Notes from Asylum Village

Now that my little MAP corner (Maths / Anthro / Philo) is getting some attention, I feel again the tug of many alliances.  The I Ching and/or Machiavelli probably have/has passages on this phase or status.  The category space of political objects contains lots of arrows, not to mention slings.  "Morphing" is the name of the game.  Tarot Cards as objects. aRb, bRc implies aRc (R = relates to).  Associative thinking.

Seen from my critics' angle, I'm proposing eco-tourism as a panacea, envisioning sustainable lifestyles that involve cleanup and improvements, post disaster or perhaps pre-emptively.  The eco-tourism for Donbass could be seen as a heading off more military action, with lots of folks taking selfies in Donetsk etc.  The focus is on civilian activities, not bolstering anyone's military ranks.  Not just the Donbass of course, just that's a hot spot these days, with plans for high speed rail to/from Moscow still in storyboard.

In my science fiction, we may also have a direct Aeroflot flight from PDX to Vladivostok, as inter-hemispheric west-east eco-tourism remains a two-way street.

Portland is likewise a disaster zone.  I've been hoping to drum up business around prototyping, per my EPCOT West scenario.  The tendency today is to experiment with lifestyles around sport camping equipment and RVs.  There's no appetite for terraforming ala the Rajneesh Purum experiment, even if the jobs are all in Wasco County, with Salem's supervision.  There's the Country Faire, about to start.  Hardly 24/7/365.

I've got my Asylum City playlist and am tracking what the city is doing around Tiny Houses and so on, where geodesic domes make a token appearance, more to mark a public space than to cover it.

"All math is ethnomath" was my bumper sticker like summary, of my math-teach position (Math Forum). I was arguing we could broaden our own minds, be less ethnocentric, by inventing new ethnicities, including around maths.  I have some new ethnomaths up my sleeve in fact.  I travel around in Cyberia presenting slides about it, and Jupyter Notebooks.  

Other experimentalists have carried some of these same memes forward, with or without my knowledge.  I'm not the bottleneck.

Exploring STEM

:: celebrating the summer solstice ::

Those of us on the PATH side often like tracking STEM-side personnel, meaning we find our people of interest and track them, not nefariously but as people with the usual search engine type tools.  Like last night the Captain and I were reminiscing about cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, as well as Sheldon Renan, a guest speaker with other ties to Wanderers as well.  

This was at the 2023 Summer Solstice celebration at the Linus Pauling House.  Terry, ISEPP president, was among us.

So like, wearing my anthropologist hat, I'm hot on the trail of Bourbaki, and yet I'll confess up front my knowledge there is still superficial.  A university gatekeeper would be underwhelmed were I interviewed, but I'm not applying for the Church of the Omniscient at this time.  I was more chasing after whatever Bourbaki became, and some claim that's Category Theory.

Once on Planet CT, what do you do?  Use your skills.  That's right, discover some key people, authors, authorities and start graphing their relationships. Are they contemporaries? Do they engage with one another? 

Casual searching today will bring up Tai-Danae Bradley and Eugenia Cheng among others. I came across the former with an already well-formed interest in NLP (natural language processing), and the later thanks to Andrius Kulikauskas, one of our "for wisdom" community leaders.

One of the keywords of STEM culture is "vector" which goes with "vector processing" along with "matrix" and "tensor" and whatever else is being appropriated by the Machine Learning (ML) crowd.  That's a big crowd these days, and with its star hooked to AI, only the sky seems the limit where bulls in the stock market are concerned.

The marrying of a vast corpus, stuff people use English for, with vector (so-called linear) algebra, has enabled a kind of nanotube extraction, meant metaphorically.  I pull threads from the hairball of some googleplexed vector space, coded to continually remind itself of what it's supposed to be all about ("attention is all you need").  I'm not the expert.  I'm a PATH guy attending to the various word-meaning trajectories in this neighborhood.

For example, Category Theory is seriously into "morphisms" meaning a generative pre-trained transformer will be finding "morphisms" in proximity to "functors" and "categories" and other such ballpark players.  Their vectors will be weighted accordingly.  The hair around them (same neighborhood) may then be extruded into sensible sentences.  The believable "predictable goo" oozes forth.

We've always allowed dolls, idols, fictional entities, to use the pronoun "I".  There's no crackdown on "dolls talking" or really any other object.  Through the comic book convention of a talk or thought balloon, pretty much any object is graphically capable of talking and/or thinking.  The strong expectation around AI is we'll have some "I" to talk to, "I to I".  What would Martin Buber say about ChatGPT I wonder?  Why not ask her ("hey Siri...")?  She'll oblige with her fresh-squeezed toothpaste.

An ulterior motive of mine, for learning some CT, is my wish to cover the obvious bases when it comes to exporting Synergetics to other namespaces.  CT is a "glue language" for Stemites in general.  I was thinking if I could use CT for bridging purposes, I might help Synergetics get some more crew.

Nonhuman Wanderers

No, I'm not talking about ETs.  Or I could include them, but right now I'm thinking of Ts (terrestrials), such as dogs and cats and like that.  Yes, and snakes.

In my vocab, a Wanderer is a type of flaneur, meaning a bystander-observer, which doesn't mean innocent so much as aware and willing to chronicle and communicate, a reporter, a journalist.  Nonhumans don't commit their observations to writing, but they do register and adapt.

We had an organization named Wanderers, just a coffee-sharing morning / evening coven, or whatever group word, a meetup.  We met (still do) in the boyhood home of one Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel prizes (unshared -- although his wife Ava Helen had a lot to do with the one for peace).

Humans on this planet tend to be delighted by their nonhuman companions, even as they slaughter them in droves.  Part of the satisfaction we get from our herds is our ability to eat them.  Not everyone is into it.

Planet Earth is still delightful, even if sometimes overtaxed by obnoxious behaviors.  Humans have a track record of adapting, but also of not adapting.  We need to accommodate our own slowness in some ways.  How do we cut ourselves slack, without crashing the plane, so to speak?

I'm not posing as the answer man, but I do share the view that humans learn from nonhumans all the time.  Sometimes we learn the basic value of companionship.  Other times, we're reminded to pay sharp attention and keep a lookout.

Play for Pay

Work ethic Yanks and other Americans, many of Protestant extraction, want there to be an "earning a living" game, such that the undeserving losers might be deprived of their livelihoods, there being some fatal insufficiency as it is.  It's only fair.  Work hard if you want a place in heaven.

The Yang Gang had an uphill battle championing a UBI (universal basic income), paving the way for limited testing over the sars2-covid years. 

People question "income for what?" implying not enough work is or was getting done, in exchange for the channeled and forwarded stellar energy.

Our research on the importance of play, and not just in childhood, suggests the UBI is about sponsoring your play, which again, in Protestant eyes, many turn into some Pinocchian nightmare, on Donkey Island, whereon people make irredeemable asses of themselves. 

Many stuffy adults equate "play" with "profligate depravity" and/or "irresponsible frivolity" i.e. what they themselves would indulge in if given more paid time off.  They're into policing themselves, and by extension, fallen humanity.

A lot more anthropology attaches here than I have time to think through, let alone scribble down.  

We have the memes of "hard fun" and "professional sports".  What a lot of people might do with their UBI scholarships is learn another language, or more of their own.

Players with talent get to make a living in their program, with the consent of their clients and customers.  Professionals get paid to fool around with all manner of equipment, and many love their jobs doing so.

A UBI would speak to the professional inside of one, yearning to attain mastery, through play, for some additional skills.  People do get motivated by images of a future self, a possible upgrade, especially if they sense progress right away, and if their ideal self also looks like a net positive for others as well.  Players want to be assets on whatever teams.

Even the Yanks will understand that, maybe.

Hypertoon Exercise

Imagine a lot of plastic transparent tubing snaking in an out of an abandoned factory building, not along the ground but in the air.  This snaking hose pattern represents the potential flight path of one or more drones.

