Repairing Voting

Today is Free Software Day and geeks in my lineage (open source) are expected to stand up for democratic rights, even in an electronic age. Especially in an electronic age. Here's from today's stash of writings (typos fixed):

Imagine something similar to vote by mail in Oregon. You don't
all have to vote on the same day, there's at least a week. You
need not take time off work. You'll have a way to vote online,
by entering your PIN. Email confirmation will come back to your
email box, showing how you voted and giving another number you
can use to find your vote. You needn't keep it a secret how you
voted -- be as public as you like (your choice).

Traveling overseas? No problemo. There's a way to vote from
your iPhone.

There's also a lot of votes taken throughout the year, polls. People
are in the habit of voting often if they want to. So they know
if their credentials are working, i.e. it's not a matter of being
surprised on "election day" (once a year? once every four years?).
On the contrary, a trusted voting infrastructure is used almost
daily, by at least some set of eligible persons (you might have
needed to register -- like now).

It's easy to imagine working solutions that are light years more
advanced than what we have today. People generally feel satisfied
with the systems and understand how they work. Access is quasi-
universal. Literacy rates are high, infant mortality is low, and
the debates on TV are intelligent and to the point.

People in this future look back on our ranting raving dark age of
crazy-making punditry, and fall to their knees in gratitude that
at least it's not 2010 or thereabouts, when everything was just
nuts! They weren't even teaching about Bucky hardly at all, when
so much depended on waking up to brighter prospects.

Hard to explain, how our ancestors could be so slow.

Something in the water? Lead poisoning?

That's what some speculate happened to the Romans. Brain rot
eroded their civilization from the inside out. Fast food?

I've written quite a bit about voting and voting technology in these blogs already.

You may ask why I haven't instituted tagging for your reading convenience, or turned on comments to this post.

Well, I come to the Web from a Quaker background and was just thinking of these as my journals, world-readable for sure, but not water coolers for people to gather around and chat with each other.

Lots of blogs out there serve that purpose (literally millions at the time of this writing), so I hope it's OK.

The Internet is Broken

Many have said this before (including me), and the truth is, in the wild and woolly world of the free Internet, so-called consumers are fair game, for every kind of spam, scam, virus, you name it. The sign should read: prey enter here.

If you're behind a well-maintained firewall, using free protocols and well-thought-out systems to engineer from within, then this same technology feels robust and secure to you. You're not just out there by your lonesome, a hapless Windows user with a new laptop.

Why are schools leery of the Internet? They lack sysops. Those making money, sometimes the very scammers mentioned above, pay the top talent to work for them, leaving the public sector somewhat undefended, in a vulnerable position.

I know what you're thinking: Pentagon to the rescue. When it comes to protecting the security of ordinary civilians from predatory attack, isn't that what our homeland security forces are for? This is a touchingly innocent way of thinking, and school administrators have every right, on paper at least, to be thinking that way. Like of course your government is here to protect you.

In the next chapter, more students will master the necessary skills and help their schools build up safe and protected domains. Champions will step forward, helping young people fortify their minds and bodies, and sharing the necessary memes to not fall prey so easily as their adult forbearers, from when the Internet was still new.

:: predators R us ::

A Serendipitous Opportunity

:: congressman david wu addressing djangocon ::

Chairman Steve, whose Holden Web is producing DjangoCon this year, decided at the last minute to upgrade his airplane seating from Dulles to Portland (IAD to PDX) to first class. He wound up getting to sit next to Congressman David Wu of Oregon's first district. They got to chatting, comparing notes, both being social adepts, and by the end of the ride Congressman Wu was willing to consider addressing our conference. He chairs the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation for the House Committee on Science and Technology after all, and knows about the importance of open source to Oregon's (and the world's) economy.

As Grand Poobah Snake Wrangler (what's on my nametag), I was outside the hotel to meet the congressman's car and usher his party to the Banquet entrance of our DoubleTree hotel, where Russell Keith-Magee, president of the Django Software Foundation (DSF), officially met our guest. Steve, in the meantime, had been holding forth in the ballroom in front of 250 geeks, building suspense around his special surprise guest. Who would that be? Steve Jobs? Jacob Kaplan-Moss? The identity of our impromptu visitor had been kept secret.

Congressman Wu delivered a short and pithy speech about the importance of high technology to Oregon's future in particular. Both software and hardware are a focus here, with an emphasis on medicine (e.g. OHSU) and nanotechnology (e.g. ONAMI).

He expressed appreciation for open source, understood that it was not just about "free as in beer" but about sharing standards and solutions. Innovation emerges from such a process, as the creation of the Internet itself attests.

Traditionally, our model for society has been "a top-down pyramid" said Congressman Wu. Nowadays, however, and for the first time, the model is more "a geodesic dome" with nodes connecting around in all directions.

If our open source community would realize its own power and responsibility to do good in the world, then the attitudes and behaviors of the surrounding society will accommodate and reciprocate. Open source will have come of age.

He also spoke of the importance of starting early with STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), from kindergarten onward. Getting more open source technology and teacher training into our schools sounded like an initiative his office would support.

Chairman Steve ceremoniously provided the congressman with an iconic pony, as our motto this year is "everyone gets a pony". David Wu wondered if he might have two, one for each of his children. Given his status as our honored guest, the necessary arrangements were promptly made.

Out in the foyer after the speech, the congressman remarked to Steve that "a topic for another day" would be finding out why we're so disproportionately male (a fact hard to miss from the podium). What happens that leads females to drop away from STEM subjects and careers in technology? Steve assured him that we're working on this puzzle.

Technology Talk (TT)

Get a couple hundred geeks together, and esoterica happens. I was somewhat in and out on the scaling Django talk. This shop (Disqus) provides commenting services for huge numbers, millions of users. There's no down time. Maintenance mode means the comments are read-only, with new ones getting queued.

Advice to the weary: if you haven't taken the plunge and opted for MySQL or PostgreSQL, this group recommends the later, for doing a lot more. They use Slony-I for replication, failover. Lots of in-memory indexing keeps things fast (talking server side -- no mention of HTML5's SQL cache on the client, not a standard feature these days).

I'm snake wrangling and brokering ponies. Nancy needs two more and I've got a text message into Steve asking the whereabouts of those six we set aside earlier, after the photo op.

A delegate lent us his Pink Pony hat, size large, which fit over the PSF snake's head perfectly, though to eerie effect. After taking a few pictures of this unified beast, with a secret teaching (namely Django is Python), I set the display back to showing two creatures, getting along well (more how it appears to the casual observer, Django being an application of the Python language, not Python itself).

Good seeing Andy McKay again. We discussed urban farming in our respective environments and it's beneficial effects. Tending to gardening tends to relax the mind, which may lead to more rapid development, faster fixing of bugs. That book on Geek Cooking seemed a step in the right direction, I may have mentioned.

Birthdays

:: terri's birthday party @ taborspace ::

As Lyn Gordon explained at the rise of meeting today, our custom of first Sundays is to celebrate the birthdays of anyone born in that month, this month being September. Lyn himself was a September baby. People stood up in turn and let us know whose birthdays they were celebrating.

I thought of some, but didn't add to the festivities. My late wife Dawn Wicca was born on September 20th. Marian's birthday, September 11th, is the same as our wedding anniversary.

We don't consider it overly morose or maudlin to celebrate the dead with the living. Meeting itself was much about death, sorrow and tragedy, or the "ocean of darkness". Our faith is not about always looking away from the depths of despair.

