axis of the VE are redundant, the three is part of the 15 axis and the 4 is part of the 10 axis in the five fold. Since he had doubled the 31 great circles he reduces the 87 by 14 to get 73; (3+4)*2 =14."

He's referring to this well-known figure (in geometer circles): Fig. 1132.01B.

More threading going on edu-sig, debating ghost policies regarding whether math teacher trainings through community colleges should be "objects first" or not. In Japan maybe? Intel says it's releasing funds, but money for STEM is like black ops sometimes. Where did it all go?

Like how many young women are getting some digital math in their schools, thanks to any kind of stimulus, public or private? Give us a breakdown by zip code area, thanks in advance.

Wanderers 2010.1.9

We're going around the table introducing ourselves. Our guests are from Borneo. Adrian Lasimbang from near Kota Kinabalu and John Paisley. Here's John's thumbnail autobio:

BSEE '87, came to Portland that year to work in test and measurement at Tektronix which lasted for 5 years when I discovered I'm terminally self-employed and went back into residential construction. Presently owner/president of John Paisley, Builder, Inc. I've worked with The Borneo Project since '95 protecting indigenous peoples' land rights from timber, mining, and other extractive interests, through projects such as community mapping, longhouse construction, village scale microhydro, solar-powered, satellite-linked internet at remote villages, and preschools for Penan (an exceptional group of hunter-gatherer nomads).

We have a therapist and zoo guide visiting with us tonight. She knows about orangutans, which is what took her to Borneo last year. She and I have chatted before, during the Appreciative Inquiry seminar.

I made a quick trip to Frys this morning. The Win7 laptop had a loud and vibrating CD/DVD drive, but seemed to work, until I pushed it to a limit, in trying to read an Ubuntu 9.10 iso. It burned OK, but would not read it, even though my desktops would. Frys graciously exchanged it. That's good, as this is a work machine. The 150 GB backup device came in handy.

Patrick and I were looking at Beautiful Soup at Angelo's this evening. This cool guy engaged us in talking about gauges versus metric. Turns out he's a glass blower and has this cool Youtube about trying to "blow lava" (as if it were glass, which it sort of is -- Pele's in this instance).

Small villages in Borneo, using micro-hydro for power, do manage to gain Internet access in some cases. Bringing in trainers helps minimize the negative effects of future shock. The communities retain control over their own adaptation process and that proves a more satisfying and sustainable process. Kids don't need to trek off to school, learn right there in the village -- a valuable development.

Coffee Shop Meetings

Regarding TT (teacher training), I diagrammed a workflow, pretty primitive, while waiting for Rami, an MVP Oregonian ramping up around Django.

This is all based on old news though (from last summer), mixed with a little recent email. Were I a journalist, I'd probably be called into the editor's office, to be asked if there's really a "there" there.

Django is a content management system (CMS) that allows developers to build more full featured web platforms, such as ThinkSpace.

Django is written in Python and provides a free and open source library of tools one needs for talking to databases and presenting well styled web pages to the user. You also get session management, user authentication, an admin back end.

These tools come as a tightly integrated Python package (in site-packages) and work right out of the box. The rest is your own secret sauce.

In a separate meeting at Starbucks, I learned about the Red Card, while explaining my philanthropic gaming idea, basically a "U drive" lottery system, with shop patrons taking credit for their donations to charities. You'd need the right banks to accept the incoming funds and convert them to EFTs as a service.

Speaking of coffee shops, I was in Lyrik again this morning, hobnobbing with Joe about Flextegrity again. We pulled up the folder and rolled through some slides. Last night was a grand opening for some new pieces, several of which sold.

If I stick with photography, then the story comes to you, perhaps in far away Japan. It's not either/or though. Local venues make sense. Lindsey is always strong-arming people towards Muddy's, which I appreciate. Aimee and I are thinking of going there next time.

I was glad to see Allison Randal is getting nominated to the PSF Board. +1.

Message Traffic

The catastrophic events in Haiti have galvanized AFSC into action. I was encouraged by the quality of the email, complete with embedded article, pictures, and donate button, signed by the executive director. This went to various e-lists, was forwarded into the mix. Lots of scam artists have gotten into the act as well. Plus no amount of money is any substitute for real logistics on the ground.

Would these hexayurts help? We'd need a new kind of reality TV to find out maybe.