Along any given segment, several tubes may run in parallel, but then peel away in various directions.  

We looked at models like this at the Field Structure Institute quite a bit, thanks to Don Bridell and Gary Doskas specifically.

From the point of view of a drone pilot, what unfolds on screen is a hypertoon, with segments repeating as the drone dives though a particular window, and coming to segues, where one of several maneuvers is selected.

Once these scenarios are all smoothly interconnected, one has the basis for a computer game of both chance and skill, given the decision points (segue hubs, peel off and rejoin options), and/or something fun to watch that runs on autopilot.

Camp Generators

Back to the Future

I've flashed on the Nord Stream debacle a few times, saying it couldn't be the work of a great nation.  Not with a coverup.  If it were heroism, brag about it.  But if it's not, then slink around and act guilty.

So in that sense, my USA, as I was saying, was not behind such a thing.  But, Planet of the Apes style, we could nevertheless have Ollie North types with the keys to this or that meeting room.  I'm not saying people living in The District (aka City of Morons) weren't complicit.

So we would have to call such a cabal pro-Ukrainian right?  So that part of the yacht story would read correctly.  It wasn't the USA aka Uncle Sam, not seen since the 1980s and suspected a goner, if not making a comeback, so it must have been some pro-Ukrainian group.  Fine.

Whether they used a yacht or not, vs suckered the Norwegians into being the bad guys, time will tell.  Either way, the USA was not involved.  By definition.  There's no need to lie about what happened to protect the USA.  If there's lying happening, it's to protect some pro-Ukrainian group.

Evolving Mythology

 

I've noticed my specific glue language has taken a turn in that I'm specifically sheltering Synergetics with "P folk", not relying on "M folk" to do that job.  What am I talking about?

Given there's only the one P in PATH, you might suppose Psychology and Philosophy were destined to duke it out as to who gets the helm.  However, psych folk are more likely to claim their home on the other side of the C.P. Snow chasm, in STEM, as a Science.

What about Politics, won't it vie with Philosophy for the premier P on the marquee?  No, Politics comes under Theater.  Anthropology (not Art) is our bridge discipline.  We study ourselves (all is vanity), as humans (not as members of some superior race or chosen pueblo, that's History, oft written by the proud), and in so doing crisscross back and forth twixt the liberal arts and engineering.

OK, with those clues, you've likely guessed it:  the M-folk comprise the mathematically-minded establishment, networks within networks of various faculties, with silo-style verticality such as in K-16 (the "grades" -- YMMV).  

I'm not denying our wedging into that M-silo mid-level, around 8th through 12th grade, and winning some recruits, but that mostly just means abducting them into P for reprogramming (of themselves, by themselves, for themselves) with guidance provided by various syllabi and curriculum artifacts.  Reading programs, in other words.

For example, a high school maths teacher will tune in CHoP (concentric hierarchy of polyhedrons) and think "this'd be great for my 10th graders".  In traversing the directed graphs of connecting concepts, however, said teacher finds herself wading in to lots of narratives involving historical figures, who are not themselves considered mathematicians.  

We step outside the established pedigreed family tree and pick up more Aquarian Conspiracy types, various illuminati / literati.  Marshall McLuhan for example, and Hugh Kenner. 

That Hugh Kenner wrote Geodesic Math and How to Use It, becomes a premise for the ensuing narrative I then spin.  Quoting from the M4W archives:

Hugh Kenner wrote Geodesic Math and How to Use It, which was not about quadrays per se, but which set a precedent for a James Joyce scholar, fluent in literature (he wrote The Pound Era), wading into the shallow end of the maths swimming pool and beginning the construction of a new namespace, independently of the established M in academia.

Hugh was something of a polymath. He also wrote for Byte Magazine (McGraw-Hill) and was one of the first to track "chatbots" (again in the news, thirty years later).

I think Dr. Kenner may have inadvertently emboldened the Quadrays people (me one of them) to realize we're entitled to name our four spatial vectors at 109.47 degrees to one another "basis vectors", even if we choose to not make them unit length. The choice is grammatical, and Category Theory, with its liberal ideas about equivalence, helps us provide a justification.

Correction:  I should have said "forty years later" as the ELIZA-bot stories were from the 1980s.  The World Wide Web came later, around April 1993 -- we just celebrated the web's 30th anniversary last month.  However, thirty years ago, chat bots were already a thing, and had been for over a decade.  They weren't using large language models yet though.  ELIZA was a psychotherapist, Racter an erratic polymath.  They came with built in personalities.  Stay tuned.  Good ideas don't die, they recycle.

So Philosophy is up to sheltering and nurturing the CHoP stuff while inviting selected M-folk to come tour, packing whatever memes they want to share with us (such as from Category Theory or CT, not to be confused with CRT).  Cross-fertilization occurs, and we keep the most positively synergetic for a next round of upgrades.  Our mythology thereby evolves.

Friendship Societies

As a career programmer consultant and custom applications developer, I had numerous mostly non-profit clients in the greater Portland area.  The Northwest Regional China Council for example.  Portland may not be as integrated into the Pacific Rim economy as Seattle, given its relatively diminutive port facilities, but it's certainly another chip on the global motherboard.

Networking among subcultures does not require world travel as much as in the past.  Sometimes it feels more necessary to hop a jet and meet with counterparts in person.  However, when one lives in a big enough city, said counterparts just as often have good reasons to come here.  In the meantime, we have our electronics and shared stashes and repositories.

Probably one of the best ways to diffuse tensions, which tend to work in favor of warmonger businesses, is to keep friendships and communications alive across supposed ideological boundaries.  Although stereotypically a source of tensions and outward war, these days a religion, such as Quakers, provides ready-made circuitry for community building exercises and other confidence building measures.

The exercise of free speech has become less of a luxury than a necessity in an age when retro Planet of the Apes tendencies wish to destroy recent gains and return us to a pre-civilization that's easier to control and/or understand.  We're able to reassure our friends that we're not ourselves participants in these campaigns to stoke the flames of animosity.  On the contrary, our network of friendship societies is about creating new workarounds.  Portland is a welcome catalyst, in providing a staging ground.

A Billion Billionaires

As a child of the 1960s, I grew up focused on advertising as an intersectional discipline:  psychology, public relations, sociology, with the hard sciences supporting from below.  

The psychology part was especially interesting, and we felt MAD Magazine was on our side, helping to forewarn us of the life of others seeking to manipulate us, that was in store.

The gospel of abundance and prosperity often seems a self parody, as it touts billionaire levels of wealth for all.  However, under the hyperbole, you find the obvious truths, regarding people "living like kings". 

The kings of old never had iPhones or streaming, could only dream of such capabilities.  That's where our being billionaires stems from, along with not having to sit on some throne all day, listening to petitions and grievances.

Just walking through a contemporary airport, say in China, going from train to plane or vice versa, is more than the greatest queen of old could have experienced, and here we're just everyday individuals, not special, not singled out, yet satisfied with the infrastructural solutions to our travel needs.  

We thank the engineers and regional planners, who took the time to scope it out, and to the construction specialists who made it happen, and to the willing guinea pigs (the early adopters, the test pilots) who checked it out and provided valuable feedback.

We've reached a kind of limit on Ghetto Planet in that average living conditions have to keep improving for us to know that we're making some headway with all our tools.  We need honest benchmarks to keep us honest, which is another way of saying "in touch with reality" which has its rules.  

It's one thing to rail against government for being way too strict, which it often is.  It's another to rail against Mother Nature and her exceptionless principles, whatever these might be, not saying I'm the know-it-all.

Billionaires of the future, ahead of us in living standards, will enjoy a more congenial ambient backdrop.  It's not that we'll all live in luxury accommodations all of the time.  But then who would want to do that?  