Those with the strength and ability to be with and assist those in misery, without adding to it, are encouraged to do so. Ron spoke eloquently of compassion as the fountainhead of creation.

In a few minutes, I'm off to set up chairs for another birthday party, Terri Grayum's 60th.

I was happy to chat with Marian Rhys, Harriet Holling, Sonya Penny, Eddy Crouch, and Aimee Ford Conner today in the social hall, where leftover birthday cake was served. Aimee is also remembering some tragedies in her life, thinking ahead to October.

Betsey Kenworthy reminded me about the laptop, which I will leave in the office inroute to my next encounter.

Terri Grayum's 60th was a delight. I was amazed by the Danceability duo, their polished and engaging performance, despite the carpet. Their next stop: the nation of Columbia. I had some quality time with Carol, Tara and young Aubrey on the church steps. Our neighbor over the back fence was there with her son. I met some new-to-me people, and experienced an amazing space (TaborSpace) right in our neighborhood. Good job Presbyterians.

Debate in 97214

(click for larger view)

A topic for debate in our neighborhood, given the New Seasons is to open soon, is whether we're on board with a planned campaign to discourage the selling of products with a Made in Israel label.

I'm concerned the plan is hypocritical, as the same kinds of injustices the campaigners decry are practiced in the name of the USA as well, so Made in USA products should be boycotted by the same reasoning.

When many USAers were practicing discrimination against those of Japanese heritage, rounding them up and sending them to camps, confiscating their property and so forth, some private companies made a special point of hiring Japanese, trying to compensate for these gross injustices (for which the USG later apologized).

So it pays to look beyond any Made in the USA label and to scrutinize the specific companies involved.

Take Ben and Jerry's for example. The parent company may be European, but those hippie era home grown Vermont-based values still permeate the subsidiary. If I were wanting to discourage the USA's persecution of Japanese Americans, would I boycott Ben & Jerry's? Not likely.

Our 2 Dickinson Street cabal was certainly on board with, and a co-organizer of, the divestment campaign aimed at getting Princeton to drop from its portfolio any companies that profited from South African apartheid.

I'm concerned that going by nation-state labeling only encourages nationalistic pigeon-holing. People start identifying with so-called "nations" in neurotic ways, basing their entire identity on what "nation" they represent. Why not go by zip code or county or sports team?

Taking nations too seriously is a form of mental illness according to Albert Einstein, who could have been the first president of Israel.

Those of us interested in doing God's will, having a Promised Land that's healthy and happy, recognize that nation states are not "of God" in the first place.

I'm on board with disavowing these Doctrines of Discovery, or any idea that land held by Christians or Jews or Muslims is somehow "redeemed" versus other land held by others. That's atavistic, antediluvian, dark ages thinking.

God is too great to be captured and/or represented by any one human religion, a teaching of many religious thinkers.

Israel has no more "right to exist" than the United Kingdom, Iran or the USA. They're all equally human contrivances, awkward and ungainly social institutions, doing as best they can, muddling through the day.

Humans, being rather pathetic creatures, have a terrible track record when it comes to so many institutions. That's a lot of history in a nutshell. Misanthropists have a field day when it comes to history, saying "I told you so" with every turn of the page.

Vain and silly humans may be proud of their social constructs, but they're no more than theater at the end of the day, the stuff of soap operas.

What's the opposite of a boycott, where you consciously reward brands or companies you think are doing a good job? Carrot Mob is a step in the right direction there.

That's what I'd like to see more of. If you're a radical or activist of some kind, come out with a list of products you think we should buy, if "voting with dollars" is the game you wanna play.

That guy who wrote Fast Food Nation spoke in Portland (I went with my youngest daughter), and dared to mention Burgerville as not so terrible, if you really wanted that kind of food. That took guts I thought. It's much easier to criticize than to endorse.

That's why cynics have such easy mental lives, as it takes little imagination to be cynical about everything. Just being a "cynical journalist" takes little courage or skill.

Tomorrow's GUIs

The concentration of web cam feeds in some "security office", where it's impossible to monitor in real time, is not the only sensible arrangement, when it comes to gluing work / study positions into co-functioning circuitry.

Imagine your dispatcher could watch the pallets pile up on the loading dock, as the truck backed into the bay. The trucker has a comm link that includes video. There's room in the rear cab for multiple feeds, for consulting when not rolling.

This video view of the warehouse loading dock could be in one of several HTML5 windows. The point is those web cams connect people who communicate with one another, aren't just for monitors looking for someone doing something wrong (which depresses morale, inspires anger at "big brother").

Web cams need not be about intrusive monitoring, invasions of privacy (although they might be), as many a video blogger will attest -- because they were in control. If that's your friend on the other end, watching your back, helping you manage, then you'll not have the same bitterness as when snooped on by enemies, unseen voyeurs behind one-way glass (the setting in many a movie, especially cop shows, also Bruno).

The "silent spy in the sky" model might stay in the picture, but it's selfish to hog all the warehouse video and not let people who work with the warehouse actually see what the scene is.

Civilians could be so much more productive if allowed to enjoy what some soldiers of fortune already get to play with. Viewing audiences know from sporting events, from the Discovery Channel, how routine it is to place multiple cameras around an event space.

Having a web cam on the truck, usually pointed at the road, would be an option. Some enterprises use that to match up with a maps view. Here's where the truck is, here's what the truck is looking at on the ground, in terms of traffic and weather.

In the case of Wanderers, we tracked a blip in real time but the Google Street Views were not updating in real time, were just a rough approximation (whatever happened to be in the database from the last time a Street Views car went through). We were sitting at our HQS in Portland while the Buxtons traversed middle America.

Looking at bio-diesel options for Blue House heating. The idea of an extended campus might include a college finding a heating oil supplier that met Keith's criteria (one of my advisors on fuel). Once again, trucks are involved. Or should we phase out heating oil entirely?

I used to write science fiction on one of the Physics lists about robot trucking systems (ZTSs) that'd extend DARPA's research into self-piloting vehicles. Some particular freeway might be set aside for testing, not shared with unsuspecting motorists.

Low volume studies in macro-sized packet switching using machine intelligence need not take priority over outfitting ordinary trucks with better GIS/GPS however. This was never about ending all the driving work out there. That would neither be practical nor desirable.

Speaking of GIS/GPS, NASA's concerns about a possible solar eruption, hard on satellites, is percolating to the top of the inbox as something to talk about in concert with other brands of 2012er.

This beats getting hit by an asteroid or invaded by ETs (new ones), in terms of realism.

Notes on Trucking

I've often exulted how knowing something about computers gains one entre to any number of disciplines, given they all have a need for computer services. Case in point: I've worked in transportation, summer camp registration, even in the cardiac operating room (after hours) testing my heart operations data collection application (CORIS).

These days, I'm learning more about trucking. Transportation Management Systems will help dispatchers organize shipments and hand them off to trucking companies. LTL stands for Less Than Load, meaning only part of the truck gets filled. Does one book a direct LTL delivery, a multi-stop, pass on to a pool? The experienced dispatcher needs a head full of geography and lots of experience. But what if that level of experience is unobtainable? Enter software assistants, the equivalent of part- and/or full-time employees.

Microsoft's Visual FoxPro (VFP) was a highly capable product but has fallen on hard times. VFP coders are being herded into .NET solutions, but feel their productivity dropping off. Although not a TMS, the trucking software I'm looking at is in VFP and the question is how to migrate it to something else eventually. The program is already running live, in production, with paying clients, so the mentality is one of gradually swapping in Python components, swapping out VFP components.