Yes, another Sleeping Bag Fundraiser is in the works through Laughing Horse Books. Musicians from Portland's legendary scene are focusing attention on human misery here in Portland. Lindsey Walker is planning an all acoustic event (not amplified) at our meetinghouse on March 3, in collaboration with Elizabeth Fischer, our Program Committee clerk. The money is handled transparently. Our musicians aren't getting paid, they're getting exposure as committed and caring for their community.

Good seeing Jeff at Alberta Street Pub, the night of that Spanish language class at Laughing Horse Books (moved over from Liberty Hall). He's a Wanderer with training in international business, including in China.

Other stories I've been tracking: the one about John McLaughlin doing stuff (op-ed) behind the scenes (I recall his making an appearance earlier in my blogs); the one in Scientific American about shutting down the supply chain for all weapons-grade nuclear materials, a blanket ban.

Regarding compassionate engineers just doing the right thing, I think a lot of that goes on. The unsung heroes outnumber the sung, at least in some especially treacherous areas. Waiting for politicians to agree may result in life-threatening delays, dangerous meltdowns, loss of vital services.

Geodesic Domes with a Made in China label? That could be a business. Of course we have room for more than one player.

On the more prosaic side, I've been rave reviewing the 2nd edition of Litvin & Litvin, aka Mathematics for the Digital Age. I showed it to Jeff. I also showed it to Patrick. Rami said he's taken a look at the web site. Robert Hansen is even thinking of marketing angles, a breakthrough as he and I have had some heated arguments on math-teach.

The Wittgenstein list is pretty hot these days. I'll anchor to one of Sean's. Explore in this neighborhood if wanting some juicy posts on the Tractatus. You'll find me quoting a passage from The King of Infinite Space regarding Donald Coxeter's relationship with Wittgenstein. I'm also back to appreciating Henry Le Roy Finch and his book Wittgenstein: The Later Philosophy (Humanities Press, 1977).

So Donald Coxeter's scenario partially overlaps these two others I've studied intensively: Bucky Fuller's and Ludwig Wittgenstein's -- an interesting triangle.

Reality Checks

:: math meetups ::

At the checkout lane in People's Food Coop this evening, I came across The Big Ideas of 2010, the latest issue of Adbusters. The centerfold or double page spread towards the center, was all about mechanized bombing with "game changing" drones, as controlled from Nevada or other cubicles. The verbiage about the weapons seemed mindless and laudatory, the familiar cruel hype. The message of the spread seemed to be that war by these means might be continued indefinitely, if for no other reason than doing something else might be considered defeatist.

I was disturbed by this nightmarish article, especially because of its context. Here we were in a mostly organic, progressive, worker owned food coop, the kind of institution Portland prides itself in supporting. Why would the magazine rack include such psychopathic propaganda? Was our world imploding this quickly?

Lindsey was stocking up on supplies (grains, beans, onions, carrots), some of which will stay at Harrison Street, some of which might go to Duke's, where she's planning to get her food handler's license and whip up a southern vegan meal during the next "private undercover party" (one of our Ignite-like events). She didn't see the article but thought it might be tongue-in-cheek, a spoof. I wasn't so sure, was feeling disoriented.

At about this time, the Clerk of Oversight phoned me, aware that I was slogging through hell in some way. I'd been at the two hour committee meeting that afternoon, left a little early when Tara texted, saying she might be coming down with something. I ferried her home from a friend's on SE Clatsop. She'd been using the bus both ways, as I'm working to conserve fuel, and promote teen independence (as a high schooler, her student ID also counts as a bus pass). She's seeming better this morning, off to school on the bus again.

I'm hoping to get together with Friends and give more of a sense of my picture over here. Just keeping these journals is not the complete practice. We have clearness committees and stuff like that.

I've been in touch with Gary Litvins about Mathematics for The Digital Age and have an OSCON proposal in draft form wherein that book gets mentioned towards the end of the abstract. Here's what I've written:

Oregon teachers have plans to start field testing a new kind of mathematics course in 2010 that would count towards fulfilling the legally mandated three year minimum mathematics requirement for a high school diploma. Learn how the Python community has been supporting these efforts and how the open source community more generally is becoming involved.

Other developments such as poster sessions at Pycons, an upgraded turtle graphics library, new on-line resources and published titles, suggest future trends in education.

The appearance of Mathematics for the Digital Age and Programming in Python, by Maria and Gary Litvin may signal a sea change in high school level mathematics teaching, or perhaps it simply represents a confluence and positive synergy of many long term trends, including the bias towards teaching more discrete math topics at the high school level.

