More on Public Education

Reports are filtering back from the NCTM annual conference. I'm looking at Maria's recap of Ihor's talk in particular. Nothing too surprising.

The "kite campaign" was barely a blip on the radar, but then that was more for retrospective use. When drawing attention to "what's missing" (e.g. Mites), one needs a frame with cross-hairs, a camera lens to look through.

That sense of math education being under attack, with continued dismantling of tools, a rollback of advances, is felt around Portland as well. Benson, our polytechnic, was ordered to dumb itself down by the school board awhile back, as its math-science standards were considered discriminatory. The new proposal is to simply bus students there, i.e. to kill it as a school with a self-contained identity.

Obviously I've been hearing from some seriously distraught math teachers.

One could see where the economic incentive would be to prevent the local population from regaining its abilities to organize and staff industries. Now that the Silicon Forest is well established, why not keep it a preserve for imported workers? More generally, North America is being stripped of its human resources and dumbed down. High school no longer teaches much of anything about machine world or how things work.

Turning this situation around with free and open source software has been a theme in this doodle pad (not a diary really, usually). Another theme: a place-based education that really gives a sense of local timelines. Faculty have a responsibility to custom tailor curriculum imports. There's no "one size fits all" approach that's going to work.

Cultivating regional identity, versus some tendency towards mono-culture, enforced from some imperial center: this an old pattern, one that doesn't just apply in "the developing world" (as people used to say). In Biblical terms, one steers around Rome (take the Annulare?). Nor do we all get our news from the New York Times (at least not exclusively).

Xenophobia is not the way to go though. We're lucky to have a diverse and cosmopolitan population. Competence with tools and technologies should be encouraged everywhere, not just around Portland, Oregon (duh). This Global U infrastructure to promote more student exchange will make it easier to keep schools like Benson in business. Getting more households on stream and certified for visiting scholars is a part of the longer term plan.

In the meantime, our Radical Math and the Portland free school business are helping propagate mentors. Teachers are experimenting with new techniques, including more pair teaching. I've not been attending all of these classes (some in Spanish), but I do appreciate the efforts. Language and math do go together (and I'm not just talking about computer languages). We've been recommending Who Is Fourier? by the LEX Institute for some years on edu-sig (Jason Cunliffe and I especially). The teaching techniques are prototypical of O'Reilly's in the Head First series.

However, I'm not claiming these efforts to keep math on life support will be sufficient in and of themselves. As I was posting to Synergeo yesterday, I don't have too exaggerated a sense of my own importance in these efforts. The various networks have their own agendas and the synergetic result is more than the sum of its parts. The Pythonic Math curriculum we've been developing is just one effort among many. Functional programmers have their own ideas. OS Bridge is shaping up to have more talks on Haskell than Python this year.

Wanderers 2010.5.11

This event was given considerable air time at the recent Raph Nader event, so we're expecting some extra guests (two more just walked in).

Rudi Nussbaum is here, with his wife Laureen, to talk about the Hanford down-winders, people adversely affected by the Manhatten Project's HQS in Washington State.

Purifying plutonium for atomic bombs has endangered the Columbia Gorge for the foreseeable future and attempts at cleanup is costing many times more than the Manhattan Project itself.

Daniel Ellsberg referred to this cleanup as Manhattan Project 2. Although people aren't much using that nomenclature, the reality is: it's happening.

Lloyd Marbet has joined us, long time activist, opponent of Trojan (since destroyed).

Rudi sincerely admired Linus Pauling, had the opportunity to speak with him at some length at Portland State that time. He's feeling honored to join as at Linus Pauling's boyhood home, with his picture with Ava (a Quaker) over the mantelpiece.

John Gofman, an early whistle blower, helped expose the lies being promulgated by the Atomic Energy Commission regarding the safety and acceptability of using military personnel as guinea pigs around atmospheric testing. His career and character were trashed in retaliation, though he didn't disappear.

Alice Stewart was another of Rudi's mentors and personal friends. Stewart was one of the first to alert the medical community to the deleterious effects of X-rays, on pregnant mothers etc. Many were not ready for this finding, as X-rays were all the rage at the time. Her career was definitely hurt by her professional integrity.

Rudi didn't originally plan on investigating the medical effects of nuclear fallout, fissionable materials in the environment. He sought refuge from "dirty politics," was not looking for a fight. For many years, he got away with mostly doing basic research.

Once he opened the can of worms that was the "science" around the health effects of radioactive material, he was blown away by the level of corruption he encountered. Money buys scientists by the boatload. Three Mile Island provided another example of corruption, with the government blue panel commission finding "no health effects" essentially by edict. Tritium alone is a leading cause of leukemia in children.

"Inconclusive results" is what PR firms are looking for, when fending off public resistance to whatever technology is paying their bills.

Official state-sponsored investigations of Hanford's health effects were often high handed, with members of the public advised they might be suffering from "radiophobia" -- an irrational fear of radiation. Independent scientists got together to see whether they could produce some definitive findings.

Dr. Charles Grossman, another Linus Pauling fan, whom Jon Bunce and Rudi both know, was originally skeptical that "down winders" were victims of radiation poisoning. After conducting some interviews, he had to change his mind. Given releases of materials were initially into the atmosphere, the term "down winders" is meant fairly literally.

Sam Lanahan is here, and is eager to hear the scientific results of this counter-study. What were these "definitive findings" he wants to know. LaJean grew up in Walla Walla and would like to know some more details.

A finding of excess hypothyroidism associated with spontaneous abortions, excess cancers of thyroid, nervous system and reproductive system, by a factor of some 10x vis-a-vis background rates for Washington State, seems close to irrefutable.

Wind-borne iodine 131 and iodine 129 are the implicated isotopes.

The Hanford Thyroid Disease Study (CDC, National Cancer Institute, University of Washington), in contrast, found no ill effects.

Their technique was not to compare local incidence rates with background rates, but to look for a monotonic relationship between purported dose amounts and the number of cases reported, i.e. incidence rates in concentric circles around the release site needed to increase in a simple manner in the direction of Hanford, or there could be no evidence of correlation, regardless of absolute numbers.

Simple correlation of dose with distance is too simplistic in any case, given variations in topography, wind patterns and so forth.

Now that more data about Chernobyl is being released, the ability to cross-check the numbers is becoming easier. A recent German study (plus an older one) applied some fairly rigorous protocols and showed children living within 10 km of nuclear plants are adversely affected.

Rudi asked not to be quoted in this article if he couldn't see a pre-publication draft, but Adrian Burton broke their agreement. Oh well.

Although the down-winders have been awarded some millions by some court, the government has unlimited resources to appeal and the current plan is to simply wait for these folks to die off.

