More on Thanksgiving

In the original telling, the colonists were ill prepared, after a life in the English countryside, ala Wind in the Willows, for the challenges of harvesting before winter, surviving 'til spring, in their magnificent New World.

In neighborhoods where Anglos and Navams got along, the theme was fellowship and mutual enjoyment of the fruits of one's labor, and, overwhelmingly greater, the generosity of Nature herself, to those who respect her.

Yes, Navams were romanticized, then as now, as the early pioneers of American cultures. They'd had many generations to get it right, through trial and error, through encoding their findings, before those colonists arrived from over the Atlantic.

Other immigrants didn't respect the Navams much and assumed all along the challenge was to just get rid of 'em or, failing that, to pen them inside of demarcated areas, cut off from adjacent lands, there to be forgotten, neglected. Of course this strategy was doomed on many levels, but did spawn a large bureaucracy and lots of map drawing.

Today, in 2006, many of the original nations have reconstituted sufficiently to set up self-sustaining businesses, casinos in particular, in some cases as stepping stones to further ventures. For example, in the State of Oregon we have the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde and its Spirit Mountain casino, a funds-generator for many worthy causes, including grants to OMSI, our science museum.

Further north, in the State of Washington, in Stillaguamish country where I'm writing this, the Angel of the Winds casino performs similar community service, helping to revitalize both the tribe, and the surrounding ecosystem (a large percentage of the profit is earmarked for wild salmon restoration).

Thanksgiving is a time to take some time off to just celebrate what we already have (so many treasures) versus what we still have ahead of us, both to be and to do.

Swordplay with Zorro

Some of you old fogeys may remember TV's original Zorro series, another take on the masked man lone ranger theme, this time with a more Mexican flavor.

Swordplay is also a metaphor for flashy debates, wherein each player attemps to best his opponent with rapier sharp wit (another cliché).

So there's this guy Haim over on math-teach whom I spar with a lot, and whom I've nicknamed Zorro (a compliment). We do the Y-chromo thing (fight), but I think in ways even some X-filed Pam and Betty types will find entertaining.

Here's an excerpt:

Cyber-curricula have a leveling aspect, as kids
nearer Katrina's epicenter tune in and bliss out
on 'Warriors of the Net' (why wait for stupid big
dummy textbooks to catch up?). They feel more
empowered by Python and Ubuntu than by any
King's English I'd warrant, given how the latter
has been dumbed down (slowed, degraded) by
unimaginative bankers who can't fathom open
source and its math-teaching significance to
our digitally savvy ethnicities.

I might have said "emerging digitally savvy ethnicities" (more showing off) but that's in the nature of fast-paced think on your feet debates: lotsa coulda- shoulda- woulda- saids in retrospect. So save it for the rematch?

Wanna read more? Here's a link to the full text (typos elided), plus a tie-back to the contextualizing thread @ Math Forum (now at Drexel University, but started at Swarthmore College).

Fast Food Nation (movie review)

This hard edged study in bleakness pits a powerless good against a dreadful evil: cows to the slaughter on an industrial scale with humans likewise objects of gross indignities, behind a cosmetic, antisceptic veneer (of mostly lies, unless you stick to just fries, and even they may be tainted).

The cruel bullheaded engineers, descending tiers of lesser bovines, contrast with the stunning innocence, vulnerability and apparent naïveté of the cows at the bottom of this food chain.

A horror film and psychological study, without much to lighten the mood (even what's funny is grim). Many will dismiss it as preachy propaganda.

I was reminded of El Norte and Elephant.

Loose Ends

Regarding that shower drain, I did end up asking Dex ("dex knows") for a professional plumber, went with Rescue Rooter with its multi-page ad.

At first he described it as a nightmare job, as both the shower and tub drain to the same T, meaning he'd need to make a 90 degree turn into the T's bottom -- a difficult maneuver for his power snake.

But then he realized the bathroom sink also drains to the same pipe, lower down but still above the likely clotting point. This became his point of access.

I wondered if "scare then relief" was a typical rollercoaster before closing the deal -- the customer is just glad it'll be easy / routine and signs gratefully.

No, it's not quite like balloon angioplasty, but there are some analogies, especially from a Monster House perspective.