From a math teaching perspective, I think the Litvins text is a breakthrough. Students use it at Phillips Academy in Andover, considered one of the nation's top schools. I've been going on Math Forum asking for advice from my peers: if we wanted to spread a course more like this around Oregon, how would we do it?

The solution that seemed to be shaping up last August was to simply fire up the new course under the heading of discrete and/or digital math, per state standards. There's already a section in the standards for such material.

However the real question is where to find the teachers, when to equip them with the few additional skills needed to take some well-known and conservative content, and make it ready for the digital age. In the case of the Litvins text, that means learning some Python.

Would we field a small army of Python trainers then? That seems like a possible strategy, should funding become available. Or perhaps these teachers are simply learning Python on their own? Having been a high school teacher, I know there's a lot of pressure just to keep up with the existing schedule. Preparing to teach something new would mean time away from other duties and teachers on the front lines may not have that luxury, absent some institutional work flow.

I may be too out of the loop on this one. Should someone else give this talk then? Maybe this blog post will garner some feedback.

Exercise 8 in Chapter 10 (2nd edition) gets into V + F = E + 2, Euler's Law for Polyhedra. That's the kind of stuff I get into through my Oregon Curriculum Network web site, also very vested in Python. I've tended to use VPython, a 3rd party library, for my Saturday Academy classes, which makes it relatively easy to get colorful polyhedra on screen. I haven't done much with PyMol yet, another add-on our chemistry teachers might enjoy.

Having since checked that Adbusters web site, I think Lindsey is correct that I was reading a spoof. More like The Onion then? On the other hand, it just seemed too real. These drones are much worse than V-2s, plus are used against people with no air defenses to begin with (no RAF). Calling these remotely piloted know-nothing drones "weapons against blow back" is simply ridiculous, but then I could hear some faux counter-terrorism expert saying just such a thing, perhaps over a secure phone from some ski trip somewhere. Are these the same anonymous faux experts who disbelieve the NIE, think we should be bombing civilian power plants in Iran? Who put them in charge?

Once home, I focused on filling out an application form for a part time tutoring job. I wrote to Stu Quimby on Facebook, asking if I could use him as a reference. My work on a geometry toy is more relevant to math students than some of that database work for the outcomes research people at Providence Health System.

Getting a digital age math course option out to students will require innovation at the institutional level, the design of new roles, new work flows. As an army of one, all I might do is point in that positive direction and suggest this might be our ticket to a brighter tomorrow. I am quite aware that the Obama administration wants to get the focus back on education and jobs, not to mention health care. We might well have a bigger army here soon. On the other hand, innovation is a difficult process taking skilled managers. ONAMI was an inspiring, showed me that Oregonians still have that pioneering spirit.

Education in the digital age means using more viewers like Google Earth and Microsoft TerraServer. The news shows are already using those. TV has already improved in that sense.

My thanks to Carey Carlson for sending some philosophy PDFs, somewhat in the Russell-Whitehead lineage. Also thank you Tom Higgins for pointing me to Roger Ebert's blog. My prayers for John and Eve Talmadge, cousin Mary, Grace, cousing Pat and her mom.

Some Adjustments

Trevor's latest music CD is a masterpiece. I made a special trip upstairs to warn my daughter to prepare herself if she was going to come downstairs.

These sounds are sometimes both inexplicably eerie and hauntingly beautiful in ways only music and life can be.

I needed to backpedal on some misapprehensions I had about Nietzsche, namely that he was Austrian. I made a post hoc change to Philosophy 101, tweaking the time stamp (a ritual gesture, means "shifted" or "adjusted").

Paul Laffoley's blog gives me a new angle on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom I've been yakking about recently. I'm having some deja vu about all this, not sure why:

My only objections to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) are first, he refused to believe in the existence of Extraterrestrials, meaning that the Earth was the only place in the Universe where intelligent life exists; and second, as a student he participated in “The Piltdown Man” hoax in 1918 in East Sussex England by burying a Neanderthal human skull without its mandible and then substituted a chimpanzee mandible. The attempt was to make the World believe in the existence of the fabled “Missing Link”.

Trevor rightly points out that Grunch.net has this retro 1990s flavor, suggests I convert everything to WordPress, including these blogs. As it is, Synergetics on the Web is a hodgepodge of different styles and fonts, lots of hand-coded static HTML.