Wanderers indulged their penchant for red wine during Rudi's talk and tended to embarrass themselves per usual. Good thing we didn't have a lot of guests. We need this semi-private venue to indulge our vices. I hope those few visitors who did attend will forgive us our lack of social graces. "You oughta keep alcohol out of this event" said Lloyd Marbet. I tend to agree.

I had no idea that Phil's bookstore had burned down, a loss of some 100K rare volumes on the Pacific Northwest, a shocking loss.

Civil Service

My daughters joined me for lunch at The Bagdad today, a rare enough event. I remembered when this had been a video rental store, pre McMenamins buying the building.

We celebrated Carol's successful endeavors at the UN in NYC, welcomed the bright day, despite an abiding awareness of unfolding tragedies. She found some atmospherics to be up beat about. The Russians and the Americans seem to indeed have rebooted their relationship. Now if they could only act maturely around Iran... (that speech was pretty tame, nothing Canada couldn't have said).

Tara took the neg position regarding a two year quasi-universal draft, whereas almost 100% of her peers are taking the aff (aff and neg: shorthand from the Lincoln-Douglas debating subculture, Tara the district champion).

A culture espousing freedom should not mandate mandatory service, was Tara's position. Alexia saw relief from the pressure of student loans as a motivator. I circled overseas service as a possibility for volunteers, but that's not how the proposal had been written (a domestic service only).

Tara enterprisingly asked around and netted a cast-off PCIe card from a friend that solved her computer video needs. This took me almost an entire day to install, between other projects. Getting the dust blown out of her computer was definitely in need of doing. This was no super high end vid card, but beats what came on the motherboard (there's a BIOS setting to switch it over).

Don't apply the same dust blowing techniques to a piano though, I learned in my visit to the warehouse, as you'll just blow off the delicate felt padding (not that I'd done this, was learning from another's long ago mistakes). I was working for food, got to drive a truck and trailer (still haven't tried the forklift though).

My student friend in Indonesia has moved on to XML, is studying elementree.

I need to show Wanderer Bill Sheppard the Console module by Fredrik Lundh. I just tested it on Win7 and it seems to run just fine. Bill is always ribbing me about Python not being able to control a simple terminal window, sort of a basic test of basic smarts in his book (he writes in assembler).

In addition to upgrading the video card, I upgraded the Starling-1 netbook from Jaunty Jackalope to Karmic Koala, the next higher version of Ubuntu. System76 technical support by email was most necessary in getting me through this. I'd lost wireless, needed to upgrade grub, the boot loader.

I'm not some super Linux guru, believe you me, am in awe of some of those I encounter.

Tara has been using the Starling-1 more than I have recently. I mostly use it in meetings, to share pictures or quick takes from the Internet. I find it difficult to use for production work and appear not to have hypertoons installed, so it's hardly CSN-ready.

I wrote about PyCuda on edu-sig when thinking about this new graphics card... not that I've ever used it. PyCuda and its successor give Python coders a way to talk to the GPUs on nVidia cards.

I don't know what the Security+ people have to say about rogue employees milking more cycles out of on-board hardware -- presumably, like skateboarding, that shouldn't be a crime.

Speaking of which, the warehouse I was working in had an entire indoor skateboarding facility, which no one was using at the time. I was reminded of Vilnius.

The Wittgenstein list now has a record of some recent plowing and tilling in the Radical Math domain. I'm collecting recent links to my Math Forum posts in MyBizmo.

This may all seem more like idle banter than high stakes poker, I realize. I live in my own "private Idaho" to some degree.

Nick (GU exchange) reminded me to check out the revamped BFI website. Lets see if I'm can find some old pages... this one (NCTM heart Synergetics), but not this one (my London Knowledge Lab lecture). OK, cool -- the latter was out of date by now anyway.

LinZ is a the UU church downtown at the Ralph Nader lecture, running a table for Laughing Horse.

Alexia: what about those disappearing bees, why don't we hear more news about that? The only environmental cue we're getting is the steadily rising cost of honey.

Wanderers 2010.5.5

The room was packed this morning. I arrived a little late, having circled the company car via Cleveland/PPS, later to Jiffy Lube for a free tire top off. Front right was down to 5 pounds i.e. technically flat. Gotta keep a sharp eye on that one.

What happened amounted to a series of lightning talks or fire crackers, a kind of Ignite Portland. Indeed, some of the same topics came up: tensegrity, flextegrity... and a lot of other stuff.

My original plan had been to say something about my experience with STScI. As it turned out, my large format glossy posters, provided by the STScI outreach office, were much appreciated.

Other than that, I expressed my sincere appreciation to Holden Web for providing me with this short notice opportunity. I've continued to study numpy, although I realize the mainstream still considers Matlab the fish of the day.

After the official meeting, I used the white board to diagram some of our Radical Math concepts. This is a marketing moniker or brand promulgated by Oregon Curriculum Network. Here's the logo I'm using (click through for Photostream):

I also published Geodesic News to Synergeo, synthesizing some recent findings.

Empirical Studies

Patrick threw himself into oil spill studies with a vengeance.

Between well capping and surface skimming is the mile of intervening ocean where oil plumes.

With only 10% of water's density, it forms a vertical flow that might be partially dammed by large, neutrally buoyant, inverted funnels. He calls them "jellyfish".

Patrick's quick survey of the existing literature, including various patents and proposals, showed that designs for under-sea collection infrastructure had never been implemented.

Relatively few had thought in terms of fielding ad hoc under-ocean oil snarfing devices. Their pumps would actuate in short bursts, in response a concentration of oil detected in their upper reaches. Oil might go into bags for pulling to shore, if not directly into ship tanks.

Patrick did some quick hydrological experiments. Then, as one of the few people who knows about Flextegrity, he wondered if Sam's way of tethering compressive members together could provide a quick skeleton for holding some membrane or skin in a collective position.

The Flextegrity web site shows breakwater and sea-bottom artificial reef applications, but neutral buoyancy applications have not been a feature. Patrick found a way to submit his idea on-line.

Like any good engineer, he's casting about for solutions, leveraging whatever knowledge base is available. BP no doubt has a vast army of such engineers studying the problem from all angles.

Patrick's proposal seems pretty radical, but radical thinking, even radical mathematics, is what we need more of these days.

Patrick joined us for morning coffee, just before my Python class in the piano room.

From my email to Sam later that same afternoon (fixing one typo):

I think a "prose sketch" of the rig, an inverted half octahedron, maybe 5-6 frequency with pretty gigantic icosahedra (ala coral reef), would be close to my interpretation of Patrick's concept: a giant inverted funnel designed to keep some sort of canvas or skin serving as a passive catcher's mitt. When an actuator measuring oil density gets triggered, because of collected oil in the top reaches of the cup, the pump sends it up the hose, as a burst, then shuts off, waits to be triggered again. He referred to them as "jelly fish".