Being out in the mud, digging trenches, laying pipe, is not a bad way to build muscles and hand-eye coordination.  This could be First Person Physics for a university program.  

The downer is when you're made to work as somebody's slave instead of on your own behalf along a work-study track (a tour of duty) of your own devising.  Others benefit, either way, but so do you when you're on board with your training.

A theme park has the rides that it has, although there's turnover.  Oaks Park has its newest roller coaster.  However you, the theme park goer, are not required to ride them all, nor any, in any special order.  That's all up to you.  This is the mix of fatalistic (stoic) versus freedom-loving we wish to achieve.  

We can't do anything about what we can do nothing about, yet there's a remainder we might mess with to our heart's content.  Let that be towards our contentment.  

Billionaire talk, and money talk in general, is a disguise over that sense of lasting security one might feel for one's self and one's loved ones, the lastingness of which is ever finite (mortal) in any matrix.  We feel impelled by deltas to keep working it, exercising those freedoms.  

That picture some have, of having enough to sit back and coast, is not all that realistic, given the sense of mortality every billionaire likewise feels.

One of my points though, is that Bucky Fuller was not lying (not being misleading) in some super naive way, when he talked about our living standards being higher than those of the kings and queens of yesteryear, not only physically but, potentially, psychologically.  

We're freer to distribute the psychological burdens of self governance more equally, and that's actually a favor to royalty in a lot of ways.  Leaving the job to just a few chosen celebs was actually more a source of their potential misery than many would know.  Being the scapegoat of the masses is no fun, even if they fatten and pamper you before the sacrifice.

A Patriotic Vista

Curating Control Rooms

Question Authority (School of Tomorrow)

Speaking of stereotypes, by the early to mid 1900s, if you wanted acceptance regarding matters STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics), it really helped to have Einstein's blessing. 

From that time onward, some kids felt parental pressure to "be the next Einstein" (and make mommy proud) and that meant chipping away at quantum mechanics, even though QM was not Albert's forte.  QM was sexier than "nuclear physics" (same thing), which earned itself a reputation associated with WMDs or WMSs (weapons of mass suicide).  How The Hippies Saved Physics is the book to read, along with Alec's new bio of Bucky Fuller.

Fuller was writing Nine Chains to the Moon (prefiguring space elevators and better satellite service) in an effort to educate humanity about its prospects.  He was not one to make a big secret of pending innovations, especially if these were positive, as humans needed some cheering news.  Economics had been so dismal, so doomy-gloomy.  Why couldn't we have some more positive science fiction?  But the publishing industry was getting push back.  "But Fuller is not the next Einstein" the control freaks railed.

Fuller's solution was pretty brilliant; he made friends with Einstein and scored a personal interview, after which Einstein could be counted on to stay in Bucky's corner, defending his right to share STEM stuff.  

The latter kept a kind of particle physics going, along with a model for combinatorics, and even named the E module after the guy.  Synergetics comes with BEAST modules.  E is for Einstein.

What I argue in the above video is that Fuller was a registered skeptic when it came to little stuff "explaining" big stuff, in the sense of "determining" or "nailing down".  

The chemical properties of the elements, in compounding, exceed the powers of QM to explain, just as biology outpaces chemistry i.e. we cannot predict (anticipate) based on chemistry, what all the biological attributes will be.  

That was Fuller's Pyramid of Generalizations:  the base does not hold up the apex so much as it's suspended therefrom.

In other words, Bucky's contribution as an American poet-engineer, was via the humanities (philosophy in particular), in the tradition of both New England Transcendentalism and later, Pragmatism, although he's not currently lumped with the latter.  Consider connecting No More Secondhand God to a William James type treatment.  I've added a lot of Wittgenstein to the mix.

My professor, the late Dr. Richard Rorty, in writing Achieving Our Country, was leaving the door open to continue with a brand of leftism that was not, thereby, derived from Marxism.  Marxism could be subsumed under Social Darwinism as a form of anti-capitalism.  However, as capitalism morphs, so do its dialectical competitors.  Mainstream Marxists may not be able to keep up (we shall see).

A superstition popular in some circles is that Fuller was trying to sneak in some alternative to the Standard Model.  His 4D Feynman type diagram (six tetrahedron edges labeled with energy particles in a proton-neutron transformation) and speculations regarding muons, suggested he saw his A and B modules, his MITE (another wedge, their combo), as somehow opening the door to a Theory of Everything (TOE).  

Certainly Fuller was free to speculate in this direction, but it's clear he didn't think a complete GUT (grand unified theory) was necessary for humans to achieve greater mastery in Universe.  The generalized principles inform all levels (frequencies) from micro to macro.  Humans were especially carved out to work in the medio range (between extremes of large and small).

However Fuller's Universe was "non-simultaneously conceptual" meaning "eternally aconceptual" meaning he didn't expect a static noun to replace the verb.  Logic has to co-exist with Chaos.  Our thought processes continue to adapt.  In every age, we seem to have those believing we're at a terminus, which turns out in retrospect to be one more station stop along some perpetual journey.

Humans were not tasked with finding the holy grail (some GUT or TOE) before they could manage to feed themselves, in Bucky's opinion.  More important was to overcome various forms of brainwashing that kept us in passive spectator mode, leaving decision making to others.  

Abrogation of responsibility leads to dangerous results at many levels.  Waiting for CERN to map out our future, as if hadrons could be read like tea leaves, was the bankrupt strategy of many bozos.  And yet CERN came through, with the WWW (or W3), our ticket to curriculum integration and more synergy.

Upgrades at the biological level (e.g. better dwelling units) did not await new developments regarding the Periodic Table, in terms of predicting the individual elements from quarks and gluons and so on.  

We could improve the shelter situation regardless of what we were learning about neutrinos.

Explaining: Control Room

 

As old time readers of this blog may know, I often introduce my Control Room vs-a-vs a fleet of vehicles known as bizmos (business mobiles, see BizMo Diaries). 

That would give it (my control room) somewhat of a dispatching, monitoring and data gathering mission.  

The objective is to keep playing world game effectively, referring to another one of my blogs.  But then from there I've gone on to storyboard a global trucking exchange whereby drivers and other crew get experience bouncing around the planet, from gig to gig.

Along those lanes, a bizmo might be a logistics vehicle keeping the truck stops along a route appraised of new developments, or be about reconnoitering along a new route.  In the citizen diplomacy model, truck stops play an important role, and my Global University model sees them as extensible campuses, wherein a given driver (no specific stereotype intended) might get some academic time off in the work-study model (drive the roads, while learning the ways of your hosts).

As like the science fiction writer, I'm able to project into these roles, seeing the angles, without myself holding a trucker's license nor even owing a literal bizmo (I wasn't into owning).  These latter were posited as science fiction or computer model avatars early on, as I was thinking well beyond what was commercially available.  Ditto for the control room.  

I'm not the billionaire evil guy in James Bond movies, who runs all this infrastructure from headquarters, except here in my own threads (e.g. here in my blogs, for example).  I do own a 1997 Nissan sedan, but I cast it in a different role.

That being said, you could say science fiction is sometimes indistinguishable from investment banking.  An attractive prospect that has the gleam of a near future reality, is sometimes a mirage, yes, but sometimes it's not.  

Given this genre depends on technology that's already well developed, with new roads in Eurasia a theme (North America already having a cool network, Africa thinking ahead...), it doesn't come across as all Martian or even as sheer Lunacy (on the moon).  Terraforming is an old business around here.

Such a storyline anchors the model, however I'm well aware that the Dispatcher | Field Operative |  Territory | triumvirate is paramount in many a genre (of computer game or whatever).  As a GST guy (i.e. systems modeler), I'm not trying to deny myself the possibility of thinking about other configuration spaces that feature a similar design.  

The control rooms will likely themselves be involved in some network, and so on.