The hybrid (VFP + Python) might look pretty convoluted though. Imagine FoxPro accessing its own native tables through a Python COM server that in turn uses ODBC for its back end. Could this be ungainly? Will I be swallowed up in the trucking world and Earthling Math?

MENWFZ

MENWFZ = Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (not "men with fezzes" although that could be a mnemonic, unless one perceives an ethnic slur of some kind).

I just pulled up a bunch of articles on this idea, which is not a new one, but which "has legs" at the moment.

Many journalists say it's aimed against Israel, but that's to ignore the double-edged sword, as those signing the agreement would be opening themselves to disambiguation, versus following an "ambiguity" policy.

Iran wants to be on record saying it has no such weapons nor plans to develop them. Whether this is true or not is independent of the fact that nations without nukes enjoy disproportionate kudos and credibility these days.

If you want to be trusted, you won't be a source of WMDs, for anyone, not even yourself. Iran gains credibility every day that goes by without evidence of actual stockpiling of weapons grade fissionable materials.

IAEA does get to pry.

The same protocols apply to the USG as it goes with a "demand zero" policy and an across-the-board criminalization of these weapons. The focus needs to be on cleanup and safe storage, a whole other can of worms which the Obama administration has been facing. Cleaning up after nukes is no picnic, as the Hanford cleanup crews will attest.

However I understand those who say the verification process is still insufficient. Part of the problem is public education. What sorts of civilian nuclear power plants share the same food chain as weaponry plants? As with so many issues in our modern world, the definitive journalism on this subject actually has to contain quite a bit of science and engineering.

Beware of the "soap opera press" which turns every story into some episode of Dallas, or tries to pretend it's Team America (world police). If there's no science content, just intrigue and maneuvering, then you're more likely dealing with more armchair know-nothings and their comic book paranoias.

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons each have their own worlds. Where they partially overlap is where much of the action is these days. Stay tuned. The next meeting is in Washington, DC they tell me.

Philosophical Essay (2nd Draft)

In recent essays regarding how we've countered the knowledge explosion, in ways other than by simply narrowing our respective knowledge domains, I've come to a notion of Philosophy (as a discipline) as an incubator for glue languages.

A "glue language" is one that is deliberately designed to cohere multiple other disciplines. I would claim this is (a) not a new vision of what philosophy does and (b) is akin to some types of poetics, which stands to reason as metered oral tradition ragas & sagas were indeed a way for cultures to encode and transmit vital knowledge.

Another thesis, non-Wittgensteinian in the sense of arguable (debatable, either way), is that the recent chapter in philosophy (pre linguistic turn) namely the rise of analytic philosophy in the form of symbolic logic as a "mirror of the world" (Tractatus idea), was about the noosphere (zeitgeist, holy ghost) giving birth to computer languages, as dreamed of by Leibniz, Ada, Grace Hopper... a different lineage than those analytics like to own, but arguably more the main line, with the benefit of hindsight (a view of history).

Logic matured into that which runs most of our infrastructure by this time, at the low level record-keeping level, and even at the real time control level, where humans tend to spontaneously operate. Philosophy again appears in the driver's seat (as it might have been seen in trivium-quadrivium days) once we allow it to give birth to computer science as one of its own (as Athena from Zeus).

However, this computer logic is low level and largely content free. It gives us ways to store and retrieve, but is not spontaneously integrative except insofar as it allows us to sift through, synthesize and summarize super-human amounts of data (more than any one researcher could hope to personally collect and analyze).

The next level or challenge, is to develop more glue languages, designed as tools for human thought, that help us navigate these wilds, this new "cyberspace" ("steering place"), i.e. this new governing area (not to be confused with Area 51).

Wittgenstein's later philosophy opens doors to glue languages by leveling the playing field, providing a clean beginning. How could many languages be true at the same time? Isn't that just relativism? SWM and I used to debate this on wittgenstein-dialognet.

In focusing on the "doing" in symbolic games, rather than their "pointing" to some supposed "public object" or one true "in itself world", he turned language inside-out, made it seem more like what we see in the case of computer languages: a kind of executing or processing of energy, a vectoring of content this way and that. A strong religion is like an efficient FORTRAN program, in keeping memory working hard for the greater glory. A different ideology or religion would operate differently, yet still get work done. The "forms of life" approach allows for different reference frames that all share the same "c" ("c" for "certainty").

Lots of computer languages do the work, not just one, and we see no contradiction. We see "forms of life" connecting to "grammars".

A human glue language provides inertial guidance, a kind of homing device, a gyroscope, except this "glue language" is not monolithic or "the one true system" ala Hegel or the Tower of Babel -- both closer to the logical core / divine order than your average joe and/or structure, but neither the "last word" as the world keeps changing, which in turn requires upgrades (sometimes in answer to our prayers).

We're ethically precluded from calling "it" (our glue language) "finally done" and/or "instantly true" (as if "the truth" could be captured in a snap shot per the old "picture theory" of meaning) i.e. living systems are about becoming, adapting, not about "the end of history". One comes to see in a new way.

My final thesis will be that this Bucky Fuller gestated glue language called "synergetics" (not to be confused with its fraternal twin -- see Wikipedia for disambiguation) is one such post linguistic-turn philosophy. Its purpose is less to "corner truth" than to "orient and contain an outlook and overview" i.e. to organize a vista around some "me ball" (the observer). This is a legitimate service for a philosophy to perform and is what many a philosopher has sought to provide.

Synergetics explicitly glues polyhedra, long a source of fascination and insights for natural philosophers, to a "connect the dots" model of "thinking in the round" (i.e. systematically). A lot of "hard science" content is linked in by this model and glued together using a prose-poetic style. Jungian psychology would be another example of a prose-poetic style, another glue language.

A lot of geometry enters in as well.

In Synergetics, one gets a kind of "mnemonic brew" that might be considered toxic or corrosive if branded as a pure science (see the preface by Dr. Arthur Loeb), but refiled as a literary philosophy, this potion turns out to be benign, safe to swallow (or so I would report -- though others might say it has rendered me alien).

Lyrikal Afternoon

No, not a typo. Lyrik is a neighborhood hangout in 97214, a place for networking, holding forth with one's peers. I'm thinking either Dr. Nick or John the Architect might join me, though I've made no special arrangements.

Mostly, I'm just wanting to stay out of the way, as Food Not Bombs is using our household's kitchen, might be using the meetinghouse next time. I offered to help, but my volunteering the facilities was apparently assistance enough.

I'm not widely known for my great cooking abilities, especially when it comes to large groups, although those Teresina Lentils are kick ass (not taking credit for those though, just following a recipe).

I'm supposed to contact the Property Management Clerk at the meetinghouse and see about transferring Thursday's operations to the more industrial strength kitchen on Stark Street, the former Electroscientific Instruments building. A lot of the food is uncooked, the same produce you'd find in a grocery store, so excessive use of energy, pots and pans, is not part of the picture. Indeed, the bike trailer comes with its own cooking equipment, such as it is.

I've suggested we take a look at Martian Math as a discussion list, over on the math teacher forum. So far no takers, so I'm upping the ante. We don't have "all the time in the world" to get to the bottom of some of this stuff. There's real work to be done and I'm under no illusions that it'll all get done in time if we're just looking to some small group of poor slobs at their workstations. Recruiting is the name of the game, has been for awhile.