I felt OK about shelling out the $167, as it was obvious to me that my skillset and toolset just weren't up to the job i.e. I wasn't being redundant (sometimes another form of irrelevant -- not always though).

As for that paint job, they said they'd come back for a couple loose ends I might find, plus put another coat of weather proofing on the front door. I said I'd gladly pay 'em then but then went up to Hawthorne. By the time I'd come back, the check had been cut. I blame myself for not communicating more clearly with my wife.

One of the guys was a former Navy submarine divemaster and I got into sharing about my uncle's new book, now with a US-based publisher. Another member of the team, I think the company president, fell off a ladder at another site and hurt his hand really badly meaning time in the ER.

I hope he's OK by now. I liked their energy and the house looks great -- they did a good job for the price I paid. I'd recommend 'em to others.

Synergeo 30547

Re: the effect of the environment

--- In synergeo@yahoogroups.com, tim stockton wrote:

> politics is really fragmenting-

Lots of phoney baloney scapegoating going on here in the US.

Trying to blame everything on GWB's inner circle is a silly cop out though he does make a fun lightning rod in a storm with that What Me Worry?™ attitude.

It's been an oppressive period, a lot of it backlash (reactionary).

When a Medal of Freedom winner's inventive thinking is kept away from public school kids, it oughta be obvious to any astute observer that moronic monkey brains are in the control room (or so they fancy themselves).

Anyway, didn't we already see all this in Planet of the Apes?

Fortunately, the Iraqis and Iranians have an easier time following, as they never lost touch with geometry so completely. NCLB owes a lot to Arab and Persian cultures. Sound familiar?

Kirby

Peer Group Networking

Of course there is any number of ways to resequence topics in a logical progression, especially since maths form a network, not a linear stairway, so it's really a matter of deepening over time, by retracing a lot of the same ground over and over, adding in new topics as they arise (this is of course an organic ideal rarely attained without caveats).

However, there's a comfort zone that goes with one's ethnicity as a math teacher that prevents resequencing too deeply and disruptively, which expresses itself with this clinging to physical hardcopy textbooks as the embodiment of any serious-minded approach to math teaching.

More emphemeral digital alternatives, including hard media such as CD and DVD, get shunted into a holding pattern (mañana syndrome) while in practice each year is much like the last, for at least a half generation (a decade or so), again because of the comfort zone of the math teaching ethnicity.

In competition with the math teachers, we now have the emergence of self-teaching peer groups who forsake the more traditional textbooks in favor of cyber-curricula of one flavor or another.

Traditionally, these peer groups have formed in the adult world as teams within companies, in order to share inhouse proprietary knowledge and trade secrets related to the business. However, with the emergence of social networking software such as MySpace (Orkut an early pioneer in the genre), college and grade school aged kids in the K16 pipeline are finding increasing opportunities to do more than just socialize.

They're colluding to form study groups, other intelligence gathering machinery for the purpose of practicing the social skills they'll need to survive in tomorrow's cyberspatially aware business networking environments.

Multiuser online gaming is another vehicle for this kind of personal development, and I'm not just talking about first person shooters and their limited appeal among girlz, Lara Croft notwithstanding (CBS News correspondents Lara Logan and Kimberly Dozier more define the archetype -- intelligent and compassionate, not unabomber gun-toting thugs).

In any case, marvels and superheros abound in this cartoon world of shared imagination, resulting in an explosion of new ethnicities and subcultures, many of them shared internationally i.e. across the political lines drawn by earlier generations of world game player.

Some Overview

interactive shell languages

In contrast to batch compiling decks of punch cards, interactive shells provided a command line experience. Logo and Scheme, both influenced by LISP, Iverson's APL (and later J), Guido's Python, all share this feature, as does xBase (e.g. dBase, FoxPro), another language that's been important to me.

my trajectory '58-'80

Sometimes sharing autobiography is helpful. Above I'm sketching my trajectory from a 1958 birth in Chicago, through my Princeton chapter (Class of 1980), where I majored in philosophy, but also dove into computer science to some degree.