My thinking these days is "grunch" and "grunge" go together ("grunge of giants"?), meaning we start from the fact of a downscale planet, don't pretend we're richie rich. Yes, there's this "GRoss UNiversal Cash Heist" connotation (GRUNCH), but that simply means we have nowhere to go but the future, no choice but to invest, one way or another.

Anthony Mason had the right idea in that January 5 piece on CBS News, which Katie said was terrific. Will new shelter solutions be a part of the mix, or is the plan to just do more FEMA trailers from here on out?

A Math Talk

The reason I promote hexadecimals so much has less to do with understanding everything there is to know about bases, including negative and irrational number bases, and more to do with comprehending some details behind the ASCII-to-Unicode story.

Expanding the number of permutations of 1s and 0s, by adding slots, doubling their range with each added new one, means growing by powers of two. At four bits you have 16 permutations, mapping to the digits 0-F.

Since when was F a digit?

Since hexadecimals: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F.

Two such digits represent eight bits and that's conveniently called a byte (I'm reminded of mites, sytes and kites for some reason). Four bytes look like this: 12 AB 5F EC.

8 bits gives 2**8 or 256 permutations, enough for much of Latin-1 (like Roman letters), but not enough for all the world's alphabets and ideograms, math symbols, cursive glyphs in joining groups (ways to connect to one another -- important in Arabic and Syriac scripts).

By widening the field from 8 to 32 bits, one boosts the range to 2 to the 32nd power or 2**32 or 4,294,967,296 (more than four billion slots). Only the first 21 bits are really needed at this time, leaving room for the shared symbol space to double many more times.

Think of at least three reasons we might need to add code points (hint: what if Teilhard was wrong?).

My thanks to Carl Trachte for this blog post.

Another Debate

This is actually Wanderers 2010.1.5, if you're flying that airline, however I'm more the Martian this evening, coming late, leaving early.

I've got the client laptop, so had to remember the pass code (WEP). Bill Sheppard gave me a clue. I asked in pen on a postit (sticky 3M) so as to not interrupt proceedings, which is all about systematic errors in GPS readings, Mt. Hood guy, lots of listeners.

You need a minimum of two systems if you're going to prove the errors are systematic in the first place.

This debating coaches web site is interesting to me; I forwarded it around. This might explain some election shenanigans? "Drill baby drill"? Was that Exxon or what?

Barry: an under-ocean DC line across the Bering Strait would never work. You'd need 10 feet of insulation plus there's nothing but wilderness on both ends. He also despises windmills as flaky and loud, ecologically destructive (too many roads). I also wanted to ask him for an opinion about thorium reactors -- some other time perhaps.

Trevor has some great new information, such as show times in WDC, for the D.W. Jacobs play about Bucky.

☂ D. W. Jacob’s play R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER: THE HISTORY (and mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE will be performed May 28 - July 4, 2010 at the Arena Stage Crystal City in Washington, DC. Doug tells me: “Crystal City has put out an international call for artists to create outdoor works of art around Bucky themes and concepts, etc.” More information available from the Arena Stage.

I'm to meet with Trevor tomorrow, have some ideas to run by. Our Private Undercover Party motif, developed through Duke's, might be just the ticket for a teaser / preview of Tetrascroll (a cosmic fairytale).

One of our Cascadia Wilders is relating her experiences with little handheld GPSs, what happens when a satellite goes goofy (because setting). The more satellites the better, but you'll get sucky readings if the alignment is bad. You need to know how to read that. Digital math, an outdoor sport (sometimes) is / was gonna do that for ya. In Alaska maybe?

The client laptop is Windows7 with the latest Office. Word is way different. I spent the evening adding drop shadows to those two of Koski's, showing vZome with twisted greens, courtesy of Dave Koski.

Aldona just walked in, armed with info on algae (a potential fuel source -- so much more space efficient). Good seeing her. Steve Mastin, Jon Bunce... some people I don't recognize. That guy looks like retired brass, an unusual species in Portland -- I could be wrong. Anyway, he looks familiar. I'll call him Bob.

The debaters seemed pretty certain that WDC was remiss in not accepting the offer of technical assistance.

Trevor cites Bucky in Playboy suggesting homosexuality might be one of those gentle taps on the brakes Malthus favored, a godsend. Apocalyptic types prefer oblivion to utopia so they can say "I told you so" though.