To let off steam, I'm back to Punch & Judy on Synergeo, either watching or participating. Call it a mosh pit. Synergetics is steam punk, or at least punk, or at least... slam dancers R us. Rybo to me: "You full of whatson bozon poop.....what a lack of moral integrity.... :--( sad"

Speaking of which, we're also trying to torture the Yahoo! rich text editor into delivering up a radical math sign (trademark, whatever). It's sort of working, thanks to Alan's suggestion we switch to UTF-8. Let's see what a cut and paste operation does (remember, your browser has settings too, and sometimes "Western" is not what you need most): √я

Followup:

Facebook profile is loading blank tonight. F~B didn't happen as I'd originally imagined -- hardly any cooking at all this time. Checking into bio-diesel for home heating after re-reading Hyzy's posting on that (old newspaper article).

The Willamette Week cover story on the open source cure for what's ailing health care, is somewhat encouraging, though the art is looking so retro. This thing about geeks being "old hippies" is maybe too much lore, too little technical detail. Will we go with something like Cassandra? Given all the problems Facebook is having (not just talking about my missing profile), that's probably not reliable enough a system for medical record keeping. Tokyo Cabinet? Thx to Laughing Horse for the tip.

For further reading:

Draft Essay to some Math Teachers (on another list)

PPUG 2010.8.10

Our Portland Python User Group spanned several tables. Our spot at WebTrends was not available this month, so we repaired to Produce Row, newly remodeled. Impressive.

I took my place at the head of one table, making more room for Michelle to join Josh. They fed me beer and a piece of sandwich respectively, leaving me feeling the grateful circus seal. But did I have any worthy tricks?

I tried to bring up Visual FoxPro at one point, but the geek I was telling my story to drew a blank. I'm this old fossil I realize. At least "dBase" rang a bell, but I gave up trying to talk about anything PSU.

Another theme of the evening, for me anyway, was Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC), its rules and regs. Some of our Python super stars are minors, coming to conferences from out of town. Where can they socialize and how late? At Produce Row, until 9 pm. I got back to our Chairman on that issue later the same evening, as Djangocon is coming up and these questions are relevant.

Having just completed Martian Math, I had some momentos in my bag to show around, including the new Flextegrity book. Some Python was used in the making of the two graphics I'm credited with. POV-Ray was my other tool of choice, for rendering.

Some of the things geeks are into sound like critical infrastructure. There's some switched messaging going on, serving those cell phones. Some Java application listens in real time on thousands of ports... sounded low level. Python does other tricks.

More Musings

Given my house mate's many years working a computer science job at the management level, we sometimes get into arguments about what a next move might be. I'm grudgingly respectful, as she did help me get my resume in better shape, having been tasked with reading them, and evaluating interviewees, before she transmogrified into her Portland incarnation. I say "grudgingly" because I'm reluctant to see the obsolete military-industrial way of doing things as superior to Portland's. I guess sometimes we still learn from one another.

As for myself, I made a career as a Portland-based applications developer mostly working for what we might call "public sector" entities: not-for-profits, county agencies, even a national government or two. My rates were relatively low, as I was idealistic about my work and wanted to be affordable to these types of clients. In the early days of the PC revolution, a solo coder slinging dBase, and later FoxPro, could handle a number of clients as an independent contractor. That's how I made my living, for the most part, though with some other gigs on the side.

Fast forward to today, and I'm somewhat won over by the idea of multiple coders using version control, coding within some framework that's not too twisted (a pun on Twisted, which I respect). The solo coder model is less viable -- one needs a team. FoxPro, in the meantime, is being phased out by Microsoft, with its developer community in the process of disbanding.

At least the computer science department within a university should be hacking on its own stuff quite a bit, eating its own dog food. What better way to learn, than to have access to these internals, organized according to whatever industry standards.

At the secondary school level, I have this vision that faculty and student apprentices could do their own IT, not outsource everything to the district or private vendors. Again, some measure of self-sufficiency, of autonomy, is the hallmark of a serious school.

That vision might be a pipe dream however, given how teachers are rarely compensated for anything much beyond direct teaching in the classroom. They don't grow in their experience this way, which is one reason so many schools lag so far behind: the relevant skills of are just not in demand within academe. Rhetorical question: is this healthy?

"IT is the giant blind spot within higher education" one consultant said to me the other day, having looked into the matter for a couple decades. At the level of dean or provost, IT seems too trivial and mundane to be concerned with. One or two levels down, and there's no longer enough sense of the big picture in any one office to make intelligent planning possible. At least that seems to be a common enough picture.

I tried to rope in another consultant whom I respect, to maybe help get something jump started in our "Global U" (a generic moniker). You'd think Portland, Oregon, an "open source capital", would have computer science departments ready to jump at the opportunity, to serve their own ecosystem, the statewide higher education system.

Well, maybe we do. But is anyone in the chancellor's office actively soliciting their help? Staff has been cut rather dramatically, and IT is something we outsource to Asia is it not? The brain drain appears to have reversed, or at least there's a leveler playing field (a cause for optimism for the future?).

Book of Lore

Over beers with Patrick at our favorite 97214 watering hole, I discussed my Lightning Talk thesis that universities should be eating their own dog food, by which I meant:

Why outsource the core basics of course registration, instructor assignment and compensation, grading and crediting, scholarships, student and instructor evaluations, to off-site vendors?

Answer (from Patrick): universities have better things to do than be coding huge database systems -- when would they find the time to do any teaching?

Patrick had lots of experience at Dartmouth, and saw from the inside how letting in-house personnel write a compiler for a specific language ended up causing a PhD thesis to come out with the wrong results. A competing institution charged academic fraud -- a serious matter.

Sobered by Patrick's story, I've come away thinking that at least any large institution should invest in its organizational memory, such that newcomers have some way to figure out how it got to be that way (whatever way that it is).

I call this a Book of Lore.

Any large organization, say a hospital, or a system of hospitals, should have its Books of Lore, giving a sense of the heritage and history. What decision-makers reached what decisions? What were the debates?

Based on my own experience, Books of Lore are hard to come by because personnel are uber-cautious with their positions and assessments, don't always want to get out in front, especially with an unpopular point of view.

A Book of Lore, to be successful, need not be about fingering villains and/or uncovering scandals. Moral judgments may be left to the various readers. Universities may stand a better chance of telling their own stories simply because the liberal arts encourage that kind of openness.

A Book of Lore is more just a blow-by-blow, and will be all the more credible and informative if actual emails are cited and included. Failures may be admitted, wrong turns acknowleged, along with lessons learned.

Sometimes it'll be a later analyst, with the benefit of hindsight, who suggests what some of the big successes were. To write history, you need that rear view mirror. Books of Lore may have multiple authors.

Developing a Book of Lore is not always an easy task, as large organizations tend to be compartmentalized. There's an assumption of monitored emails, an archive of some kind (which is what biases the conversations to stay safely neutral), but when push comes to shove, it's often hard to establish that anyone is actually charged with doing the data mining.

A full blown Book of Lore may actually be a multi-media production, complete with interviews, executive speeches, excerpts from board meetings.

Again, colleges and universities may have an easier time of it, given the contentious nature of executive performance -- not that universities can't be contentious!

Putting a company's history on-line may help people steer the company, but at what cost in terms of reputation? A good storyteller doens't leave folks afraid to communciate on the record.

The role of "company historian" goes unfilled.

Even universities, known for their history teaching, will lack an organizational memory in this respect.