Sam, Patrick, Glenn and I met at a neighborhood meeting place to further discuss the proposal. In kicking these ideas around, they morphed somewhat. The shape isn't that important, so long as it's a concave capturing device. We talked a lot about buoyancy control.

Sam would be happy to hit the accelerator on all this. We'd need to work with his engineers to move quickly.

Glenn's design wouldn't require Flexegrity at all. Stiffened dacron sails and PVC might provide the concave jellyfish. Sam actually thought this design made a lot of sense, given his knowledge of sailing and matters maritime. Sam: "Cheap, simple, locally available, ready to go... See, I'm prepared to subvert my own belief structure."

We have yet to see even the beginning of the end of this scenario. The ecological impact of our legacy radioactive materials is likewise measured in geological time.

We came up with the following abstract. Patrick got a call back from Senator Wyden's office while we worked on our draft. Patrick wrote most of this:

We propose to deploy an array of sub-surface oil concentration/collection devices to interdict the oil plume between its source and the surface. The elements of our system include individual, submerged, inverted funnels that will consolidate the oil and deliver it, on demand, to surface-based tender vessels. These elements work independently but can be deployed as a coordinated, but redundent, network. Each element consists of a concave membrane for oil collection, a pump, and a demand-based activation mechanism. Each element is deployable using small watercraft such as shrimp boats, and each can be independently weighted/buoyed as requred to ensure collection occurs at an optimal depth. Elements can be procured and assembled using locally-available or off-the-shelf materials.

Follow-up: more polish applied later, plus we presented it in assembly at the Pauling Campus the following Wednesday morning. The name "Medusa Array" was proposed informally.

Oil Spill

The eco-disaster unfolding in the ocean is eclipsing our conversations. The irony was not lost on Tara or Autumn, if we were to all die by our chief civilizational juice after water. Talk about peak oil.

Our standards of living, future prospects, have been changed overnight.

Last night I attended another benefit concert for Portland Womens Crisis Line. The event was held at In Other Words on the corner of Williams and Killingsworth.

Both bands, Lindsey Walker and Mannequin Head, were enthusiastically received by a mostly youthful female audience.

During a scouting expedition afterwards, seeking a bus stop for a girl and her guide dog, I got a callback from mom in New York. She'd had another long day with the airlines, had arrived at her destination. Nuclear disarmament remains a WILPF priority, since Ava Helen Pauling days and before. Linda Richards has also been in our conversations recently, amongst the Pauling House drifters (Wanderers).

I drank quite a bit of French press coffee during showtime, courtesy of a newly ensconced barista. Laughing Horse is aware of this wrinkle in the business model, is looking at hosting classes for example, in addition to concerts (has already done some of both). No one said that radicals couldn't be enterprising.

Radical thinking is what we'll need more of to counter environmental degradation, public enemy number one.

Wanderers 2010.4.27

Completely packed house tonight, with some of the rare birds. I'm ensconced in my blogging area, ready to poke my head in, take notes. Something about psychokenisis (am I spelling that correctly?). We have an out of town expert. Already the coat hanger is buckling under the weight, given our double the usual number.

Earlier today: a good meeting with Dr. B. Fuller, University of Nebraska emeritus, busy with his grandchildren, studying Alexander Calder with one of them. We met at Lyrik, formerly Fine Grind. I took these cool pictures of Bob signing the book he edited, writings by one of his mentors, Robert Karplus.

Allen Taylor and I read each other's blogs.

I spent the last few hours dumping FoxPro data through a converter program I found on the Internet, but needed to patch. It uses AFIELDS to get data about table columns, and does a fairly good job of creating a MySQL table, then populating it with data.

I'm doing the dumping on the Win7 host, then gmailing to myself on a Sun Virtualbox guesting Ubuntu (I should use a shared folder but haven't figured that out yet). There I populate the ktraks database in the MySQL installation, point to it from settings.py in Django project /home/projects/ktraks/. I'm using virtualenv...

These were all just demo fragments, as I'm hoping to gel a proposal. The actual project would need more than one solo coder/developer. In fact, I'm already one of a dynamic duo, or trio if you count the author of the framework (based in Tampa).

Actually, there's a vast army behind every project in IT world, it's just that we don't always know in advance for what purposes our tools will be used. Consider TCP/IP. Some use it to provide medical care while others use it to spread damaging misinformation calculated to inspire fear.

Tele-kenesis, not psycho-kinesis. Applause. I should get a picture.

She speaks in Russian and this young guy follows in English, line by line. She's talking about levels of consciousness. This gets me thinking of those Jungian talks again.

Jon Bunce bailed early. Apparently our guest requested no wine drinking in her presence. Probably a good idea to keep us sobered up. We weren't allowed to eat our cake either, nor interrupt much. Seemed pretty telekinetic to me, in that respect -- knocked 'em off balance.

Given I'm sequestered in the blogging area, I'm able to sip on the sly. Is that why the disk didn't turn? Later some said that it did, so I'm confused about whether this was an experiment. We got together and hit off each other, an exercise in re-vectoring with the "tele" part not that easy to see, though we have our models (great circle railroad tracks through points of inter-tangency etc.).

I'm missing most of the content I must confess, staying occupied talking to my on-line critic and posting to Math Forum some more.

Good seeing Rhett Savage again.

I'll put some more polish on this tomorrow.

Thinking About Bud

The Bud I mean is Dawn's step dad, father to Gail. I had the great privilege of meeting the dear man on a couple of occasions. He worked for Eastern Airlines, in operations, for many years.

His gentle manner really helped restore Dawn and Sam to happier lives in Satellite Beach, Florida, after some blisteringly bleak years in Warren, Ohio and such places.

Bud married their mom and was looking forward to a cheery retirement, when she died suddenly, of complications from a standard PTCA or other angiogram (I met Dawn afterwards).

My heartfelt respect for this hero of many adventures I have not told of here. His memorial service is tomorrow.

Sam phoned me from Florida as I was getting off my delayed United flight from Denver, left me voicemail. I immediately texted Alexia, Dawn's first of two daughters, as I road public transport back to my home.

Mom and I talked by phone tonight. She is with Julie my sister.

Immersive Python

We blitzed through a lot of Python in three days. I knew STScI was deeply into NumPy but didn't really get it about Pyfits until I got here. FITS is a file format used by astronomers around the world.

These files contain a lot of the imagery from Hubble, which dumps data to New Mexico, from whence it bounces off another satellite to the Goddard Space Center, thence it feeds into STScI here in Baltimore for archiving and analysis.

Various data processing pipelines then take the data through transformations to enhance the information and accommodate for idiosyncrasies, anomalies, other factors. The delicate instruments are in perpetual need of fine tuning and recalibration.