Portland Python User Group Meetup

I used my Trimet phone app to buy a fare on the new FX2 "bendy bus" (articulated) to the US Bank Tower.  

Since I was running early (4:20), I got off along the mall, thinking to replace my dilapidated library card, forgetting the main Multnomah County library is again closed for remodeling.  So I wandered around taking pictures, ending up at New Relic at the appointed time (5:30).

I'd not been to a PPUG gathering in many moons, as even before covid I'd been frequenting the PDX Code Guild.  

However a couple people recognized me as an old timer and my status as a co-organizer still pops up on Meetup dot com.  I reconnected with a guy who'd been at Dark Horse Comics before moving to Europe for several years.  He reported that Portland still gets respect in Europe, as a capital of open source and as a tech savvy little city.

Ernest Bonat PhD recently stepped forward as our main organizer.  He's also carrying the torch for the Hillsboro meetup.  Really, it's greater Portland that's tech savvy, and the Silicon Forest more regionally.

New Relic not only provided space, but bought us pizza.  We got to listen to a draft of their talk for the upcoming Pycon, about how they harness the Python import mechanism (complex by design) to inject their proprietary introspective monitoring software.  

New Relic monitors the health and safety of company websites that use industry standard Python web server frameworks, such as WSGI, ASGI, Starlette (including FastAPI) and Sanic.  They serve data dashboards relevant to many in the C-suite (CEO, CRO... CTO).

Then we had lightning talks.  The one about Jupyter Notebooks included some tips I'm planning to try.

Dr. D. (PhD) was able to join us, coming from his presentation at Terwilliger Plaza (a retirement campus) regarding Humanists and Humanism.  He's president of the local chapter, and also a computer science guy, if not specifically into Python.  He has his own research project, revolving around a language for mapping out and implementing parallel processing schemas.  He drove me home.

How PPUG goes forward from here is unknown.  Will we get to meet at New Relic again?  Who will buy the pizza?  The usual rule is whoever buys pizza is welcome to promote and present about their company, including in recruit mode.  New Relic was operating well within the rules.  We expressed our collective gratitude.

Social Media

For those wanting lots of analysis from experienced people, YouTube, Rumble and so forth represent a bonanza. We never had it so good. This makes journalism way more difficult I suppose, as we're able to get to our sources rather directly. 

What's left for the career journalists to scoop up is from a leftover (legacy) second tier infrastructure defined by bureaucracies of old. They leak in the old ways, but their information has already been superseded.

Although not journalists per se, we also have the travelogue people, a lot of them politically aware, and some of them willing to report in routine fashion on what's trending in the local news. 

The upshot is, if you stick with legacy media, you're in a darker more insulated world than ever, the one concocted by self-interested bureaucracies, whereas if you pay attention to social media, you have a shot at piecing together a world.

Over on TrimTab Book Club, I've been discussing the tiny tome est: A Steersman Handbook, which came out in 1970, by a TV-savvy media person, Leslie Stevens.

Brett held up that obscure est: The Steersman Handbook, Charts of the Coming Decade of Conflict that he's acquired for his collection (me prompting).

The book is published in 1970 celebrating Bucky as an "est person" even before Werner Erhard invents his "est training" in 1971 and starts interviewing Bucky closer to 1980.

About the book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Est:_The_Steersman_Handbook

About the author:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Stevens

From Wikipedia:

Individuals named as examples of "est people" in the book included R. Buckminster Fuller, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ralph Nader, Marshall McLuhan, Malcolm X, Albert Einstein, Lewis Mumford, and Eric Hoffer.

Looking back from over a half century later, I think we can say there's a lot that the author got right in his description of The Movement. 

Those who immerse themselves in new media empower their intuitions, but unless they cling to old fashioned powers of articulation, i.e. the ability to write in linear formats, the hive mind doesn't rewire. It takes a combo of new media and old media to make a difference.

Recap: Data Science

So what low-down bottom line do I share with my students along this Data Analysis track? 

• That the Python ecosystem is but one of many and many of the tools we're learning (LaTeX, regexes...) bridge our respective communities e.g. Jupyter celebrates computer languages Julia, Python, and R, all early adopters of this common browser based interface to a running kernel
  
  
• That interactive dashboard type data displays are not necessarily tracking anything in real time, but many of them are, and real time tracking is an expectation many will have; so best to bone up on the relevant tools.

I focus a lot on GIS type displays as integral with data visualization i.e. displays driven by latitude / longitude.  

I'm not off topic, therefore, sharing about the various projections, and especially the demented Mercator, with Alaska and Greenland so grossly distorted.  

There's a time and a place for it, but we're not bound by it, would be the obvious message.

We're beginners and so establish our chops using well-known favorites: 

• seaborn
• pandas
• matplotlib
• numpy
  

but then we jump into pyplot and dash for a day, to confirm the heuristics we've been learning are largely transferable.  Pyplot is a lot like seaborn and dash depends on Flash, which we also tour, including via my own Flask-teaching website.

In some ways I'm in Coding with Kids mode in that I'm not in upper management.  I punch in and punch out and uphold my end of the bargain.  

Meanwhile, I bring whatever curriculum development skills to bear, adding to what's already a substantive and well-organized tour of an emerging terrain.

Arrowhead Math

My arrowhead is what the ancient Greeks called a tetrahedron.  It might be regular, and when doing our home base, our tent, or teepee, it is.  

That’s the “tent tripod on the Earth” model, the bump or convex dent. Concave dents hold water and other fluids.  Then we have those flying caltrop looking devices, but more commonly the XYZ 6-spoke flyer.  

These flyers might have drone aspects, depending on the world we’re in.  Yes, computer game talk.  That’s a new anchoring shoptalk at FSI, with Gary our project lead.

Do we need at least flyers for birds eye views?  A rule when world building could be that we have no disembodied viewpoints.  We do have tiny insect-like flyers.  

As a “first person” you’re enabled to “look from” these myriad viewpoints, but all are embodied and have their physical limitations.

The term “quadray” may evoke “quadcopter” and sure, we’re fine with a drone-friendly shoptalk.  The quadcopter is a familiar drone design. 

The caltrop inside the regular tetrahedron, however, has any two of its rays at 109.5 degrees to each other (that’s rounded).  Here we get to jump into trig.

However, before jumping into trig, our games exercise the notion of “vector sum” by adding these pre-existing rays in obvious ways.  The parallelogram model holds.  Connect the tips and reflect the resulting triangle.

We have six pairs, for example, that cancel each other except for contributing to the length of a bisector.  The six spokes of XYZ have now emerged.  The caltrop begets the jack.

Then we have sets of three defining the edges of a quadrant.  They cancel (balance) by adding to the length of a ray out through the face center.  The four sets of three add to give the vertexes of the inverse tetrahedron.

We might add any pair (parallelogram model), then a third quadray (parallelogram again).

The tetrahedron and its inverse define the merkaba star (or stella octangula), likewise the corners of our duo-tet volume 3 cube.  That’s right, volume 3, and our tetrahedrons are volume 1.

Jumping into trig, we want students to remember the A modules, 12 right and 12 left.  The quadrays define  their spines.  The fact that the origin floats above the floor, 1/3 of the way to the opposite apex, gives us a tent pole to play with.

In jumping to trig, we focus on the arccos (adjacent FE / hypotenuse CE) = acos(1/3) = angle CEF.  That gives 70.5287794, which, subtracted from 180, is our intra-quadray angle:  109.4712206.

The fact that Buckminster Fuller and friends would add substantively new language games around polyhedrons starting in the 1970s with the publication of Synergetics, when rectilinear orthodoxies were already well established, would give arrowhead math a subversive and/or discordant aura.

Discordant themes tend to set up a dialectic and drive discussion and debate in the direction of a new synthesis.  We see that happening in connection with Pentagon Math.