Patrick and I did end up agreeing that some larger and/or more gung ho colleges and universities might well choose to role their own, and make the core shared, as in open source. Other universities might use the system with customizations. We've seen elements of this picture emerging already.

Each department may have a strong identity, and want to express itself in terms of the tools it most favors. Some departments may enjoy XML, whereas others may want to stick with JSON. Avoiding a "one size fits all" solution is part of the promise of open source.

Python Users Group, July 2010

I met with another Python teacher today after the user group meeting.

He's doing a class for the Art Insitute, whereas I'm teaching for Saturday Academy.

We're both using IDLE on Windows, which DARPA-funded, initially Guido-programmed shell is under fire for being far behind the state of the art these days, and therefore perhaps more of a liability than an asset.

IDLE barely works on some versions of Apple software.

But what would we use in its place that might likewise be included within the standard Python distro?

Another Python guy wanted to talk hyper-geometry, had been watching the math-dimensions videos and was planning a talk in August.

I told him about our recent contest for "most primitive space-filler", with D.M.Y. Sommerville nailing four candidates back in 1923. Fuller had circled one of these four as the Mite, and I've been championing this decision, though the four quads of the Rite also meet Sommerville's criteria. The other two are Mite-fillable. The heart of the Rite may be graphed using Mites, but they won't fill the four quads.

Judging from traffic on the Polylist, there's still a contingent favoring the "characteristic tetrahedron" instead (Mite-fillable). This shape is not one of Sommerville's candidates for the obvious reason that it comes in left and right flavors -- not properly congruent. Hand-waving about symmetry ensues.

On the other hand, Fuller is adamant that the Mite is also "flavored" even though it's outwardly always the same shape. I compiled a list of pointers into Synergetics Dictionary on this topic, admittedly somewhat esoteric.

Aristotle was right, remember the Mite.

What about those troops and ships moving into Central America? Rumors are flying.

Speaking of esoteric, the presentations during the Python meeting were somewhat on the abstruse side, especially the one by Dan Colish on constructing a context free grammar parser. This was pure computer science.

I've not been invited to OSCON this year (proposal not accepted), so I won't be weighing down these blogs with my usual techno-babble. Plenty of others to fill in those gaps. OSCON is somewhat expensive and I don't have sponsors who think I need to be there. However, a number of free events around the edges will give me some opportunities to compare notes with peers.

Reciprocity

Excerpt from the Wanderers list...

...Yeah, the Army Corps of Engineers has identified some significant projects in Iraq that'd serve a civilian purpose. There's the case of a weak dam, the possibility of flooding... also, the Iraqi and Iranian grids connect in like 9 places and if those new Iranian nuke plants generate as much juice as they're supposed to... even Turkey and far off Europe could benefit.

I'm surprised the US hasn't stepped up to the plate and volunteered to help with the uranium purification -- what better way to monitor than to be integral. Reciprocal agreements with Iranians, whereby the IAEA would be empowered to inspect US nuclear facilities, any time, would be a huge confidence building measure. Any administration at all serious about peace in the Middle East would be eagerly looking at non-proliferation by this means.

Of course Russia is closer, geographically, and already helps supply India with civilian-grade fissionable materials, so it makes sense that the US is backing Russia's overtures...

Lurking and Posting

I'm lurking on an Elluminate session featuring Calculation Nation (CN), inserting my two cents in the comments box.

Maria Droujkova has brought us together through her Natural Math and Math Future groups.

CN is funded by Verizon, has the official endorsement of the NCTM.

On the Wanderers list and Facebook, I'm featuring this useful article:

We Are All BP Now

Militarizing the Gulf Oil Crisis

By ANNE McCLINTOCK

I've also linked to that from Synergeo, where I've been on my usual soap box about wanting to add to the network of topics covered in geometry work / study programs.

Others on Synergeo are more into posting about the World Cup, which is somewhat apropos given football features a hexapent.

Koski feels Synergeo has been infiltrated by anti-buckaneers. Certainly we're kind of a mosh pit, with the "dancers" slamming into each other. I don't sense we've attracted any professional provocateurs yet though. Too obscure.

No one sees "spatial geometry" as a threat to their agenda right?

I liked Dick's summer camp metaphor: we're a bit rude and crude, with the counselors saying stuff like "no name calling!", but we don't always pay much heed. We need to express ourselves, and not everyone is a trained diplomat.

I suggested we have more "edgy math", thinking we need to counter this squeaky-clean sanitized corporate look and feel. Mathematics is not the private property of the commercial sector, we should remember. I think Maria might be recording this for her web site... yes, she says she is.

july 4, usa.or.pdx

Indie Day

Americana

Disaster Zone

At the time of the great flooding of New Orleans, I wrote about Tillamook in an idyllic Oregon setting. This might have seemed far removed from the devastation in the Gulf, soon to be followed by hurricane Rita, hitting Texas, and the BP hemorrhage.

With all these past and looming natural disasters, plus BP's, you might wonder why humans also inflict disaster upon themselves. Could any species be this dysfunctional and survive?

Oregon is facing its own day of reckoning. A subduction earthquake, hitting about 9 on the Richter scale, is expected off the coast, based on previous patterns. Some planning (PDF) has occurred (Alan Potkin could advance the art).

Were we to live more lightly on the Earth, per aerospace ecovillage scenarios (ala Project Earthala), we could get off with less loss. We wallow in a dark age though, postponing engineering maturity.

My thanks to Glenn for updating me on some of the math future buzz. He also brought by the right crimping tool and workspace light, and supervised while I replaced the heating element in my oven, pretty much in an apprentice role. The part itself was hard to find. I credit the hard worker at W.L. May for pinpointing something in stock. She's a genius (seriously: it's an old Magic Chef in a retro style kitchen, hard to find parts).

Mortality Again

Losing all of ones personal files off a laptop may be a serious psychological blow. Retreating to the est model of 1s, 2s and 3s, this definitely triggers a 1. That model was ridiculously stark and austere by the way, like the training itself.

I'm crying inside about some of what I've lost.

I am grateful for my life and the people in it.

Loss is an occasion for suffering which is a manifestation of love. Attachments are not bad, just potentially painful.

Losing my dad so suddenly on October 13, 2000, was very hard. I flew to Lesotho to close out the estate. Mom was in the hospital in Bloemfontaine and not expected to live. She helped me manage from her hospital bed, so many bones broken.

I am proud of myself for holding it together under duress, could not have done so without my community. Eugene Norcross-Renner offered to accompany me, an offer that touched me deeply even though I ended up going alone. Gayle helped me get a plane ticket on short order. Dawn kept things running for the month I was gone.

Annis and George Bleeke, who were planning to visit for Annual Session, which my parents were organizing, came to this tragic scene and helped me organize the estate sale and off-load a lot of stuff (I shipped other stuff back to here).

I am proud of my sister for flying out to take over nursing mom back to where she could travel.

Losing my wife Dawn to breast cancer was also all about community, for both of us. She prayed her death would be a healing. She lived bravely and brought joy to many.

Someday I will need to surrender this body. Like many who contemplate their own passing, I don't want to leave a lot of hassles and loose ends.

I'd like my love to live on, my gratitude to my community.

Thinking also of Ed Applewhite, George Hammond, John Talmadge, and Elise Boulding.

End the Qyooban Embargo!

For quite awhile now, I've been using the word "Qyoob" to parody the word "Cube". "Qyoob" has a kind of Persian or Arabian Nights look and feel (Al Qyoob), which creates some valuable artistic distance for some readers.

