Happy New Year!

:: some belated bubbly ::

The above PKL static JPEG alludes to a recent thread on Synergeo, wherein one John Brawley of Tverse has been drawing our attention to this "dunce cap" model. Notice how the cap's triangles rise a little more steeply than their square underpinnings.

The bubbles are of course an added special effect, from JASC PaintShop in this case. I've tried to capture the gist of our Synergeo discussions, in this mathcast archived at Math Forum, and from the quasi-mythical Iraqi province of Bordûm.

Replying to a poll on KOIN News at Six: I like Beervana (a play on Nirvana) even better than Beertown (or "BeerTown" in geek), but accept both/either as alternate monikers for our Rose and/or Bridge City.

Now we just need a Portland-made beer named Samsara (in Klingon?).

Dawn is doing DreamQuest tonight, at Trinity Cathedral, just like old times. She went with Carolyn dressed to the nines in an Owl Cape, handmade by Phyllis of TBC.

Bumper sticker I saw today, on some Oregonian's car:

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (movie review)

My long term readers know I don't always review movies in chronological sequence (what a silly order to go by for anything, right?), so here I'm meditating on a 1972 classic, filmed in the wilds of the Peruvian Jungle starting not far from the ancient Incan capital of Machu Picchu.

I've watched this a few times before, but not recently, and never with the interview with Werner Herzog, the German and English speaking director (maybe Incan as well?). I fell asleep listening to him, and not because I was bored, but because I'd just come from a lecture on sleep disorders at Wanderers by a Shakespeare quoting practicing psychiatrist (packed house), and I came home of two minds: to watch this movie; and to sleep, perchance to dream.

So Aguirre is this mental case who is out to conquer the region, knowing it's been done in Mexico, that the history books are full of such games of pirate treachery. He's too sly to nakedly seize power, but crowns an underling, who shows backbone, bless his heart, but eats too much. Then we have the two XXs (another XX appears later, and fails, like her husband, to hear the Word of God): the delicate princess in the sedan chair, somewhat reminiscent of Kate in Lost, in terms of situation and regal bearing, if not outward behavior, and Aguirre's daughter, gorgeously solitary in her suffering under this tyrant father, who only wants to do it for her. Very compact and psychological. Plus Mother Nature is all around.

During the sleep disorder lecture, which was about the normal sleep cycle, in contrast to all the pathologies, I was tap tapping on my laptop about this number 6174. If you take any four digit number, zeros OK, but never all four the same, and flip it to maximum and minimum permutations, i.e. 6741 and 1467 (always inverses in that way), and subtract, and keep doing it, eventually you'll end up in this "kernel" (6174). I give more details about all this in the Math Forum.

An interesting feature of this Jungle search party is how little people talk, and when they do, it's not to resolve anything, except when it's in writing and made part of the official record. Mostly they just gaze into their own souls and/or play the flute. Even the horse seems more interior, a ghost horse, than exterior.

I salute Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski (a magnificent Aguirre), for inspiring the confidance and level of participation they got from such a marvelous and intelligent cast. And speaking of movie directors, I caught the NPR interview by Terry Gross of Richard Linklater. Towards the end, Linklater is basically razzing kids who want to grow up and make movies ("the chances of that happening..."), which I imagine grated on Terry's nerves a bit (anyway, did mine), but going back I heard a caring teacher, really spurring young listeners to rise to the occasion and live their dreams.

Don't just be a spectator in this game of life, and always remember: Mother Nature is watching.

My thanks to Mike Hagmeier for reminding me about Aguirre (Fitzcarraldo reenqueued), and to Trevor Blake for steering me to the 6174 discussion, over coffee at Peet's.

Funny Story

Ever preparing to fight the last civil war, the American generals girded themselves. Katrina hit first, which didn't count, because she's Mother Nature, and Mother Nature always wins.

Back on the ground, what happened next surprised people: the West Coast declared war on the East Coast, and the latter capitulated immediately, sparing us any unsightly bloodshed.

And once again, the USA generals were caught unprepared.

The moral of this tale: war is always surprising.

Local Activism

Winterhaven parents are up in arms because the School Board plans to close it down, separating the program from the building, and then moving the program to a strategic location far away from its current one, thereby disrupting many lives, for the sake of the children.

Their idea is that if the program is such a good thing (which all claim that it is), then it deserves to be in a bigger facility, so more kids might join. The idea that the school's relatively small size might have something to do with its success, doesn't bubble up as relevant, even though that's what the students are claiming (who listens to them?).

Nor can they think in terms of spreading a successful program, rather than closing it down to reopen it elsewhere, as that would mean two Winterhavens, which'd confuse everybody. Rather, they must perform a heart transplant, and save one community by killing another.

Something you have to understand about School Board people: they're volunteers with busy lives, surrounded by paid staffers with hidden agendas. There's a lot of wheeling and dealing that goes on. I doubt parents know even the half of it.