Clients will often get both the raw data heading into the pipeline, as well as the processed results coming out the far end.

The Hubble is always repointing this way and that as it circles Earth every 96 minutes. It uses gyroscopes to do this, not retro rockets. Astronomers compete for precious time on this always busy, tightly scheduled space telescope.

Cramming and Cleaning

I've been looking at "cramming and cleaning" as two of my principal activities of late.

I've got a teaching gig coming up, so feel a need to cram.

The other challenge is digging out from under a pile of stuff in a respectful manner. I didn't throw away my old notebooks (yet), and other media are gradually aggregating: books to the "time capsule," photographs to a room upstairs. I'm under orders from a sponsor not to rent a dumpster (bad for PR to take the easy way out).

Speaking of sponsors, my thanks to one of them for a cell phone upgrade. The previous one was providing "half duplex" some of the time (they could hear me, but I couldn't hear them). This next one, an LG, used and still in good shape, is more both robust and includes the full keyboard I've come to expect from the Samsung.

Given I lug a laptop or netbook, I'm still not in the market for a busy "apps phone" with all the bling. Per my CSN writings, I tend to aim for bigger rather than smaller LCDs. Hypertoons on an iPhone might look cool though.

On the nationalism thread (one of the subjects under study in this campus household), I've been wondering about getting certain classes of student ID approved for trans-boarder traffic.

Some people, classified as refugees, have fallen through the cracks of the nation state system, find gaining citizenship (documentation) an almost impossible barrier. A "reboot city" consisting of high turnover housing and skills training courses (like a college) might provide its graduates with student ID acceptable in at least some other locales.

Along these lines, I once made the suggestion on the PSF list, that Python Nation (a 2nd world) issue passports. These would be souvenir / gift shop items that one might get stamped at a Pycon or EuroPython or other venue. The idea of actually using such a document to get through customs would actually be more prototypical of the "virtual nations" idea. Yes, I see "identity politics" at work here; we're looking for ways to add freedoms, to improve the average global university experience.

[ With all these gigabytes available, we should aim to start a thorough and helpful medical record for any new life, regardless of ethnicity or economic circumstances. This would be an opportunity some might refuse, out of distrust or in obedience to some religious precept. Better to refuse an opportunity than to not have it in the first place though. Electronic medical records in some schemaless document management system (e.g Tokyo Cabinet) might make the most sense.]

As long as one's persistent veridical identity provides some kind of audit trail as borders get crossed, a lot of bureaucratic requirements will be satisfied.

A person with a valid passport and internationally certified student / faculty ID might use either. The Facebook-like chronology (perhaps of border crossings and nothing more), would show if both were linked to the same identity. Scanning the ID retrieves the record within the custom agent's browser. Iconic flags and decals would decorate the average tourist record.

Refugees with accepted documentation, yet still with no citizenship within any UN-recognized sovereignty, might nevertheless get opportunities to visit various campuses in the course of their work / study scenarios. If Harvard had a satellite campus in Uganda, maybe Harvard students could go there using Harvard ID, just as Ugandans enrolling in Harvard through this satellite might thereby gain the credentials to visit Cambridge through a special gate at the airport.

A doctors without borders HQS in Siberia might offer valuable training opportunities, complete with airstrip. You might not need a passport to go there through Russian airspace, by agreement with authorities. Similar facilities and/or transit centers might dot the globe elsewhere.

Your chronofile might still show you'd been there and elsewhere. The average quality of the information on tap would actually be less sketchy than it is today.

We currently live in a dark time when the so-called "undocumented" (more Global U students) are provided with little to no practical recourse in the face of the same unrelenting pressures to move about the globe as those bringing the pilgrims to Plymouth Rock, others to destinations in the Middle East and so on. People are not trees, are not rooted so much as routed by God's will (if you'll accept a religious moniker in this context -- how many pilgrims think of their leadings).

Speaking of Doctors Without Borders, my congratulations to Vino Vixens on Powell for hosting a fundraiser for this group the other night.

:: musicians at work ::

Wanderers 2010.4.7

We learned about broadband under "lawyer-capitalism" (as our mentor and Medal of Freedom winner calls it). President Eisenhower called it the "military-industrial complex" and thought it might destroy the USA we had known.

The USA has some of the slowest Internet at the highest rates anywhere, thanks to the FCC, Supreme Court etc.

Other less backward parts of the world are creating their next generation of telecommunications with fiber instead of copper, leaving the USA in the dust.

The private companies controlling the cable franchises have not kept pace, have been turning the Internet into a one-way service for delivering movies to idiot boxes while clamping down hard on competing users and service providers.

Google has been planning a few fiber-based test beds featuring a two-way gigabit service that would be open platform, shared with local companies kicked off the cable delivery system by the FCC.

The FCC lost its jurisdictional mandate yesterday in some dimension. However, I had another meeting to attend so was unable to chronicle more details.

Our speaker works for the City of Portland, which has been resisting this dying form of capitalism, hoping to open up the infrastructure to more players. The concentration of media in a fewer hands goes against the grain of the Oregonian psyche.

Workshop News

Randy, lets call her, at first found the CubeIt! "creepy" because of the magnets, but then took to exploring it with gusto, while taking in my explanation of its 24 Mites as minimum space-fillers. Another guy, lets call him Kyle, was likewise comprehending.

It's not that this stuff is particularly hard; it's just not shared very widely, not even on Math World (a situation we have recently addressed).

All talk of irregular polytopes aside, this educational tool from the Huntar Company is simply fun to play with.

The octahedral Flextegrity model triggered some discussion of a landmine detector / destroyer. One of our number, a company president and sponsor, had worked on a prototype at a national lab in his spare time some years ago, basing his design on a clever kids' toy.

A rotating weight caused the scaled up version to flip from face to face unpredictably, generating a random walk across a field, possibly detonating a charge along the way.

These devices would be inexpensive / dispensable and could be put to work in large numbers. But would they find them all? Landmines are another legacy technology today's world despises.

The motorcycle engineer also shared a few thoughts with our group, though I had some trouble with his accent, wish I were better with languages. Speaking of which, here some Japanese kanji I've been getting recently:

polyhedra 多面体
tetrahedron 正四面体
decahedron 10面体
dodecahedron 正十二面体
rhombic dodecahedron 菱形十二面体

many 多
surface 面
body 体
regular 正
twelve (ten, two) 十二
four 四
diamond shape 菱形

A reporter from Baghdad shared horrific stories. People blame the political process, but such levels of violence are hardly political, or a process. The electrical grid is still in a shambles, city services are greatly impaired, despair is running high.