A Critique of Protestantism

Here's my theory, about Christianity more specifically, because of my own experience with that religion (I'll claim ignorance with respect to many others -- life is finite):  one gets groomed to think "rendering a moral judgement" is ultimately what's called for.  

At the end of the day, we're waiting for some verdict.  

Elon Musk is good.  Elon Musk is bad.  My attitude is more:  who the fuck cares about your moral judgements in this matter; there's lots more that's more interesting to talk about.  Including with respect to Elon.

Kinda like that.

Now I may have the impression the Catholics are less judgemental, hence their name ("catholic" as in open minded, worldly, cosmopolitan), whereas Protestants are all about raining "fire and brimstone" (whatever that is) upon their moral inferiors.  

All that resentment about a "holier than thou" attitude traces to English pricks right?  I'm kidding.  You'll  find pricks in every culture.  Tea cuppy Victorians (soccer moms) and like that.  

As if your moral pronouncements were what the big drum roll was all about.  We were all in suspense about if you thought it was good or bad.  That's such an arrogant attitude.  

It's not that we don't care what you think, it's that you just assume it's your moral attitude, your ethnic bias, that we're interested in.  Why not ask us what we think matters?  At least once in awhile?

Why do we have to care if such and such offends you.  Were you asked?  Entitlement.

Making Judgement Day the most important day in eternity, seems to be a hallmark of Protestantism especially.  Why not Easter?

Chattering About Quadrays

 

What does ChatGTP know about Quadrays in 2023? 

A is for Anthropology. 

Erratum: "tail-to-tail" at 180 degrees (not "tip to tail") -- talking about vectors. 

Talking Points on Medium.

 

Version Control

 
The global conversation surrounding the slicing of Europe's jugular, energy-wise, wended its way through the United Nations today.

I somewhat agree it's OK to delay an investigation until we get clear about a key point:  the USA as a nation is not obligated to take the blame for this terrorist act, no matter the citizenship or job titles of the people behind it.

Neither was the USA obligated to run cover for the secret operation to provide the Contras in Central America with funding from Iran. That was a rogue operation run by secretive operatives who just assumed the USA would be appreciative of their covert efforts.  That's no more than an assumption, then or now.

Who gets to decide when Uncle Sam is culpable?  Are we talking about in a democracy or what?  

What if you're aware of a narrative wherein the USA might be considered bankrupt already, with a Medal of Freedom winner backing up that account.  Not newly bankrupt, but since the 1980s, and not just financially, but morally.  

In what sense might we blame Uncle Sam, if Uncle Sam is in fact dead and gone?

But even without such a radical-sounding story, it's still permissible to ask the question:  where do we draw the line?

A lot of us think the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline was so outside the rules, that no state actor could possibly have been involved by definition.  Such acts are just too beyond the pale.  Nation states are not infinitely malleable.

The same logic might be applied to 911:  whoever was in on it, the USG was not, by definition, because said act was too unconstitutional to be laid at the door of the USA.  911 was a job by outsiders (perhaps posing as insiders?).

It's more honest to say "the USA is dead and gone" (we knew that) than to say it was responsible for some desperate act of sabotage (feeling cornered are we?) such that we must now engage in some form of coverup.  

Why?  Why is your USA that weak?  Mine isn't.

In my story line the USA is (a) innocent of wrongdoing and (b) actively pursuing the perpetrators, in part by making their cover stories ever less believable, ever more paper thin, to the point of transparent.

As of today, I could easily go with the Seymour Hersh version of what happened, minus the assumption that "we the people" (our government) have to consider ourselves an accomplice.  Was Hersh himself in on the plan?  No?  So why say "we"?

On the contrary, my USA is apparently working closely with Seymour Hersh, and this wouldn't be the first time.

Think how little kids play with dolls.  

Janet says our dolly just blew up Nord Stream.  

As long as it's our dolly too (and we say it is), we maybe won't feel compelled to go along with Janet's proposal.  Her story is not necessarily more credible than ours.

"Our dolly did no such thing" is our side of it.  

It all comes down to which side gets to write the history books.  Certainly my side has its version.

An Uphill Battle Lost

I'm back to teaching about the various Python ecosystem tools (3rd party) in widespread use by various professionals studying data.  The course is called Data Analysis with Python.  My managers are in Türkiye.

My final uphill battle on M4W was about recruiting the math PhDs frequenting this space into taking some interest in Quadray Coordinates, and by extension more of the Bucky stuff.  No dice.  

To his credit, Andrius put some hours into it, but didn't appreciate dealing with its fait accompli aspects i.e. he wanted to recreate the apparatus from scratch (a useful exercise) but in so doing made different aesthetic choices along the way.  

My preexisting literature proved a source of irritation.  He gave up in frustration.

Quadrays comprise what we call a "language game" in a philosophical investigation modeled after one of Wittgenstein's, into the foundations of mathematics.  What if, instead of the XYZ apparatus of six spokes from an origin, plus and minus i, j, k, we had four spokes to the corners of a regular tetrahedron.  Might we not span space the same way, with vector addition?  Yet all the points are 4-tuples, not 3-tuples in this picture, with no need for negative numbers in the canonical representation.

How does such an apparatus influence adjacent concepts, already caught up in XYZ thinking, such as "linear independence", "dimension" and "basis vector"?  Do we gain any insights into how these "math words" achieve their meanings?  

More specifically, I use the quadrays apparatus to motivate reader appreciation for Bucky Fuller's "4D" meme.

My incursion into the M4W space (M4W = math for wisdom), with all that Bucky Fuller related baggage, seemed like crowding to Andrius, who already has his own philosophy he wants to share.  He's not in the mood to tackle an alien (aka Martian) alternative.  So I'm taking the hint and fading back, but not disconnecting.

In the meantime, the geopolitical sphere remains tense.  I'm not a fan of Lindsey Graham's either, and got some quantum of solace hearing Scott Ritter vent is rage on YouTube, regarding the senator's absurd warmongering.

Andrius did offer at one point that he had some psychoanalytic technique up his sleeve, though he didn't call it that, whereby he can shrink any psyche in terms of some 24 components, given sufficient profile information.  Is this like Myers-Briggs?  He mentioned he could perform such an analysis on Bucky Fuller, having earlier suggested Vladimir Putin.  I suggested he take up the latter first, so we might see what such an analysis might entail.

One of the side projects of M4W involves Andrius looking to apply his techniques and insights into reducing violence levels in Eastern Europe (Western Asia).  People call it a proxy war and some liken it to the District's support for Saddam Hussein's army versus the Iranian one.  This was before the District turned on Iraq itself, based on some misunderstandings.

This focus on ending the retro dark ages tank wars in the Donbas is partly what got me onboard in the first place.  

But then the W for Wisdom turned out to be more a surrogate for something else called "absolute truth" which turned out to be a complex set of mathy language games that take quite awhile to grok (like quadrays).  Bait and switch?  No, I think it's more a matter of needing to be clear with any new people coming in.

Presidential Circus (aka District Soap)

I thought Marianne gave a fine performance in her "grilling" by Krystal and Kyle (they were open and friendly).  She reported having a thicker skin, which makes sense (this isn't her first rodeo), and radiated confidence regarding her ability to beat Biden.  

I know, you're thinking "who couldn't?" but the barriers to entry are pretty secure.  Few of us get a pathway to "post Camelot" or whatever we're calling it (West Wing or like that).

However, as I pointed out to another supporter, Oregonians registered as Independent are not invited to participate in DNC primaries.  Assuming she's in a contest with other Dems, I'm another guy in the bleachers, an NPC.  

Voting is another spectator sport in this country, by design in many cases (computers get involved, in purging the registered-to-vote rolls especially, where too many people seem to have the same names).

I was never allowed to vote for Bernie.  He never got that far in the contest.  The parties (those despicable parties) have it all sewn up.  So good luck anyone with talent (I think Marianne has some).