Pythonic infrastructure

Today's picture is rather complicated, Python being implemented in at least three system languages: C, Java and C# (plus whatever those Nokia cell phones use). The C# version, called IronPython, sits atop the .NET engine with its Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

Since Microsoft defined much of the .NET API as a public standard through ECMA, a Linux version, named Mono ("moe no" not "mah no" i.e. monkey in Spanish) is evolving to bring .NET ("dot net") capability to the Linux platform as well.

IronPython should provide a lot of cross-platform capability twixt Linux and Windows, if Mono keeps up to speed.

A student wanted to know to what extent Python is used to make quality games. I talked about game engines, written in a faster system language, supporting Python bindings for higher level scripting, and about Pygame as a good example.

During this same class, I demonstrated getting Fibonacci Numbers from a Python generator and their convergence to 1/phi, phi being the ratio of a regular pentagon's diagonal to its edge. Note that some authors switch the meanings of phi and tau, plus many use the Greek letters φ and τ.

rotating by theta

Most student coding time was spent modifying orbits.py, a module I wrote while on vacation in sunny Florida at Bud's house. I've published more information about this module and its context in the Math Forum archives.

Related blog posts: More Pythonic Mathematics, Whiteboard Doodles, Next Generation, New Wings

No Problems in Houston

I'm watching a flatscreen in the Houston airport, seeing exDCI Gates ('91-'93) is replacing Rumsfeld @ DoD -- watching GWB spar with the press.

My seat mate on the plane had overview brokering architectural services, e.g. to a BBQ selling chain. CNN had an interesting Life in a Box feature about a design firm recycling shipping containers into homes and offices -- reminded me of Cape Town, that school we visited.

Houston's airport makes me appreciate PDX's no hassles free wireless. Here I'm being nickle and dimed, still the norm in most USA airports. Dawn and I are sharing a Wendys burger, Frostie™ and fries. They didn't sit next to me because of the Exit Row stipulations (I really appreciated the extra leg room). Inflight movie: Little Man (goo goo).

Is Synergetics really a philosophy then? That's what I tell people, who ask what I'm teaching on Synergeo these days.

Revamping Remedial Math

So I'm chawing through a list of "to do's" today, including buying a plumbers' snake, practicing on my shower drain (right now I'm just waiting for the poisons to work -- trying to avoid phoning a specialist from the Yellow Pages).

In the midst of such chores, I managed to kick out Revamping Remedial Math, a typos-ridden (but still highly readable) triptych regarding my three pronged strategy for upgrading remedial math (the one you get the second time through the wringer):

1. have computer science and mathematics vie for the same talent, agreeing with economists that competition breeds out complacency
   
   
2. make it easier for students to vote with their feet, by staging some version of this competition in their local area and
   
   
3. let schools wishing to opt out of this sporting spectacle do so, i.e. remain on the sidelines

Those schools choosing to play and wishing coaching might subscribe to one or more roaming services (e.g. Wanderers based in Linus Pauling's Portland boyhood home), staffed by suitably Olympian role models willing to set up and stage inhouse circus slash recruiting drives with lasting benefits for the hosting Academy.

I've been thinking of ways to promote master teachers into such responsible roles, primarily by forming alliances with the open source movement, as we want a lot of transparency and freedom in this picture (not forgetting competent engineering) both to build trust and to provide ample opportunities for selfless public service within high performance, challenging scenarios ("be all you can be" in other words).

If you're a long time reader of this blog, you've already seen a lot of the blueprints, which also involve promoting closer ties between Native Americans (navams) and the various migrant occupying populations (Anglos, Euros, Afros... Filipinos).

So-called Indian Reservations offer naturally attractive training grounds for those wishing to stage a trully American renaissance in our education establishments. Our heritage in its broadest, most inclusive sense (Mahayana) will by definition include the more cliquey / exclusive sub- and counter- cultures (Hinayana).

We have so many treasures.

Voting Machine Story

I wasn't satisfied by the Diebold employee's verbal assurances in response to CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian's question as to why we should trust a private company that's only willing to provide verbal assurances. Is that the best the American people deserve, when it comes to customer service? [story]

Computer science faculties have gotten adversarial responses, instead of full cooperation, and if they're not completely satisfied, I'm not either.

In fact, most of us who're serious about security recognize that open source transparency is probably the best way to go in these circumstances. For example, just because RSA is both public key and open source, doesn't mean it's crackable (i.e. insecure).