The Colin Powell "you break it you buy it" policy cannot be enacted from a purely military standpoint. The Coalition will probably need something more like a Marshall Plan (ERP), making use of those bases as staging areas. Some of the same logistics used in Haiti might apply, including emergency evacuations to better medical facilities (the "mega hospitals").

Scholarships for future health care workers will be needed across the board just to deal with America's aging boomers, many of whom currently seek quality care overseas. Anyone now in the military who qualifies, and wants to follow in the footsteps of Air Force hero Charlie Clements, should get a boost.

The know-how to build and repair civilian infrastructure is in danger of being lost, in America too. Per a voice from Denver, both Hewlett-Packard and TRW CEOs were suggesting decades ago that out-of-control military spending is economically and ecologically ruinous. Civil society is under attack, and quasi-defenseless around the world.

The Python component is still under development and probably needs more Numpy. Dick and I were discussing the nuances in Cyberia. The functional programmers object to polyhedra changing "in place" and returning None, akin to going some_list = ['a', 'b', 'c']; some_list.sort( ). They hate stuff like that. I expect the Scheme camp will continue to compete. Congrats to MF for getting that award by the way. I sure could use some big prizes (jealous).

Not all of this Radical Math occurred on the Pauling Campus. 97214 offers other facilities, though we hardly compete with Reed College when it comes to computer labs. The Java workshop the other night (related to work in genetics) was on the Pauling Campus, as was my Python workshop. Today though, I didn't once set foot in that board room.

Suggesting a Change

I proposed augmenting a page at MathWorld yesterday, using the contribution form.

This morning, Dave Koski phoned to let me know I'd misused the term "orthoscheme" in my initial submission. The text below is from today's newly revised version.

I posted the text of both submissions to Synergeo, as echoed back to me from the MathWorld web server.

The page I am talking about is the one on Space-Filling Polyhedra.

Existing text:

"A space-filling polyhedron, sometimes called a a plesiohedron (Grünbaum and Shephard 1980), is a polyhedron which can be used to generate a tessellation of space. Although even Aristotle himself proclaimed in his work On the Heavens that the tetrahedron fills space, it in fact does not."

Proposed addition:

However an irregular tri-rectangular tetrahedron, named the Mite by R. Buckminster Fuller (for "minimum tetrahedron"), does fill space by itself, with no need of left and right handed complements.

Discussion:

The space-filling polyhedra page curiously avoids any mention of space-filling tetrahedra, simpler than hexahedra.

Fuller's contribution is more nuanced than just offering nomenclature (Mite). In Fig 950.12 he cites pg. 71 of 'Regular Polytopes' to complement Coxeter's treatment of this shape with original modular dissections thereof.

Two additional space-filling tetrahedra may be assembled from Mites.

Presumably Michael Goldberg's treatment enumerates space-filling tetrahedra, suggesting another sentence in the 2nd to last paragraph summarizing his findings?

Coxeter, D. \titleisbn{Regular Polytopes.}{0486614808} New York, New York: Dover Publications, p.~71, 1973.\par

Fuller, R. B. \titleisbn{Synergetics: explorations in the geometry of thinking.}{0020653204} New York, New York: Macmillan, Fig.~950.12, 1975.\par

Inchbald, Guy. ''The "cells" of the Archimedean honeycomb duals'' 1996. \url{http://www.steelpillow.com/polyhedra/AHD/chart_lg.gif}.\par

You'll find I was ranting a little recently (not for the first time) about the fact that so few mathematicians include any mention of Fuller's Mite, or minimum tetrahedron, in their catalogs of space-fillers.

I continue registering my more generic consternation on Synergeo this afternoon, in the context of discussing nuclear disarmament with other contributors. I write in terms of a "global university" as that's what Spaceship Earth has shaped up to become. Fuller's "final exam time" metaphor, for this time in history, is consistent with this imagery. I also point back to this journal entry from math-teach @ Math Forum, where I explicitly tie my concerns to those of the current administration.

Arts and Crafts

Mr. Lanahan bought me breakfast this morning at Mt. Tabor Cafe. We talked about his book.

Later I joined Mr. Stockton in his studio on the Pauling Campus to continue building my instructors kit. The assembly process takes time.

I picture diplomats sitting around, doing something crafty together, shooting the breeze, talking of worldly matters. The Paulings' commitment to peace, science and health sets the tone.

One of the benefits of this workshop: the other people here. Here is an opportunity to compare notes, form bonds in a rarefied setting.

Mr. Blake had not visited this studio before, nor seen this particular version of flextegrity. He shared some lore regarding the technocracy movement, having recently had coffee with a local representative. Trevor is a student of social movements and ideologies.

Glenn and Trevor also talked about moss, a native species. Both have been using it in urban gardens.

A rack of gold icosahedra sit like cookies, baking in the sun on the porch. The bright red Alpha Helix, a sculpture not far away, provides contrast. Tourists stop and ask questions.

My uncle Bill Lightfoot stopped by. He enjoyed checking out the flextegrity pyramid over dinner with Glenn and I at The Bagdad. He shared about dog sledding in Wyoming recently. Bill is 85.

Back in the library, we talked at some length about Kenneth Snelson, the artist and a friend.

Although best known for his awesome tensegrity sculptures, Kenneth has created some truly amazing computer graphics and 360 degree panoramic photographs.

Workshop Scenarios

Glenn unveiled a Flextegrity kit of 100 pieces at Wanderers the other day. I missed the event, heard favorable reports. The kit provides a step-by-step sequence from one icosahedral hub to a four-frequency tetrahedron of 35 icosahedra. The resulting construction is sturdy and all weather. The hubs are fixed in place with customized stretched springs, do not touch one another.

One might call this "floating compression" however the springs also serve a compressive function under load, meaning we do not file this applied material under the "tensegrity" heading.

Students may wish to compare and contrast, as tensegrity is an important concept in contemporary art and engineering. The title by R. Motro is a part of the Flextegrity company library.

Sam has been running some numbers, on what it might cost to keep more of version 3 coming through the pipeline. B2C sales of kits to end users, perhaps bundled with a workshop might emerge as a co-venture.

For the time being, supply is limited and the kits are for workshop instructors.

Glenn's forte is what I call Neolithic Math, which involves working with tools, including hand-made ones. His brand of math provides a strong hands-on component consistent with learning various skills and crafts. His workshop includes such raw materials as antler, shell, many kinds of stone.

Flextegrity adds a more futuristic component (Martian Math), plus is a one of a kind, giving us a niche. My time slot, in the Linus Pauling house board room, or in a computer lab, has tended to feature commercially available supplies, along with free and open source software.

I am looking forward to adding more flextegrity to the mix, as I move about Portland. You might find Glenn and I at some coffee shop near PSU, assembling icosahedra and passing out our Radical Math (rad math) literature pointing back to these workshop opportunities.