My thanks to Michael Goldberg (no, not the same MG for which the Goldbergs are named, another math teacher though), for pointing out the typo (Neolitic) in the M4W Digital Math poster (see previous blog post).  I'd included it in a Medium story that he'd read.

That got me to thinking of a "mythic past" i.e. we could occasionally fade out in our latest thinking about history, and switch to something Xnu (that's a pun on Gnu) i.e. something more obviously science fictional.  I'm leaving the door open.

We could call this made up past our Neolitic Era (an invented word).  In game land, we call these "worlds" as we do in fiction (J.R.R. Tolkien, Dickens) and in movie-making (Coen Brothers, Herzog), wherein even minor characters may be "world building".

Martian Math could become "Architectronics" in some versions (I've always invited substitutions); a word I somewhat derived from the Ekistics crowd, back in the day.  I probably wrote it "Ekistyx" just to add a tad of Dark City spin (haven't seen it yet) -- you know how teenagers are sometimes: attracted by a Gothic aesthetic (although the river Styx is actually Greek).

You may wonder why I mix "Made for TV" language ("District Soap" in the title) with presidential politics (as produced by DC).  DC for District of Columbia, not DC Comix, rival of Marvel.  

Because presidential politics is a lot about television, obviously, but for other reasons too.

Yes, I am permitted by law to surrender my Independent status and re-register with the DNC if I want to play in their sandbox.  I get it.  But I don't want to make such a Faustian bargain with any of these war parties that run the District.  That's kind of the point.

A M4W Rendering of Digital Math

School of Tomorrow: Personal Workstations

Biographical Note

From a text message to a family friend (slightly edited, links added)

Of interest about Carol (1929 - 2023). She was a huge St. Francis fan. And she knew things about his biography that most people don’t. 

For example, part of his inner circle was this woman named Jacopa. She was from a wealthy family based in Rome. The Frangipanis. They had a castle inside the Roman Colosseum! 

Anyway, she wrote a whole novel about Jacopa and Saint Francis called The Lions and the Lamb. It never got published but not because her agents thought it was bad. It was just too long and they were worried it would not be suitable for mass publication given she was a first timer. They don’t like to go with multipart books with a new author. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

Later, she managed to parlay her research for the novel into a masters degree from a Jesuit college in the Philippines. Ateneo de Manila University. That was pretty exotic and is shown in the picture.

Current Events

:: senators: TikTok is not your toy ::

Yes I've been paying attention to the Twitter Files.  I'm especially interested in the pressures exerted on the company (i.e. Twitter) to prove the narrative that lurky jerky bots were a problem we needed defending against.  I hadn't been aware of the Hamilton 68 subterfuge, nowadays dragging a lot of people down given its exposure as fraudulent.

Of course I'm tracking the Sy Hersh story on NS2, eager to see if I can keep working in a crazed BP PM. UK I mean.  BP, whatever.  I don't saddle Uncle Sam (US) with the blame, mainly because he's long dead. A resurrection story might be in the cards.  

As a global OS (operating system), USA values have worked their way into the woodwork, with the grain of popular public opinion.  That's not nothing.  Democracy still smells like roses, even if still over some distant horizon at this point. 

How is the human brain a democracy?  Some would say it's not, but I'm not so sure, starting with the bicameral nature of the design.  

In practice, democracy seems to feature polarity, meaning warring factions, meaning opposition.  Where there's opposition we find alliances and yes, "strange bed partners" (they'd mix it up at the Grange too -- what those dances symbolized, about life as a process).

Does opposition among the parts result in a dynamic equilibrium at the level of the whole?  Most true cyberneticists will certainly posit that possibility, and even give examples, such as the adversarial court system.  That's not to say every warring mess of factions evolves into a self governing self assembly.  A kind of phase change occurs at that point.

Beyond the left-right brain dichotomy and the proverbial war between the lobes (is it proverbial?), we have other internal brain organs.  Calling the brain a "single organ" is semantics more than logic.  Much as a car engine disassembles into separate subsystems, so do brains.  

You might say "that's an oligarchy then" and I might agree with you.  A democracy is never so simplistic as one voter, one vote.  The term has more to do with its rate of turnover and anti-fragility.  Like the blockchain, in principle, its tough for any one faction to pin it down.  You can only fool so many people for so long, to dumb down a well known Lincolnism.

A lot of landlords are coming under scrutiny for their decisions to endanger the rest of us for their personal benefit.  I'm talking about the warlord train owners and their devil may care attitudes.  Suppose the devil does indeed care?  Did you really want that kind of attention?

Unobtanium

Sam confirmed my fear that C6XTY would soon be more impossible to come by. Unobtanium. 

He at one time had large amounts, cite Lattice Gallery.  Designed in the Silicon Forest, Made in China. 

But "the west" (if we want to call it that) proved uninterested. No time. No space. Other priorities. 

So now a lot of it is gone for good, as Sam was not about to shoulder the storage costs all by his lonesome.

Chatter Boxen

Something unkind to say about a person is that so-and-so is a chatter box.  This kind of put down may be less necessary in cultures where people are more glued to their devices and therefore more likely to delegate chattering to the professional chatterboxen who do it for a living.

Bringing up Hugh Kenner at this juncture is a kind of no-brainer.  He was writing about Eliza and such early in the computer revolution.  I have a distinct memory of him getting Eliza and Racter to talk with one another ("talk") in an article in Byte Magazine (McGraw-Hill) for which he wrote a column.

One needn't have a highly developed sense of irony to see everyone cranking out variations of the same article.  The writer does some "research" (reads other articles), then "digests", then puts it back out there in a grammatical form.  Does the chatter box do any less?  The game is to get the next word right.  Stick to beaten paths.

Naturally the chatter boxen trigger various insecurities.  The automated dolls, the miniature robots, made by the French, were unsettling back then (around the time of The Turk).

Synergy

I’m listening to a recording of Peter Meisen and company on the 52 Living Ideas channel.  Bear Island, Maine, duh, not Massachusetts. 

He is talking about the emergency situation in Ukraine, in the context of introducing the idea of Synergy. His focus is the energy budget, and the mix of resources, renewables versus coal.  Shrikant wants to get those already steeped in the Bucky stuff to expound upon these words “synergy” and “emergence”.

My focus these days has been Grunch dashboards, enterprise level instrumentation developed with tools such as dash and plotly, perhaps in tandem with pandas DataFrames.  We’re talking real time monitoring in many cases, of oil rigs for example.  I’m remembering a EuroPython talk.  The technology is a moving target.  I meandered over to Google Earth in one of my tabs, to talk about data visualization as seamless with these satellite painted global data displays.

Long time readers of this blog may know about my Global Data Corporation, which one might call science fictional.  The murky origins were not in Delaware, in “whiteman law” as I called it, but in native peoples (“tribes” is OK, I’m not at Stanford) learning the language of supranationalism, and hearing much of our nation-state talk as holdover Anglo imperialism.  I didn’t want Global Data in the lineage of the treaty breakers.

Thanks to the DSR (design science revolution), the core ideas and algorithms tend to percolate outward to the periphery.  Global Data is fringe in that way, over the horizon, outside the everyday jurisdiction of most business paradigms.  

Through computer science, linear algebra, machine learning and other STEM language games, we make a bridge to this alternative commercial sector shoptalk.  The language of open source interweaves.  As I was telling my students, there’s still plenty of room for private enterprise in the context of communally shared tools.  PayPal calls it “Inner Source” (bringing the communal way of doing things in-house and making it proprietary).  Cynics will cry “co-optation” but what’s free and open poses a non-trivial challenge, a form of competition that tends to cow the more cowardly capitalists.

The Anglos are used to exercising their right to contradict where foundational metaphysics is concerned.  To what extent is the “3Dness” of space a mere dogma?  Heresy.  