At the very least, Diebold should by now have produced feature length documentaries about the vote counting process, and distributed these free to public schools on DVD, so that teachers might answer their students with confidance regarding what happens to a vote after you push the button (check the check box or whatever).

Just saying it's "high tech" and therefore over the heads of young children, is both a cop out and a smoke screen. Given the ambient level of distrust is so high (i.e. you can't lock us all up as crazy for questioning the integrity of the process), this level of arrogance is simply unacceptable.

I got the impression from Keteyian's report that the plan is to blame early Alzheimers among seniors if for some reason the rigging fails this time through. That seems like a lame strategy and I hope Diebold gets reamed if they try it (Congress first though, as they're the ones who sold us out for cheap).

Anyway, I'm glad we have vote by mail in Oregon, plus a culture that encourages whistle-blowing.

Also, if any patriot within Diebold is aware of any funny business (and I sincerely hope there is none), then I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we get full testimony on camera -- may have it in the can already for all I know (domestic politics is not my area of chief competence, although rigging elections is not a completely unfamiliar topic for me).

Halloween 2006

wolf man orthodondist

receptionist goth

Jim Lehman with Wanderers

mantelpiece detail

Lynne Taylor as "Biogem"

The U.S. Versus John Lennon (movie review)

I saw this with Matt, appropriately, as John was a star in his sky, and his murder left a palpable emptiness. But this movie isn't about the senseless act of violence that ended his life. Rather, it's a shared trip down memory lane with some of our favorite talking heads. A lot of this story was new to me (I followed The Beatles from a much greater distance, mostly from my perch in Rome).

Yes, Lennon had a privileged life by working stiff standards, and probings by the FBI don't begin to approach the terrors of Vietnam, but that doesn't make him an enemy. His was a family values lifestyle, if that means loving your wife and kids and wanting what's best for them.

But when your wife is an already accomplished conceptual artist, quite able to expertly morph into some ninja princess master of psycho-guerilla warfare (as Bucky sometimes called it), and when you're one of these new breed of idols called "rock stars" whatever that means, and pretty clever besides, it's really unlikely your adventure will remain within "normal" parameters. Theirs certainly didn't.

Many of these fans (plus a few loyal opponents) were new to me, as on camera personalities, although G. Gordon Liddy I've seen and always get a big kick out of.

Richard Nixon has become archetypal in some way, surreal and Shakespearean. He's the star of his own universe most definitely, but one that's hard to break into, if you're not him. I experience compassion.

This fight between angry killer bee isms (communism... anti-communism), always so ready to devolve into stupid shootouts, as if that solves anything; Lennon was trying to show a better way to fight these battles, making them more like chess. He definitely engaged Nixon's attention, made more of a game out of it. Clowning is a serious business my friend, any real circus manager knows that.

And remember to set your clocks back tonight folks; the summer of '06 is long over, never to return. On a happier note, we get that extra hour in bed, perhaps reminding us of John. Peace.

Geometry in Nature

"at peace in Universe"
(statue made in Nepal)

"Hexapent in the Silicon Forest"
("Quantum Reality" by Julian Voss Andreae)

"Reading Hungarian Geometry"
(at Peet's in Lake Oswego)

VIP Visits PKL

:: David Koski ::

I retreived David from his uncle's in Dunthorpe this morning. If neighbors Koski and Torvalds ever meet at parties, it's about Finland that they share, not boring operating systems.

Later we paid a visit to Meliptus, though the tide was too low to permit its emergence from the boathouse.

I took along my newly acquired Bobliographon, the SubGenius Psychlopaedia of Slack.

David invested a lot of his youthful days in sunny California exploring Synergetics-related geometry, especially phi-scaled tetrahedral blocks. Today, he's a union HVAC engineer in Minneapolis, still interested in geometry.

While I was returning David to his uncle's, and again stopping by Trader Joe's, Dawn and Tara went to Freddie's for the Sim Pets add-on to Sims 2. Tara is quite blissful, now that her cute electronic dolls have these cute pets to go with.

Last night I took her to see the kick-off ISEPP lecture, by Dr. William Saturno on Mayan archeology. Saturno is an excellent storyteller.