I also have a tensegrity sculpture, Barrel Tower, a gift from Kenneth Snelson himself. I consider it too valuable to lug it around as an educational supply however.

Schools sending their teachers our way have an interest in joining a more world class network wherein tetrahedral accounting and 60-degree coordination (e.g. graphene) inform the geometry curriculum at all levels.

Schools which include more of this heritage (including Fuller Projections in some contexts) have a more cosmopolitan aura. Portland's international business community tends to encourage schools to move in this direction.

Geometery + Geography

Here's how I'm thinking: the emergence of high definition screens (HDTVs, LCDs etc.) will drive a resurgence of spatial geometry. One could say it already has, given the NFL is simply polyhedra on steroids (each player like a Sim, in the sense of an object with attributes and methods).

With this Renaissance in the foreground, we'll have the option (so far not much availed of), to streamline and simplify the teaching of said spatial geometry. This will occur in tandem with a more explicit embrace of high technology (HDTVs, LCDs etc.), in place of the current Calculator Limbo, the dominant paradigm in many a school.

Those schools embracing the NCLB Polynomial and NCLB Polyhedron (both literary devices, students of American Literature take note) will have more of a world class flavor and will prove more attractive to an international cast.

Diplomacy will get a boost from these developments, as the USA recovers from its withered years, as a mere puppet of Eisenhower's aptly named "military industrial complex" (a psychological complex characterized by some infantile belief in "superpowers").

As science fiction, this forecast makes some sense.

I'm not talking about a done deal of course, as the slumdog millionaires fight change at every turn, grasping at whatever straws.

Nostalgia for the 1900s and its Flatlander belief systems is still running high in some segments. Some believe in the end of history. Others believe in no tomorrow.

The Geometry-Geography nexus is where to focus. Geography at the medio-level is one's local ecosystem, neighborhood, bioregion.

Going in, it's your body and the chemistries it depends on, the quantum mechanics it obeys.

Going out, it's the solar system, a fusion furnace with client planets, outward and onward to the stars, the galaxy, other galaxies.

Geography is all that has energetic significance.

Geometry, on the other hand, may be size-and-time independent, what we in the Synergetics namespace call "prefrequency" or energy-free.

Here is our familiar Platonic Realm, where our philosophical faculties like to anchor themselves, as observers of the eternal verities.

U = MP in other words, i.e. to communicate this curriculum, one needs both vocabularies, the geometric and the geographic.

Geography is about the playing field shared by we world game players.

Geometry is about the generalized principles that connect all the special case dots.

These broad brush stroke heuristics may come across as too esoteric to have pragmatic consequences.

What's true though is that geography and geometry have always developed hand in hand, so lets remember that "radical" and "root" have much the same conservative and/or anchoring meaning.

When it comes to providing civilizations with secure origins, serving up a mix of geometry and geography has generally been the most successful approach.

Connecting Dots

I'm developing more curriculum around 2 * P * F**2 + 2, which R. B. Fuller sees relating two kinds of twoness: concave / convex multiplicative two (x 2) and spinnable additive two (+ 2). The letter F stands for frequency, whereas P is some prime number or product of low order primes.

Quoting from Synergetics (a philosophy):

1073.11 Since unity is plural and, at minimum, two, the additive twoness of systemic independence of the individual system's spinnability's two axial poles, the latter's additive twoness must be added to something, which thinkable somethingness is the inherent systemic multiplicative twoness of all systems' congruent concave-convex inside-outness: this additive-two-plus-multiplicative-two fourness inherently produces the interrelationship 2 + 2 + 2 sixness (threefold twoness) of all minimum structural-system comprehendibility.

1073.12 All systems are conceptually differentiated out of Universe.
System + environment = Universe
Universe - system = environment

1073.13 The environment is dual, consisting of the macro and micro (outsideness and insideness). Ergo, a fourth twoness of all prime structural systems is synergetically accountable as

2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8.

On math-teach, I came up with a kind of game, developed in part to generate appreciation for the different meanings of these operators (+ and * i.e. addition and multiplication). There's the abstract algebra topic of groups, rings and fields, which is customarily not broached until college, except in a cursory manner that goes by pretty fast.

However, as we import more segments to our alternative track, newly lightened by not having as much heavy calculus, we'll find the time for more of this material, which is actually somewhat fun and intuitive for many a demographic (depends on how taught, I favor some cartoons, animations, even claymations). The idea of an entire track sounds ambitious at this point, as we're still looking for single course pilots to pop up around the state, on reservations or wherever.

On Synergeo, I'm linking to Fuller's omni-directional halo concept, which is perhaps most brilliantly defined in No More Secondhand God. The topic is Descartes' Angular Deficit, the difference between 360 around each vertex, and a chordal polyhedron connecting the same dots. One tetrahedron's worth of angle needs to be taken away. Then, once you get such a system, most simply a tetrahedron, you have the ability to expand it through the jitterbug phases. At the icosahedral and cuboctahedral phases, the number sequence 1, 12, 42, 92, 162... kicks in, as generated by the above 2 * P * F**2 + 2, with P = 5. Per Donald Coxeter, this exquisite result was worth memorializing. He wrote a professional paper about it, in his inimitable style.

The above shape-governing formula might be likened to some seed molecule placed in a dendrimer, anchoring its growth. However the more formal visualization of said formula involves sphere packing, and that's something we'd like to talk about more, not because they form a practical applied material, but because the mathematics opens doors. You might want to move to hyper-dimensional sphere packing, which has practical applications in optimizing communications channels, while keeping conversations separate.

This is rich cooking, lots of spice. The flavor is still esoteric for 2010 as no one is much interested in 2 * P * F**2 + 2, especially as written, in some non-standard Pythonic notation (** is the exponentiation operator).

Speaking of Python, I was on edu-sig today chatting with Bill and company about a fine page of exercises, drawn from many walks of life. These are like "cave paintings" in their relative simplicity, yet project some useful ideas. I jumped in on the Caesar Code exercise in particular, partly just to reiterate some earlier work, exercise my skills with a dictionary. Bill wanted uppercase letters and punctuation to make it through unsubstituted, and my version achieves that.

Last night Dave Koski went over some of his more recent discoveries. I find them interesting and relevant. We've both been cogitating on a lot of the same themes. phi/radical(2) has come up again, in connection with a scaled-up S-module (one might say). More later on this.

My editorial on the NYT op-ed piece is not supposed to sound too alarmist, yet I am looking for ways to register some serious concerns. Bill Gates and I might be on the same side this time, in thinking more radical reforms are needed. The trick is to not have teachers get completely defensive in reaction, as if any wish to institute change were an implied criticism of the work of dedicated professionals. On the contrary, I expect these professionals themselves to agree: that change is truly necessary. This is a partnership opportunity, not an attempt to vilify an entire profession.