I talk about “hypercross dogmatics” and a quasi-religious streak in establishment science, in its embrace of Abbott’s Flatland and the mysteries of the tesseract (hyper cube). We boot a belief in the transcendent with the perpetuation of a priesthood, an elite, with a few from the laity, when we speak in hushed tones of multi-dimensionality.

Speaking of my confusion, regarding the timeline, the location of Bear Island, I'd also managed to scramble the order of the books we all talk about.  Tetrascroll came well before Critical Path, not after.

More Echo Chambers

We should revisit the image of "echo chamber", which I think is a good one, yet even more powerful if paired with other words such as "groupthink" and "choir", even "silo".  I'd make a great machine learner, or am one already, as Chelsea Manning suggested in Berlin that time.

Yes, I've been exploring the world (planet) of NLP, natural language processing.  The specialists have carved out a nifty niche, with a smooth vocab, kudos to University of Toronto.  

When I tell the story, I let Regular Polytopes hitch a ride on the ML bandwagon, because Graph Theory, because Linear Algebra.  I'm linking Regular Polytopes to Coxeter of course, also University of Toronto, and practitioner of hyper-dimensional Euclidean language games.

Did you know Coxeter lent his suite at Cambridge to the Wittgenstein posse, even after deciding what passed for hot philo was not his cup of tea.  Ludwig (LW) had entered his "second phase" by then ("language games"), if I'm not mistaken.  My source is the Siobhan Roberts Donald Coxeter bio:  The King of Infinite Space.  She did a later bio of Conway.

I'm not the expert in the room when it comes to NLP.  I do rub up against Machine Learning in my contemporary role on faculty, but more the way a high school teacher rubs against higher math, as an admirer and fan.  I'll lurk in on Andrius talking Sheffer Polynomials and even get deeper into his slides, but I'm not venturing as an equal into the ring.  I'm an apprentice at best in so many arenas.

My understanding is a breakthrough in the concepts of Attention and Self Attention (operationally defined) has enabled "next word predictors" to take more context into account, in addition to word order.  Would it be right to say a weighted semantic network develops internally, connecting higher attention words to their most frequent associates?  "Michelin" goes with "guide" "travel" and "tourist" as well as "tire".

Speaking of tourism and travel, at one point I was told, while gazing over the maze-like pattern of walls and chambers in the Colosseum in Rome, that I was seeing the ruins of a medieval castle that occupied the Roman stadium in a later century.  I believed that, but was recently talked into accepting these walls and chambers date to Roman times, while the castle story is also true (they're not mutually exclusive). 

Actually, my family, mother in particular, knows more about that castle than most, having taken an interest in Jacopa Frangipani, a luminary protagonist in her The Lions and The Lamb, an historical fiction novel, unpublished.  The Frangipanis owned the castle.  Jacopa was a friend and admirer of St. Francis.

You may have picked up on what I'm doing here:  showing off what "real intelligence" (vs the phony stuff) is still capable of, in contrast.  Everything may appear strung together haphazardly, but on deeper digging, everything checks out.  Eat your heart out GPT-3.

Of Sex and Gender

I've been delving into the various echo chambers (choirs) regarding sex 'n gender recently.  I haven't seen What is a Woman? yet, the documentary style talking points maker, but I've watched several reviews, which feature excerpts.  I catch Tucker Carlson from time to time, who rants on these and other issues.  I tune in channels by trans, feminist and academic content creators.  The internet makes it easy.

Beyond the internet, I've also had my share of life experiences, and welcome my continuing education.  I'm not done developing my views, but do have habits of mind, or call them ruts, or grooves.  I'll lay some tracks, to give a sense of where I'm at.

When I say "rants" coming from a Quaker background, I mean "as a ranter would do" which, in Friendly parlance, is in contrast to the "quietest" who mostly says nothing at all in Meeting for Worship.  Call me a "ranter" too then, as I'm outspoken in my Quaker journals (aka blogs).  Expect some polemics in other words, some invective.

What I'm patting myself on the back for these days, is noticing how "race versus ethnicity" parallels "sex versus gender".  In both cases, the former is something they inform you of, tell you about.  You don't get to contradict them.  "You're Black" says the world, and you'd better believe that, or else.

In the case of race, there's no surgery or hormonal pathway for transitioning, say to Red or Yellow (that's how the game goes) and it wouldn't matter anyway as the whole point with racial categories is people are stuck with what they are, even if they try to "disguise the truth" and "pass" for something else.

Before you attack me, the messenger, for this news about "race", its indelibility and immutability, let me assure you I'm no believer in "races".  I am not a lawyer for this concept.  It has too many holes.  They were already practicing racism when I got here, never asking me what I thought.

Too many perfect humans fall through the cracks as "mixed race" and the pure archetypes (how many? how many pure races are there really?), the primary colors (from which others derive), are hard to come by and agree upon (does "white" really have to be one of them, only to then be treated as "special" as in "white is not a color"? -- seems corrupt and/or bad design). 

I've traced a lot of racial thinking to the story of Noah and family in the Bible.  Since humanity had been "pinched off" by the Great Flood, racial diversity could only be explained in terms of Noah's descendants.  It took the Tower of Babel to get them to spread around.

Speaking of humans spreading around the planet, the social construct they call "the system of nation states" isn't working out all that well either (nice try?).  Too many have had to live their whole lives as "undocumented" and/or as nationless refugees, while in the meantime the whole concept of "sovereignty" is routinely violated.  

I've been a lifelong fan of the United Nations, yet its credibility has diminished over time, thanks to all the flagrant violations of international norms by member states.  I see a broken bureaucracy.

Do we have some alternative?  Not really.  Citizen diplomacy maybe, i.e. human-to-human relating.  

Diplomacy is everyone's business, not just of those with diplomas.  

The Truckers for Peace Program fits in here.

The "race meme" is inextricably mixed with the "breed meme" of animal husbandry.  Humans can, in principle, be bred into breeds, with various traits deliberately inbred to define the brand.  I'm not saying I'm in favor of such eugenic practices.  I'm saying the practice of animal husbandry provides a conceptual foundation for racial concepts.  

Most of us qualify as mongrels, or commoners.  The purebreds count as royalty.  It's an archaic system, a blend of many mental habits, including the arithmetic of fractions (as when one is 1/8th or 1/32nd some specific race or races).

In any case, I'm no eugenicist, nor even a dog breeder (not that I'm against breeding dogs, or cats, or horses...).  

I'm for humans having babies with whomever others consent and commit to such a project.  

I'm also fine with humans choosing not to have any babies at all.  

We get lots of babies, and don't care for them sufficiently, as it is.  We abort a lot of them in theater, on life's battlefields, and a lot of others before birth.  Adoption makes sense.  I'm not proposing anything new in making these remarks, nor telling you how to live your life.

Ethnicity, on the other hand, is more fluid, like gender.  

You may be born into a cult, and not even see it as a cult into you grow out of it later (perhaps with no hard feelings, as growing is not always "escaping" -- perhaps this cult was benign).  Looking back, you see a lineage of "former yous" (the yous you used to be).  

That's like a movie synopsis of your individual journey, in the course of which you may take on the traits of many ethnicities, from language to eating habits to political outlook and so on.  

Your ethnicity is akin to your personality, of which your gender forms a part, and attaches to your psychic life more than to your physicality.  Ethnicity is more epigenetic (transmitted outside the chromosomal mechanism).  Buddhist priests come in all shapes and sizes (makes and models).

Race wants to be genetic but has an insecure foothold in contemporary science (no race genes) and could better be ditched all together, to our collective advantage, as "man's most dangerous myth" to quote Dr. Ashley Montagu.

How might we apply the word "trans" in anthropology and philosophy, in connection with changing one's ethnicity?   If an aspiring Jesuit decides to abandon that path and marry a Korean partner instead, isn't that a kind of transitioning?  No plastic and/or cosmetic surgery may be involved.  