Looking back at the Euro cultures, we see "four square" and such inter-twining attributes as "upright" "normal" "orthodox" and "upstanding" -- not to mention "regular guy" and "square deal".

Sound familiar?

Remember, the "beatniks" didn't want to be "squares" in an age of hyper-dimensional "cubism" -- were perhaps prototypical of the "buckaneers" in that way.[0]

"So what?" you ask, "what has any of this to do with Philosophical Investigations?"

Well, when undertaking a philosophical investigation, in the Wittgensteinian tradition, it pays to take in the lay of the land, to map out the surrounding grammar.

Connotations matter, not just denotations.

The goal, to fight the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of grammar, will be more effectively reached if we've actually done some homework.[1]

To get how these key vocabulary words weave their meanings, one actually needs to study them in action, not just assume one "already knows" as a kind of gedanken experiment.

To assume one "already knows" is to bleep over the whole point of Wittgenstein's philosophy, which is to get you to actually investigate, not take "it" -- whatever meaning -- for granted.

Back to Al Qyoob: the prevailing caliphate starts drilling children early on to think of "squaring" and "cubing" as mathematical equivalents of "2nd powering" and "3rd powering".

Some rather subtle mathematics inheres in this difference twixt saying "squared" and "to the second power", as the former presumes a shape, whereas the latter leaves the door open to different shapes, such as a triangle -- or a tetrahedron in the case of 3rd powering. [2]

My recent essay Aristotle was Right! is an opening salvo from the newest NeoPlatonists, one might say, as it challenges philosophers to revisit their ancient ties to the Polyhedra (and their inter-relationships).

Geometrical thinking is a primitive form of logical reasoning.[3] Before we had modal logic or a theory of logical types (ala Russell), we had the golden ratio, vesica pices, and the accepted methods of construction and proof.

Architecture was accomplished by these processes. Real work got done.

The story going forward, starting from Aristotle's claim that pyramids fill space (dismissed as bogus in superficial treatments), wends its way to recent times, to the geometrical explorations of a lone geometer named Sommerville.[4]

Sommerville circles a certain tri-rectangular tetrahedron as the simplest candidate that follows some specific rules in his mathematical language game, namely that:

(a) to count as "space filling", the tetrahedra must face bond (as is typical in such studies) and

(b) the space-fillers in question must not rely on mirror images of one another (i.e. sometimes a left and a right fill space, but not something alone).

Said tri-rectangular tetrahedron is found in Regular Polytopes by Coxeter (Wittgenstein's student, contributor of a venue for the Blue / Brown Book notes I think it was), where it is referenced by page number from our NeoPlatonist work. [5] There it is dubbed the Mite, or Minimum Tetrahedron, because of its space-filling role (no need of mirrors -- nor smoke for that matter).

In this referring work (dedicated to H.S.M. "King of Infinite Space" Coxeter), said Sommerville shape is in turn dissected, into the two As and 1 B particle, also described and depicted by Robert Williams in his groundbreaking work The Geometrical Foundation of Natural Structure. [6]

The Qyoobans have been embargoing this information (hence the term "Qyooban Embargo"), as evidenced by Math World, which on the page about space-filling polyhedra pointedly eschews mentioning any of the tetrahedra meeting Sommerville's rules.[7] These would be the Mite and two Sytes in current parlance, a tetragonal disphenoid (Rite) and another one (Bite), all three illustrated in the chart by Guy Inchbald.[8]

Furthermore, the Qyoobans censor and/or forbid sharing about the alternative model of 3rd powering, whereby said Mite and Sytes have volume 1/8 and 1/4 respectively, vis-a-vis a cube of volume 3 (no longer unity). Their public school systems deny their own citizens access to this heritage. Write to Congress?

Having their beloved Qyoob (a hexahedron) booted from His Eternal Throne is tantamount to heresy for them, hence the Embargo or Boycott, easy to document for the history books. The sense of entitlement among these Qyoobans (not to be confused with Cubans) is legendary. Talk about road hogs!

Those philosophers paying any attention to this little tempest in a teapot (not!), are probably aware that the dike is breaking, and that Qyooban philosophers are soon to be held accountable for their intentional and insistent dumbing down of our common heritage (logic).

Their overly high price tags may be questioned, even as their bigoted and ethnocentric behaviors fall into disrepute. All math is ethno-math.

I'm thinking Wittgenstein's philo will come out smelling like roses though. His investigatory style has proved a real asset. Hooray for the linguistic turn.

To summarize:

If you want the benefit of a liberating gestalt or enlightenment (as the fly escapes the fly bottle), then you'll need to find all those pesky little strings the Lilliputians have used, to tie down their Gulliver (our hero), to trap him with their small-minded meanings.

"Snip snip" go the Philosopher's Scissors (similar to Occam's Razor). Don't let those lab-coated Qyoobans nab you in their straitjacketed way of thinking.

Qyoobism tends to be overly-confining, awkwardly unimaginative, some say a symptom of its insecurity in its logico-authoritative role (arrogated).

Cubes are unstable unless triangulated, as any honest architect-engineer will tell ya.

Lets end the Qyooban Embargo.

Notes:

[0] Of beatniks vs. squares, also buckaneers:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2008/07/mining-cartoons.html
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/08/buckaneers.html

[1] from a recent journal post:
"""
Lots of comparing notes occurs among the spin doctors, with secondary sources echoing primary ones in disseminating the latest bewitchments (the great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used this term "bewitch" in a technical sense, in the context of investigating the hypnotic powers of "language games").
"""
http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2010/06/supporting-troops.html

[2] "Triangling and Tetrahedroning"
http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s09/figs/f9001.html

[3] Aristotle was Right! (remember the Mite)
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2084375&tstart=0

[4] D. M. Y. Sommerville (1879-1934), see:
Which Tetrahedra Fill Space? by Marjorie Senechal, Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 54, No. 5 (Nov., 1981), pp. 227-243.

[5] One of several portals to said Neoplatonist philo:
http://grunch.net/

[6] He changes the meaning of B-particle from its original source, but is otherwise on target:
R. Williams, The Geometrical Foundation of Natural Structure, Dover, New York (1976), see footnote 20 on pg. 136.

[7] No mention of Mites or Sytes (as of June 23, 2010):
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Space-FillingPolyhedron.html

[8] The Archimedean honeycomb duals by Guy Inchbald, The Mathematical Gazette 81, July 1997, p.p. 213-219.
http://www.steelpillow.com/polyhedra/AHD/AHD.htm

Kirby Urner is a RadMath teacher living in Portland, Oregon.

==========================================
Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/

Wanderers Summer Retreat

We're packed around the table again. Lots of plastic. Our Blue House ethics have shifted against plastic, which doesn't mean we don't have any. I went to the supermarket, determined not to get anything with plastic in the packaging (I got glass, cardboard and metal). I paid with plastic.

This is potluck time, so some of the plastic contains food. Tara joined us. She's booted into the wifi with my old laptop. She's at the table, I'm on the steps.

For those just joining us, this is the boyhood home of Linus Pauling, one of Oregon's favorite sons. He received two (unshared) Nobel Prizes, although the one for peace you could say goes to Ava Helen as well. Their papers are collected at Oregon State University.

Our patron and sponsor, Doug Strain, helped endow the reading room, as well as restore this magnificent old home. Doug co-founded Electro-Scientific Industries, which also supplied a facility to Quakers in the late 1950s, where they practice their faith to this day, two remodels later.