Finally, my posting to edu-sig revisits the feud in computer science, twixt a lambda calculus wing and other factions. I'm worried that discrete math is the can we keep kicking down the road, when instead we need to be developing a new track that looks a lot more like Bill's. The high school aged would ride these rails, but so could adults, including their teachers. Other curriculum writers, such as Edward Cherlin, go further back into childhood. We're somewhat spread out along this railroad and its many switching yards.

I anticipate lots of new positions will open up if we invest in this future. But will needed engineering occur if the focus is on some soap opera between contentious camps? Perhaps this is not an either / or proposition?

The same questions might be asked around just about any low level conflict I suppose. Sometimes competition helps whereas other times it drives away skittish investors, not sure what to think, but disliking the sense of acrimony?

"If the people are feuding, will they forget to grow food and stockpile for the future?" That might be the more civilizational question. The Native American lore in this region chronicles times when people tried to take short cuts and paid a high price. We'd rather learn from our mistakes than repeat them. Perhaps more philosophers will get involved? More Chiefs? Chieftesses?

On the home front, Quinn stopped by with Nick, also Gideon, also Rose.

Spring Retreat (continued)

I joined the group late, missing the breakfast. Discussions of energy policies continued.

David's take, and he's in a position to know, is that energy companies these days are mostly trying to avoid the capital expense of actually building new generating plants, of any description. They're riding an increasingly decrepit energy grid into the ground, doing their best to prolong its viability by paying major customers, the industrial users, to lower their loads by increasing efficiency wherever possible.

Household consumers take a back seat. Our Sims-like grid management games would have ways to model this strategy. Students need access to such games through their school systems.

Long ago, as a part of the Portland district's talented and gifted program, an experiment was tried wherein kids were exempted from regular classes and bussed to a facility on Marine Drive, where private sector professionals might interact with these students, on the theory that some of their real world experience would rub off. This was maybe like once a week from the kids' point of view? I'm hazy on details.

A weakness of this program was the district administration was pretty strict with the curriculum, telling these not-full-time teachers what activities to provide, mostly computer games. Oregon Trail and Sim City, early versions of both (low resolution screens, not much RAM) were the among the most popular choices.

The games we're brainstorming (storyboarding, looking for realism from energy companies) are in this genre. Whether its grid management (macro-economic) or household management (micro-economic), we're wanting to find segments of the population willing to partner in considering these challenges.

Although my focus is the pre-college classroom in much of my curriculum writing, I'm as interested in giving adult populations access to these simulations, along with more access to realistic global data.

Steve (crystallographer, gemologist) came by and brought up Julian's work regarding double-slit experiments with buckyballs, showing they exhibit quantum effects, as do even larger particles, per a story on NPR yesterday (per Steve). I have Julian's paper in my gmail stash.

Glenn wiped some graffiti off Alpha Helix just this morning, one of Julian's early sculptures, a tribute to one of Linus Pauling's discoveries. People routinely stop to have their picture taken next to it, read the placard.

On a break for a walk around the block, I met up with Elizabeth and David Braithwaite, heading towards a book store. I'd just read Laurie's kind email, remembering Dawn.

Mom and I spoke twice by cell. She wanted to be sure her part time residency was reflected on our census form, still due to go back.

On another break, I checked back with the household. LW was immersed in Native American lore, a Laughing Horse video recording of an elder giving the history of groups in this region, such as the Multnomah.

These groups suffered the consequences of short sightedness and greed sometimes, do not portray themselves as saints, do not over-romanticize. Their Creator would take away core competencies sometimes, until the people repented and buried whatever hatchets.

TU is doing some spring cleaning today. NC, another guest, joined us at Pauling House today, but was not in evidence.

Wanderers Spring Retreat

Don Wardwell is singing Angel from Montgomery to our party, accompanied on guitar by Jon Bunce, a professional musician. Lynne Taylor introduced her upcoming talk on eco-tourism.

Nick and I joined somewhat late, though in plenty of time to partake of salads.

Lindsey is playing at Laughing Horse tonight, was at E-room last night, Laughing Horse again the night before, at Roots Brewery tomorrow (a fundraiser to supply more books to prisoners).

I was challenged to do a lot of big picture thinking today. I've been reflecting on my most recent meeting with Patrick of Portland Energy Strategies. He's seeing the same thing a lot of us are seeing: a way to make the "smart grid" a reality, that depends on the active and conscious participation of many of those served.

Smart grids are related to smart meters, also appliances that report on their own energy use, smart houses, intelligent systems for load balancing. I'm not an expert.

These ideas have been the stuff of science fiction for decades. By around 2000, a lot of writers (analysts, forecasters) anticipated we would have these technologies. But would people learn how to use them?

So far, a lot of smart meters have been deployed, but the smart grid has yet to materialize, perhaps correlating with public unawareness of the global grid in general (a grid which includes communications transmissions, not just power transmission).

Imagine your rate changing by the hour. Run your clothes dryer in the middle of the night, and take advantage of a lower cost per kilowatt-hour. What if you had grown up playing simulation games wherein you'd trained a family of Sims to so optimize? Patrick's games would have both macro- and micro-economic dimensions.

An open question, in my own mind anyway, is to what extent energy companies, public utilities, want to get back into public education. Do they worry about consumer backlash, accusations that they're playing big brother? If there's a commitment to sharing some substantive data, giving consumers more of an over-the-shoulder look, then the sought-for partnership relationship might materialize? What's the interface with public schools? Where does local government enter the picture?

Obviously I'm neither the first nor only person to be asking these questions. Patrick has been in the energy business for much of his career, has been pondering such matters and with a lot of grist for his mill. His proposals are more definite and refined than I'm getting across here.

Trevor came by with a new template for the Grunch web site, so named for Fuller's whimsical, satirical, subversive, radical Grunch of Giants (St. Martin's Press, 1983).

The site looks more like a Wiki now, which is apropos, given my work in Wikieducator on Digital Mathematics (mostly heuristics, like Dr. Tomalia is into -- though different ones).

Earlier: our meeting about supporting educators on the front lines. Getting a better handle on this 60-degree coordination business is a top priority for all of us. What's the best strategy? We're talking about art schools, schools of design, liberal arts colleges... war colleges?

I worried later about too many gray icosahedra cluttering the ecosystem, some Dr. Seuss like fantasy based on a possible classroom workflow. Glenn assured me that PVC is easily reground and recycled.

There's no danger of an over-abundance at the moment, as the supply is quite limited, with artist-engineers resorting to recycling what few icosahedra are already in circulation. The assembly process itself makes lights go on, according to those lucky few getting to participate in the process.

If students are learning something, are developing a stronger grasp of geometric principles for academic credit, yet are also producing some in-demand good as a result, then do we worry about child labor laws, exploitation?