The new translation of Wittgenstein replaces Anscombe's "queer" with something different, even though that's what she heard, in English. Is this improving her translation or copy editing? Sean is right to ask the question, even if it's much ado about nothing.

Omega Party

:: omega party ::

I'm no expert on the history of this place, having just set foot in the door a few minutes ago. Obviously this used to be a neighborhood church and was designed with that purpose in mind.

Buzz and I met at Laughing Horse this afternoon. He wanted to learn more about tensegrity, having come across it through my blogs. I showed up with Kenneth Snelson's newest book. We stood on a street corner with his daughter, about Tara's age, thumbing through it, while waiting for her ride to show up.

In his authoritative Tensegrity, R. Moto says he's not crowning Kenneth the Father of Tensegrity only because he's not a kingmaker, hasn't the power to bestow that title. This seems a diplomatic communication of his sentiments.

Speaking of Kenneth, I was pleased to read about his recent in-studio meetup with Gerald de Jong. Good news. Gerald has been a Snelson fan for many years.

Gerald was our house guest in the 1990s, during which time we drove to the Kasman-Chu residence in South Seattle for a geometry confab, followed by a rendezvoux at Karl Erickson's to learn more about elastic interval geometry and Gerald's emerging Java application (Karl was an early power user, as was Russell Chu).

Even back then Gerald was committed to using a cigar shape, like a shiny balloon, for his elastic intervals. Darwin at Home, his more recent EIG application, still reflects this aesthetic.

Gerald had come from the Netherlands to attend JavaOne in the Bay Area. We would meet again at a party in Santa Cruz, after another JavaOne, with Bonnie DeVarco, Joe Moore, other scholars and luminaries.

These in-person meetings were infrequent. However we'd been meeting in Cyberia as avatars, in Bonnie's virtual high school, or in that other "world" devoted to matters geometric. ActiveWorlds had come online long before Second Life and we were among the early adopters, investigating educational uses for this shared communications infrastructure.

Speaking of neighborhood churches (Kenneth pokes fun at me for any "church of Bucky" vibe), I've been preaching to the choir on Synergeo again. My welder friend darmraj is pointing out that practically no one on the planet devotes any attention whatsoever to our friggin' MITEs, their tripart dissection. We're just a bunch of crazy die-hards at this point, floundering amidst the flotsam and jetsam of unused nomenclature.

Quoting myself preaching:

This all seems kinda backwards doesn't it. A rag tag crew of buckaneers, scattered around the world, is stuck knowing more about primitive space-filling shapes and crystal lattices than most people ever wanted to know. That's a natural consequence of taking Fuller seriously and is proof that this curriculum works, in terms its of students developing higher reading comprehension, better powers of concentration. You'd think that'd attract some attention?

Preaching to choir, talking to self.... blah blah.

Buzz and I then adjourned to the book store. The collective was holding a staff meeting, so we kept our voices muted, hung out in the foyer, running our laptops, connecting to Facebook. Buzz shared about an already up and running Pacific Rim manufacturing concern with an active R&D division. He was yakking about shelter solutions, polyurethane fabric. Like tents? We'll see where he goes with this.

Over on the Wanderers list, I came across this sad blog post from one of our global university students, shared by Gus Frederick of Silverton. Hossein is like the Dick Pugh of Iran, an award-winning science writer studying astrogeology on his own dime. The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology has offered him a scholarship, would be happy to get him, but he can't get a visa from the US authorities.

Bucky Fuller considered nation-states a cruel holdover from those divide-and-conquer great pirate days. They encouraged parochialism and self-destructive behaviors. A more supranational mindset was emerging, thanks to telecommunications and decreasing misinformation, so humanity was in a race against the clock in Grunch of Giants (1983). World Game, with its focus on the global electrical grid, would help reorient and anchor the new thinking in this brave novus ordo seclorum.

Lindsey has started her set. Burn Out seems appropriately apocalyptic under the circumstances. It's closing time at Liberty Hall, a final performance. "The curtain's coming down, and everything is gone. The banquet's left the hall, the débutantes are bald, there's nothing left to do..." The acoustics are excellent, her performance bold, to my ears flawless. Portland is blessed with a truly vibrant music scene.

Other bands have arrived and stacked their equipment along both sides of the room. Only another eight hours to go. I'll be exiting shortly, wandering off on foot to find Michael and Matt. We're celebrating Michael's birthday today.