Our group, called Wanderers, gets its name from (a) the ancient Greek word for "planets" (they wander the sky, especially in a geocentric coordinate system -- simpler spirals if you look from a heliocentric point of view) and (b) a quote by Mandelbrot that goes like this:

Science would be ruined if it were to withdraw entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are wanderers-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

-- Benoit Mandelbrot

We're looking at close up pictures of Mars on the Web, mostly gray scale.

Gus Frederick of Silverton is a Mars nut, actually a good presenter on an interesting topic. This isn't about Martian Math so much, which is something I write about.

Carol is home prepping for her next journey. She lost some pills, I lost some money. Our exchange student (per Census interview) is out and about.

Some traffic on PSF channel today; another Synergetics boot camp on Synergeo (ongoing).

Art Kohn and I spoke at some length in the alcove (near the food table), about family matters, about image processing and the Hubble space telescope.

This latter topic led Art to recommend Case Closed by Gerald Posner, laying to rest all those conspiracy theories around the assassination of JFK. The computer-stabilized version of the Zapruder film helps clarify the single bullet theory.

Jon Bunce and Don Wardwell sang an old Woody Guthrie song Pastures of Plenty. Jon and I then yakked about Subgenius literature, the bleeding head of Arnold Palmer in particular. We're an eclectic group, so pretty open to a wide range of topics.

Best wishes to Dr. Tag. I mentioned our internationalization work on the PSF list again. Not every Python-related chat room uses Latin-1 after all.

I started screening the first of a series on spatial geometry that's been showing on Portland community access TV, after screening O Superman by Laurie Anderson.

After a just few minutes into the polyhedra, Don and I heard yelling and cheering so went outside to see what was happening. A large number of naked and/or partially clad cyclists (skateboarders, roller skaters, unicyclists) were turning onto Hawthorne, protesting exposure to exhaust fumes, other machine world insults and indecencies. The procession was over a mile long, maybe longer.

Git Mo Stupid

"Too stupid to close Gitmo" was the verdict, last time we checked the score.

It's mighty hard to put any faith in those "counter-terrorist" twits after seeing their bogus blog posts in defense of that operation, an embarrassment for [what little remains of] "intelligence" in those circles.

No career path to an elite inner circle by that route apparently. Just cruft on the c.v., might as well say "unemployable".

I'm not blaming the White House though, even back to Bush, who wanted it closed too. Few people know that, as they can't believe presidents get lied to (especially presidents).

This defying of presidents is what "the woodwork" is good at (the so-called spineless bureaucracy -- aka "banana republic" -- which hides behind anonymity, posing as patriotic).

USAers don't seem to understand how their credit rating so much depended on what they might offer the future. Overlooking the debt was easier when the policies made some sense.

Endless "war on terror" is wearing thin, especially when there's so much positive futurism waiting in the wings, on hold while the world sits through this tortuous little stage number.

At least we're making some headway on the voting machines and attendant infrastructure. If they're not NSA approved, then we know they're unworthy. Or did I get that backwards? Good to see The Washington Post is on top of it, vigilant as ever.

Any truth in the rumor that the Pentagon wants to commandeer Gitmo as a HQS to monitor the oil bleed? Certain BP executives might need to be watched, asked a few questions.

Bruno (movie review)

As with Borat, the comic index of this film depends a lot on the viewer's assumptions about how scripted it is, i.e. which characters know this is a spoof and which do not?

The DVD version, which my daughter inherited from somewhere, has the movie with commentary, and that clears up some questions.

However, given Sasha is good at fooling people, how much of the commentary are we to believe in turn? Was Harrison Ford really "in on it"? Perhaps not.

I'm reminded of Werner Herzog's commentary regarding the filming of Fitzcarraldo. I took that as a spoof as well, in cahoots with his cast, the film savvy, Mick Jagger, Jason Robard and friends.

I viewed Bruno (twice, once with commentary) with a gay rights activist and community organizer, who thought, as I do, that Sasha is brilliantly brave, and knows how to do poignant social commentary.

Borat, Bruno and Ali G represent a new form of cultural anthropology, wherein the anthropologist learns enough about a culture to offend, enrage, excite and otherwise perturb it.

This is the opposite of trying to stay out of the limelight while taking notes.

I found myself reminiscing about Team America: World Police after it was over, a likewise penetrating spelunking exercise within the collective unconscious. Talk about "special operations"!

Supporting Troops

I'm using "troops" rather loosely, to mean roving bands or remotely deployed teams of experts ("away teams").

When I was a young boy, a "troop" was a multiplicity of soldiers, only later reducing to a singular individual, i.e. a "trooper" became a "troop". Other linguists have remarked on this trend.

Later still came "An Army of One" (a marketing campaign).

The idea of embedding journalists or chroniclers (log makers, bloggers) as a part of the away team was a post-Vietnam War development.

A perception had developed around the Pentagon that too many journalists were loose canons and were seeing and reporting on events they should not, such as atrocities, murders of innocents, the agony of the troops.

The hellish nature of war motivated an insistence that it stop. Television played a big role. Young people (Global U students) especially resisted accepting their work / study assignments overseas. Others rebelled once they arrived at the scene.

A system of self-censorship was set up such that the media today are much more self-controlled. Pictures of atrocities get passed around on memory sticks, often mixed with pornography, but the general public is mostly spared from vicariously experiencing the horror of war.

Reporters violating the new code of ethics lose privileged access, and are punished for betraying their roving band, with whom they should have bonded to form a seamless team.

In the meantime, the public has been trained to harden itself against disturbing imagery, to become more accepting of inhumane behavior (witness Gitmo etc.).

Per C.G. Jung's posthumously published Man and His Symbols (which I borrowed from the Quaker meetinghouse today, along with Uncovered: the War in Iraq) people have the ability to "lose their souls" by means of various ego-dynamics. There's a picture of a band of Australian aborigines suffering from soul loss, amidst psychological analysis.

A TV-watching public sinks into unconsciousness under the watchful management of its spin-doctor anesthetizers, who continually remix the memes to keep the war tolerable and securely remunerative for its sponsors.

Lots of comparing notes occurs among the spin doctors, with secondary sources echoing primary ones in disseminating the latest bewitchments (the great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used this term "bewitch" in a technical sense, in the context of investigating the hypnotic powers of "language games").

Some of the troops I'm thinking about have been thankfully reassigned to perform humanitarian duties, such as during the tsunami in South Asia. A lot of the same national guard type logistical skills pertain.

Coordination and planning, command centers and communications, all come into play. Some of the same military bases play a role.

The overlap is such that it's not always obvious which troops are engaged in which operations, or whether these ops are "special" or "covert" in any way.

In these pro-human operations, the embedded chroniclers are often keen to get the images and words out to a public, not just to show the heroism of the troops, but to garner public support in the form of actual goods and services.

Once a need becomes clear, sponsors step forward, either as individuals, as private companies, or as government agencies.

People at home or in coffee shops may wire funds directly, and take credit for doing so, on Facebook or whatever. Perhaps they send other forms of support (such as I've been doing, and chronicling on Facebook).

The chroniclers (bloggers, TV crews, filmmakers) are not under such pressure to keep the lid on their stories, as there's less fear of a negative backlash or reprisals. I'm not "spilling the beans" so much as "sharing the beans" (insider philosophy talk).