When touring China in the early 1970s, I saw elementary school kids doing what looked to be circuit board assembly. Were those usable circuits? I don't actually remember.

I'm also contemplating David Koski's work. He seems to be mining a rich vein in polyhedral geometry, sending a lot of gold my way. How much slips through the cracks, because I'm only an average interpreter? I turned two recent emails into a web page, with a follow-up to Synergeo.

There's always the hope that we'll get some more help. Animators could be having a field day, is my sense of it, but are missing the boat as we're not investing in work / study sufficiently. Findings need to be disseminated, not shelved, but then where's the audience for esoteric geometry, especially where tetrahedral mensuration is concerned (relates to 60-degree coordination). Universities? Mostly not yet.

Tara is with her sister this evening, plans to come home rather late on public transportation, fairly safe and convenient in Greater Portland. To tourists, other visitors, I recommend taking the Max to the Oregon Zoo.

Marketing Math

Responding to a questionnaire.

Wanderers 2010.3.16

This is a meeting regarding the Parliament of World Religions, take two in some ways (I missed the first take). We're here to learn about the most recent convergence, which took place in Melbourne (Australia) recently.

I plan to tell a couple stories about my experiences at said parliament in 1999, in Cape Town, when we go around the table. I attended with my late wife Dawn, my daughters, my parents.

We were a Quaker family, with mom & dad based in Maseru, Lesotho. Dawn flew solo to Durban for a workshop with the Dalai Lama.

We stayed with Nosizwe Madlala-Routledge and family while in Cape Town. She was Deputy Minister of Defense for the RSA at the time, and a Quaker -- not necessarily an inconsistent role.

Later, we got to meet with Tenzin Gyatso, DL XIV in a Cape Town government building (a parliament building). I use a familiar name because, as Quakers, we're sometimes avoiding of titles. Noziswe asked us how she should introduce this great man and we suggested including his familiar name as a part of the introduction.

He looked slightly askance when he heard her intro, but took it in stride. Weird stuff happens when you're the DL, goes with the job description. In the meeting, he expressed the fond hope, based on analysis, that future wars would become increasingly regional, not turn global so easily.

In his keynote to the assembled Parliament of World Religions, his message was to "be skeptical", not just buy in to whatever beliefs. Some might consider that ironical, given the source, but Tantric Buddhism is actually quite experiential, experimental and empirical, so I wasn't that surprised.

The first Parliament, in 1893, was a huge breakthrough by many measures. This was the first time that leaders in certain faith groups had shared a podium and spoken to the same audience. Approximately 10% of the presenters were women, which for that time was a benchmark.

It took almost 95 years for a next Parliament to reconvene. Swami Vivakananda made a big difference in this regard. Parliament basically means "a safe place to come to talk about important things" i.e. this isn't a legislative body. The space is open to the participation of people from all walks of life, provided they're not there to convert and/or prostelytize -- except in your own booth. The next Parliament took place in 1993, again in Chicago.

Helen, our presenter, has been on the board of the Parliament since 1990.

The Parliament in Cape Town had a lot to do with the contributions of the various religions in ending apartheid. We had something real to celebrate. South Africa has been an example to us all. I'm reminded now of Bishop Desmond Tutu's appearance at the University of Portland and his clearly expressed affinity for the Dalai Lama.

The Parliament in Barcelona in 2004 had a lot to do with terrorism, the events of 911, of March 11 in Madrid. Ending religiously motivated violence, the debt of most impoverished nations (such as Haiti, the USA), assuring access to sanitary water supplies, were among the chief concerns.

Australia's changes in immigration policy, with more commitment to diversity, were something to celebrate in 2010. I asked about the Doctrine of Discovery, whether that came up (I know it did). Like Glenn Stockton, I'm focused on the representation of indigenous peoples at the Parliament. Aboriginal peoples, who have been treated genocidaly, were a focus of this 2010 event.

The Doctrine of Christian Discovery (manifest destiny) has been cited by the US Supreme Court as recently as 1995 (some case from upstate New York). The slave trade depended on this kind of thinking as well. Australia has had the common decency to forswear appealing to such lame and obsolete principles in future. The decrepit USA, backward and impoverished, has been unable to keep pace.

The Parliament is not about converging all the religions into one, nor about judging what is and what is not a religion. Consensus is not a goal. Finding common ground, looking for ways to work together, is a goal.

Our presenters were Helen Spector, Don Benson, Milt Markewitz and Lynne Taylor, all of whom attended the Parliament in Melbourne. Some of the pictures were spectacular.

Serene Scene

Dr. Tag stopped by today, and prepared a fava bean lunch in our kitchen. I'd been taken to lunch earlier by the Boltons, so just stayed with black coffee.

Lindsey, working on gardening, came inside to join us. We sat around the living room table, sharing food, yakking about this and that. We talked about the Middle East and those domain names it hosts (Jordan, Lebanon etc.).

Tagrid was with her Yemeni friend earlier, knows quite a few people in Yemen, a great place at least in the old days. She's likely to travel in the Middle East again soon, though not in Yemen. I've added her resume (as distinct from her c.v.) to my 4D directory.

The Boltons and I talked about Powell's Books, its roots in Chicago (where Chuck and Mary first met my dad, independently of one another). They also wanted to talk about domain names (Israel, USA etc.). Chuck is a sociology professor emeritus with Portland State, which he came to from UC Davis, having trained at University of Chicago after WW2.

After lunch with the Boltons, I stopped by to visit Glenn's workshop on the Pauling Campus. He let me hold, and take pictures of: elk antler, pipe stone, manzanita root, abalone, walrus teeth, and a few other assorted raw materials he uses to make things. Glenn knows a lot about craftsmanship, teaches the subject. He's well versed in some of the Native American lore, like where much of the pipe stone came from (Minnesota).

After lunch, I helped Tag with some domain name issues, and burned a copy of her nephew's music CD. She's still working in my living room as I blog this, doing some banking. Later this evening, she'll teach her Arabic class at PCC.

Lindsey is back to gardening in the side yard, digging a new bed.

Tara, home from school, had the split peas and rice Lindsey cooked yesterday and is up in her room. We've turned the heat on for the evening hours, are mostly keeping the house chilly, trying to conserve peak oil.

The radical math ideas I espouse trickle out by osmosis during some of these conversations, but really I'm too into esoterica to make much political sense, don't sound like a pundit.

The other radical math teachers I'm working with tend to be pretty spacey as well, a breed of circus geek maybe? I've been developing some of the mythos on Synergeo.

Speaking of radical math, our Saturday venue is quitting the scene so don't expect to find it on your next Portland tour. Muddy Waters, around the corner is also gone, has been replaced with Bare Bones.

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.