Might the more gender fluid trans from gender to gender on a moment by moment basis?  People are allowed to have chimerical, enigmatic and/or mercurial personalities.  How might "gender" figure in?  What's the upper limit on "rate of change"?

Having pride is on the healthier side, feeling ashamed less so, would be my rule of thumb.  But then, as a reproach, we may ask a stranger, with some moral outrage "have you no shame?".   Those incapable of embarrassment (let alone shame) seem lower on the ladder of moral righteousness.  Is that a problem with the ladder?

As teachers, as conveyors of cultural values, we may be enlisted into, cast and tasked with, making clear what shame is all about and when one should have some. 

To this day I recall Mrs. Cunningham in my third grade Junior English School describing the shameful behavior of these strapping young boys on the public bus, too thoughtless, too unaware, to consider offering a seat to frail elders around them.  What were the other passengers thinking of them?  I road the bus a lot as a kid.  I'd always offer my seat to the old people.

We should investigate "guilt" in this same context.  I'd say in all cases there's pressure to develop self awareness, which is the flip side of seeing oneself from many points of view.  "You're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" is a good one.  

Nags of guilt suggest new camera angles, perhaps previously unconsidered, and corrective action.  The stimuli feed an "OODA loop" to use some jargon.  Guilt is worthless if not eventually turned into consciously considered cues, to be dealt with.  To be consciously ignored (dismissed) in some cases, wisely heeded in others.

Talking about these surgeries as "cosmetic" gets people riled, as when you call it all "world game" and they say "it's not a game" i.e. to seemingly trivialize and make shallow is insulting and offensive in their estimation and they fight back, feeling provoked.  Perhaps the speaker was being provocative?  I don't know, I wasn't there.

I'm one of those who think growing a thicker skin is usually a better and more practical strategy than socially protecting fragility by means of covert hostility, threats of canceling and deplatforming (what hanging by the neck also entailed). 

Railing against those engaged in "hate speech" is too often itself a form of unreflective "hate speech".  At least it's speech, lets give it that.  If someone claims a speech inspired one to commit violence, does blame automatically adhere to the speaker?  Is the speech itself the crime, or the violence committed?

The contest is forever politeness (polity) and civility versus what's rude and crude.  What does it take to maintain equilibrium in psychologically buffeting weather.  Sometimes what's cruder also adds more intelligibility.  Electric storms have a way of clearing the air.  Sometimes a civil synopsis and summary restores equanimity and further processing capacity.

The Bible gets away with "all is vanity" and that's definitely a way of looking.  What's psychologically healthy is when God is proud of His creation (in patriarchy), not so much when the individual is bursting with self pride in some zero sum game against the balance (i.e. "the other people").  

"Me against the World" pride is at least a tad demonic, but in a divine, angelic kind of way that God Himself loves and forgives (as He does the Miltonian devil).  The only sin is in not being proud of all of it, which we mortals are incapable of being in the first place, hence the original fall.  In the minimal mirror of all Creation, God is eternally regenerative, to summarize Synergetics.

Having seen Avatar 2 recently, I do wonder if a combination of "cosmetic surgery" and "breeding" will move some of humanity towards under ocean living.  We wouldn't be the first big brained mammal to choose this environment.  I've used an "aqua lung" in my day (scuba diving equipment).  

I've sometimes joked I foresee a three pronged future for humans:  those that stay as we are, those that adapt to life underwater, and those that adapt to life in outer space.  

Am I talking about three wholly separate species eventually, that no longer biologically interbreed?  

Hey, it's science fiction.  Lets explore the possibilities.

Blockchain for Fiat Currencies?

I'm in student mode here (as I am at least 80% of the time let's presume), sitting in Econ class (or is it GST?).  I'm learning about the blockchain in the context of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining.  I get the elegance of the scheme, and yes, its limitations.

So my question is:  can't we play this with dollars too?   Or any specific currency for that matter?

What the blockchain solves, is any hanky-panky based on writing checks before others clear, thereby engaging in money creation, which only banks are allowed to do, supposedly under regulator scrutiny.

The blockchain or shared ledger provides a set of uncookable books, if implemented correctly

The different block-makers learn of transactions over a time period, and box them up in a tetrahedral block (just to get that tetrahelix image going).  

A contest is held, and the winner gets to add their block to the veridical strand of "what really happened", and gets paid in the process.

When prototyping, I tend to think in terms of "theme parks" (don't we all?), but also "refugee camps" and other overlays.  On this campus, whatever dollars you like get committed to an electronic wallet that you now get to spend.  Maybe you're paid through your wallet? 

They're dollars, not Bitcoin.  Fiat can play this game too, with the same incentives (i.e. "no cheating").  Am I wrong?

What are the advantages of using your dollars electronically?  It's up to the theme park to make that clear.  The experiment may not be about anonymity.  On the contrary, everyone has access to everyone else's expenditures.  That just happens to be the game here.

Maybe instead of "theme park" we should introduce our mixed use skyscraper, the one with work, home and play, shopping, medical care, and funereal services, a columbarium, all in the one tower or campus complex ("all under one dome" might be the expression).

My other observation, about "blockchain" as a meme, is that it represents "omni-triangulation" i.e. our power to squeeze lies (misinformation) out of the system is increasing exponentially in light of increasing fluency and monitoring.  

Getting away with fraud is getting harder in principle, thanks to techno-integration.

A lot of what's happening is those accustomed to relying on deception are encountering new learning curves, some of which are proving too steep, breaking the banks as it were.

When you're done at the theme park, whatever you have left in your electronic wallet, that you didn't spend, is still usable.  Withdraw it for cash at the ATM if you like.  There's no "currency conversion".  Everything stays M1.

Winter Solstice 2022

Slides Again

Today I dive back into data science world, with a new cohort.  This curriculum is primarily not by me; I add some wrinkles.  I'm happy with the content though, and don't mind using the canned slide decks.

In the embedded video I make it sound like people using decks by others is either a no-no or has never been thought of before I came along.  On the contrary, many a corporate training, say an onboarding, was canned long ago as a PowerPoint.  Every day, people sit through presentations of slides done by people other than the presenter.

That being said, in wanting to inject my own contribution into the mix, I get to stand back and take a look at current and/or best practices, regarding slide decks and the protocols around sharing them.

Advice Column

Perhaps the hallmark of the "modern European nation" in terms of liberalism is it doesn't conceive of itself as being in orbit around (controlled by) any one ethnicity (whatever the one). 

Israel stands out as the hallmark ethnic state, and as such is the envy of many. But then Israel is not in Europe and Saudi Arabia is just as ethnocentric in its own way (we should talk about Britain more). 

The American ideal is closest to having "race creed" etc. not matter on paper, even if in practice people are jerks. 

This is why any talk of "Ukraine for Ukrainians, make us be in Europe now!" sounds so oxymoronic. The Europeans think: "you must be civilized first, and treat the Russians as equals" to which the Ukrainians reply "wait, don't you hate the Russians too?" which to many is the clinching argument. 

What we need is more agreement on "totalitarianism is bad" (dystopian) without all the old branding. We've outgrown the old comic books.

What I'd remind Ukrainians of is that we're ethnically Russian over here too, in America. 

Not only Russian, obviously. 

Lots of Ukes. Lots of Ruskies. 

We've learned to live together. 

Sometimes I think Euros falsely conclude, based on clown shows in DC and recycled NATO propaganda, that America is foundationally Russophobic. To those with such a shallow understanding I'd say: keep digging. History is more complicated than good versus bad. 

If you moralize a lot (or too quickly?), consider you might be a dummy.

XREF:  

Statecraft: the Crafting of States
Rebuilding Ukraine
Breakaway Republics
Ethnocentrism