Mayan cities really chewed through those trees, sometimes resulting in their outright abandonment (and later reoccupation). The forests atop these ruins (many from hundreds of years before Jesus) remain discolored even to this day, thanks to all that limestone plaster, and hence their tell-tale visibility to satellites, helping archeologist geocachers get there first, to protect the public record from more selfish and greedy looters and their black market accomplices.

We've got trips locked in to both New Mexico and Orlando, though I'm on a tight leash these days, owing to my ongoing fun gig with Saturday Academy.

Related reading:
The Archeology of Mathematics Teaching @ Math Forum

American Pop (movie review)

Probably because we were just recently in Washington Square, NYC, this oldie but goodie seemed to jump off the shelf at Hollywood Video (along with the final episodes of Lost season 2).

The arch and famous fountain appear a few times in this animated feature, plus I dimly recall coming over from JSQ to attend a talk by Ralph Bakshi himself, closer to the time of this film's release (1981), at some NYU lecture hall also next to the park.

American Pop begins in Czarist Russia, where a mother and son escape a pogrom -- the rabbi dad falls to the sword, insisting on finishing his prayer.

After the mom dies in a garment factory fire, the son gets absorbed into Vaudeville, gets wounded in WWI (losing any chance for a good singing voice), marries a stripper, and eventually becomes a petty crime boss in Gangsterland USA (in part thanks to his own son's arranged marriage).

This next son, an accomplished pianist, enlists in WWII and is shot while playing, leaving his eldest to haunt Greenwich Village (enter the arch) and soak up its beat culture.

He makes his way, by stolen car and hobo train, to the drug, rock and anti-war scene in California -- by way of Kansas where a fling in the corn field begets a fourth generation (this we find out only later).

The last son ends up taking care of his washed up druggie dad (they move back to New York) who eventually abandons him (after first pawning the boy's guitar), and becomes the street smart punkish cocaine dealer with lots of music in his blood.

This last son becomes the superstar for the climax of this story, and although he's blue eyed and blond, all that American Heritage, Jewish included, is carried forward in the music, perhaps completing the great grandfather's prayer in some dimension.

The film uses interesting techniques, painting over live actors while sometimes splicing in raw documentary footage to add realism. Whereas the characters are fictional, the music is the real deal, popular American hits from throughout much of the last century.

For 12-year-old Tara (and for me), I thought this was a good history lesson, especially in complement with the EMP exhibits in Seattle and Nashville's Hall of Fame and Museum of Country Music. Follow the memes, study the genesis of your culture.

New Wings

This evening, I joined other Saturday Academy supporters, including Terry Bristol, to celebrate 23 years of operations plus the launch of a new public sector craft 'n groovy crew.

SA is finally going it alone, instead of under the auspices of this or that higher education institution (incubators OGI and PSU still plan to work in tandem).

We enjoyed finger food and alcoholic beverages in PSU's new computer science and engineering building, applauding speeches and interviewing star students, veterans of SA's courses and internship programs.


One student had helped program the latest Lego robot using prosthetics you can't buy on the open market, such as magnetic field and pH sensors. Another had helped with a laboratory process that more effectively colorizes viral gene splicers. A third had spent a summer diving into the nanotubes literature and eventually working on their synthesis. All of these kids were still high school aged.

You'll find more on Saturday Academy elsewhere in this blog. I've been an instructor at both the OGI and PSU sites, teaching Pythonic Mathematics, a way of learning mathematical concepts while developing fluency with a state of the art object oriented computer language.


I spent some of the evening chatting with a man with a son named Kirben -- such an unusual name. The dad is one of four random CalTech students on former defense secretary Harold Brown's Xmas card for the year 1970.

Musical Event @ Noguchi Museum

"peaceful garden"

"god's light"

"noguchi, fuller & sadao hqs"

John Belt and Oswego students

"setting up"

Angela Molenaar of BFI and composer Petr Kort

Noguchi bust of Bucky

Princeton Dinner

I joined fellow alums (hi Connie), a couple prospectives, parents of a current undergrad, and the staff of Pyramid Brewery (NW warehouse district), for a Princeton Club of Oregon celebration of our somewhat cerebral heritage last night. All told, about fifty of us showed.