This image of civilians supporting humanitarian services from behind the front lines derives from many a war-time design pattern. People spend their time and energy making uniforms, boots, meals, other equipment for these troops.

In today's high tech military, a single troop is a million dollar investment over time, in terms of training, transport and equipment.

This high level of investment towards humanitarian endeavors marks a big step towards the amelioration of specific problems in many areas of the world. That same sense of good will flows towards the sponsors, for supporting the troops.

Yes, the military is a wealth redistribution and government jobs program. This is not news.

Having some of the programming serve humanitarian ends only means that the endeavor is somehow profitable to humanity.

Some characterize this difference as "adding intelligence" which might imply sponsorship by specific government agencies. Let's see which ones take credit.

Aristotle Was Right!

oops

I put an "oops" here because a tetrahedron is not a polygon, nor need its faces be equal.

On the other hand, its four faces are polygons, and they might be equal.

The regular tetrahedron of four equilateral triangles is not a space-filler.

The tetrahedral disphenoid, on the other hand, with four equal isosceles triangles, is a space-filler, meaning Aristotle was right: tetrahedra do fill space.

Misinformation from Math World:

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.

In fact the tetrahedron does fill space, just not the regular one

Per Which Tetrahedra Fill Space? by Marjorie Senechal in Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 54, No. 5 (Nov., 1981), pp. 227-243:

"Aristotle did not state explicitly that he meant regular tetrahedra... some scholars continued to defend Aristotle on the grounds that he had not explicitly required regularity..."

As well they might.

What other tetrahedra fill space, all by themselves? Which one is minimal, in the sense that it builds the others?

We started Radical Math in Portland, Oregon, offering a first course through Portland Free School on March 13, 2010. Our venue: SE Belmont around 30th, at Flipside (since vanished).

RadMath teaches what we call Verboten Math, which is considered somewhat on the subversive side, not suitable for textbooks.

Mathematicians tend to welcome our stirring the pot, as argument and debate stimulate interest in often dry topics.

RadMath inherits from the Oregon Curriculum Network's "digital mathematics" curriculum.

Glenn Stockton focused on Neolithic Math whereas I was more into Martian Math.

Would you like to help sponsor? Help produce mathcasts?

Going down in history as a true radical, in conformist times when diversity was threatened, might be your reward.

Wanna win some brand loyalty from some of tomorrow's freest thinkers?

How might you build your own ConceptNet for a specific knowledge domain?

What "graphs" would you create, what "webs"?

In the case of a spatial geometry web, would you maybe have Mite, Syte and Kite as entries?:

IsA(Syte, two Mite)

IsA(Kite, two Syte)

IsA(Mite, A A B).

Make any sense?

This math is somewhat esoteric by today's standards, but if you're at MIT, maybe you know what I'm talking about.

Or is this stuff still verboten there too?

Ruminations

:: spring 2010 ::

World events backdrop: oil continues to spew, repeating events of 25 years ago according to Glenn, when the same sequence of repairs was attempted to no avail. Going through the motions. And the jigsaw puzzle of nations continues to defy solution, because nations are the product of lesser minds, were never God-given (human contrivances, an attempt at self-organization -- many valuable lessons learned).

The neighbors actually did repaint Sunnyside Piazza, looking good. I wandered by there with my camera, between computer jobs. We went looking for Hebrew brand beer at Zupan's, which we found in Pomegranate flavor, but it's the double IPA we were looking for. Dead Guy was on sale, along with another one. Thai soup with sandwich. Shades of Gothenberg. I miss Vilnius as well, glad Aiste is a Facebook friend, though I can't decipher most of what she writes. Greetings to Sir Laura, and to Steve Holden in Hong Kong (both PSF, Aiste should be if she's not).

Trey and Mike D. delivered some planters. LinZ did her Food Not Bombs run today. I filled in last week so she could work on repairing her rib cage.

The idea of a Beauty Pageant for Queen of the Space-fillers sounds kinda retro sexist, rather Rose Parade (there's a Rose Queen, high schools compete). Part of the fun is no hexahedron even makes the first cut. King Qyoob is thrown from his throne. Then there's this business of not being even-handed, being biased. Our Queen should be able to conceal her bias (orientation), is how the analogy works. I'm alluding to the B-module, which shows up as either left (+) or right (-), yet outwardly she has all the same shapely angles, either way.

The logjam of nations, in some sense a failure, in some sense lasting karma, in some sense a projection of our obedience to eternal principles, is captured in the movie The Terminal with Tom Hanks. The airport shows lots of octet-truss shots. The limbo of "nowhere / everywhere" is what airports seem good at projecting, that "space between nations" (like where the duty free shops tend to be). The Global University has roots in this limbo. Many of our students have no passports, no travel documents, no citizenship in any country. They fell through the cracks. World Game includes them, as more than statistics.

I got some polyhedra in the mail today, Made in Korea. My thanks to Gary of Pedagoguery Software of Canada.

Notice how I have no problem continuing to mention countries -- a familiar calculus. I like the stamps, money, flags and souvenirs. I also recognize virtual nations, closer to states of mind in some ways.

Imagine a Buddhist state of Samsara, with Nirvana the state capital (like Olympia of Washington). Or would Nirvana be more like Orlando? Is Nirvana an "after life"?

Many Xtians have questions about these "exotic cults" (as they might think of them, if not getting much tourism). Even Quakers are exotic to most Xtians, especially those of the "unprogrammed" variety (how does one deprogram an unprogrammed Friend?).

The folks in Louisiana have suffered plenty without this additional catastrophe of course. New Orleans is like Baghdad, though in the latter case, the disaster was man made, self inflicted. In both cases actually, counting the death-dealing oil plumes.

Poor engineering (e.g. FEMA trailers, decaying dikes) might be underlined as a cause of suffering in all of these scenarios. Poverty of mind, of the imagination, results in self-fulfilling "I told you so" prophesies coming true.

A more exultant engineering, clearly aimed at serving all humanity, would be easier to resonate with. Sometimes I think the free software movement got that ball rolling.

"World domination" in that geek subculture meant an end to domineering "owner enforced" selfishness. The workers co-owned the code, reaped the fruits of using their own heads -- what's under the "thinking cap" in capitalism. "Brain in body, body in mind" is what some say, projecting "mind" as like "the Matrix". That's pretty est-like (branching off Zen?).

Having wars about nations seems dark ages and retro, given how they're on the ropes to begin with, with the flagship USA taking on debt like there's no tomorrow. GST is switching the circuits, to where we speak more sensibly about energy inputs and workflows. "Not with a bang but a whimper" is how it would be, to ignite a big row over that which was never God-given.

The planet Earth on the other hand... now here's a Promised Land worth protecting. We'd need a Global University to do that. Maybe MIT will show us how it's done. Princeton? Cal Tech? Standford? We'll need a blend.

Speaking of Standford, we've been hearing from Keith Devlin's corner, where an Apollo Project for sharing precision thinking is planned, at least in a small corner thereof. I've not been able to trace the connections between Dr. Devlin and Dr. Benson, in case there's some overlap in the realm of Algebra. From my angle, it's more a Cult of Athena business (wisdom, defense, also music), with Algebra City a source of algorithms. We're feeding Pentagon Math with that NCLB Polyhedron and Polynomial: sounds cryptic, I realize. Other blog posts explain.

Trevor posted about still-standing Dymaxion Deployment Units or DDUs. Bucky was helping to get the idea of inexpensive, manufactured housing off to a good start. Bulter continued to reap the benefits of vending commercialized living quarters.