Dr. Joshua Katz was there, hot off a jet, to stand and -- after either chicken, salmon, pork or pasta; wine, water or beer -- deliver Etymology: The Glamour of Grammar.

Among the words Dr. Katz was excited about last night and/or is known for in the etymological community, are: etymology (the word itself), you (the pronoun, Old English), eel & snake (Hittite through Latinate transformations), vespers (evening prayers) and badger (the mammal).

Princetonians lapped it up, then asked traditionally brilliant questions.

For example, I wanted to know if there was any precedent for this explosion of made up commercial words, like Tylenol and Toyota Camry. He joked about Häagen-Dazs (very made up) and all the obvious psychology that had gone into that. And no, probably no precedent.

He called on me as "Mr. Angil" because I'd earlier distinguished myself by fishing up the Latin root for eel (he'd polled his audience, just like he polls his students). I'd flashed on Angillara on Lake Bracciano in Rome's outskirts.

The Korean couple next to me featured a charming more loquacious mom (of a Princeton student, also of an NYU student), and a quiet dad who chuckled knowingly but never said anything. That reminded me of the cute Korean couple in Lost, which Tara and I were just watching, and I even caught myself blathering about that for a few seconds. A Being There moment.

To my right, the Latin teacher from Cottage Grove, with her two high school aged wards. They lapped it all up with the rest of us. My response to tough-to-get-in good schools is we just need a lot more of them. Princeton is great and we joke about God going there, but really its our wholesome Global University that's great, meaning this planet for starters, where God does indeed teach, with a special spin just for each of us.

Also yesterday, Uncle Bill came by, yet better versed in self-publishing, and we updated his website, plus I briefed him on iPods and Internet lore.

MacTarnahan's

Postpone the Elections?

So this Princeton computer scientist shows on TV how mindlessly easy it is to subvert the Diebold voting machine, and Diebold's lame retort is "you didn't have the latest version of our software."

That's supposed to inspire confidance?

We have the talent in this country to develop a transparent open source voting system with tons of built in protections. Banks know this stuff cold. When big money is at stake, they're among the first to demand auditing.

But when it comes to voting, where's the integrity? Who really defends democracy anymore? Anyone?

Dissecting critical, core civilian infrastructure, describing how it works, is an essential function of public education in the USA. If we expect to recruit new voters into the system, we at least owe them an explanation of how it all works.

If a teacher can't describe how a vote at the polling booth makes it to some HQS for tallying, with checks against abuse, then that teacher's students have been denied access to their most fundamental rights as USA citizens.

Congress needed to play a leading role in restoring trust in voting, electronic or otherwise.

Not having a secure system in place is terrifying, destabilizing, and to even implicitly endorse this status quo is to be a kind of terrorist for sure.

I'll be scanning my sources for any sign that the American people are being given a clear story about their newfangled voting system. Unless these stories appear, I don't think USAers should be coerced into voting by any "powers that be," nor should the results be given any legitimacy.

The election should perhaps be officially postponed, and no I'm not talking about martial law.

On the contrary, we should go into a holding pattern, with politicians forced to fix what's broken, every move scrutinized, run through a gauntlet of experts, the security-minded, those with real world auditing experience.

This would be interesting reality television, instead of just the namby pamby stuff like on Survivor (talk about lame).

Until then, whatever these politicians talk about on television is really of no weight or significance to us. We might as well tune out and just listen to Muzak™.

If the real USA isn't what's on TV, why should we even care? Let's just admit that our USA has been subverted and destroyed from within, and move on, maybe start over on an island someplace.

Antarctica anyone?

A Security Mom Speaks Out

Bagdad interior

Cindy Sheehan took the stage at the Bagdad tonight. She spoke from the heart, to an enthusiastic audience, handling the obligatory heckler with ease.

I'd never been in the same room with her before (I was way up in the balcony). She thanked Portland for its strong support, and the Bagdad, and Thom Hartmann (who was not present).

Speaking of security moms, mine's flying back from Minneapolis tonight, where she was at some WILPF event (I'm hazy on the details). I'll be heading out to PDX to meet her plane.

Tomorrow, the painters arrive early and start doing some sanding.

Cindy