Some Winterhaven parents were rather vocal this year, objecting when the military came around with its annual bus 'em to brainwashing "science" briefings ("wow, look at that cool jet fighter"). Most schools just get in line because they're "too poor" to offer such "science" on their own, but Winterhaven, proud of its science, was less compliant.

Could there be an element of retribution in this School Board maneuver i.e. let's show activist parents what happens when they question authority a little too loudly? I'll ask my connections in Salem if they think there's a link.

Follow-up: likely no link, but there're plenty of other reasons to want to kill Winterhaven. On the other hand, parents have gotten wise to the fact that the democratic machinery of government gives them an upper hand. There's a meeting this evening. Stay tuned.

Nutty Gemstone

Here's the first in a three paragraph essay I posted to Math Forum yesterday:

I bank on kids having an innate desire to test the waters, since even comfortable niches keep sliding out of reach over the horizon going backwards. By which I mean: the push to grow up is relentless and not under any child's conscious control. They outgrow clothes, teddy bears, monster chess, lullaby lyrics and so on, in quick succession. Were it not for Sims and Sims 2, most teenagers would be too adult-minded to play with dolls anymore, but with 2nd Life, it's adults going back to doll play that's happening (so yes, there is play in adulthood).

In case you're wondering, no, I'm not piloting any 2nd Life avatar. However, I did spend hours in ActiveWorlds (AW) closer to that time when Bonnie and I attended the same party in Santa Cruz, hosting Gerald of Java World, of Fluidiom later, other luminaries.

Bonnie had already done, or was soon to complete [editor: review timeline], an AW High, with a library and art gallery linking into neighboring spaces.

In the educational branch (AWE), we built on the science fiction assumption that ActiveWorlds used an IVM (octet truss) for referencing constructs, and built a university, to which we invited people for seminars, a Fuller School dollhouse (cute) or SimVille, a little Buckydom.

:: heron ::
(photo by R. Sonnenfeld, NMT)

Indexing Copyrighted Works

I watched a panel discussion on satellite last night, well into 2007, regarding Google's intent to search engine the pre Internet database of print media.

Publishers feel it's their right to capitalize on copyrights they might own, perhaps owing to deals with authors, while meanwhile librarians exult in the new ways their great libraries might serve as front ends to whatever electronic stash Google in the long run manages to amass, including by data mining in Princeton's Firestone and Fine Hall libraries.

I think the trick is to see it both ways, and to recognize that authors aka authorities deserve compensation, one way or another, but exactly how they get it is what keeps changing.

Publishers too perform value added, not just through distribution, but by banking on stables of authors, assuming some risk. Universities, also publishing ventures (as academic presses) likewise assume such risks, in providing tenured and other tracks to their human resources.

Strong business models help stabilize this picture, giving authors more time to focus on exercising their best skill set, meaning less worrying about where the next publishing deal is coming from.

In the old days, Google's intended function, which is to "bring to mind" the books you might wanna look at, based on some keyword scans, was best served by living scholars. Indeed, living scholars are still Google's chief competition in that we're each proprietary search engines, able to connect things up pretty neatly, especially in some chosen field or discipline.

When it comes to quality linking and match making within a tight field, you really can't beat a real human.

Google, on the other hand, is in response to the exponential curves we've been seeing in print for quite some time now, curves made yet steeper by the Internet itself.

The need for machine indexing, ala Vannevar Bush's MEMEX, ala CERN's need for hypertext (to cohere particle physics), has never been greater, in the sense that individual human beings, capacious and intelligent though they are, don't have mastery over that scale of a database, minus these new power tools.

Google, like a multi-story crane, bulldozer, supertanker, is a result of coordination and group effort, by individual humans, to make a superhuman difference. Nor is Google the only such player, but is well representative of our need for media indexing on a gigantic scale.

And let's remember that as authors, not just as readers, we crave these new levels of access, akin to higher security clearances in the spy novels and TV shows. "So what secrets top these top secrets I'm getting?" is the perennial question.

A lot of the new stuff worth reading, watching, listening to, will have availed itself of such higher levels of access as the new indexing technologies provide, we may lip smackingly anticipate. We'll understand our history better, our selves better, is the promise of what might be characterized as a philosophical enterprise (building a new meta level).

We really need that element of brute force, those harnessed teams of big dino gigahertz and terabyte computers, to plough through such a vast acreage of electronified materials, and Google has primitive muscle of that nature (e.g. in The Dalles, Oregon), and not only Google. Several panelists expressed their belief that the USA itself would have more potential. But why see it as either/or?

Relevant:
Peter Suber's Open Access News (blog)

A Limiting Ball

:: Times Square New Years ball ::

I was mentioning to David Feinstein yesterday about misplacing my new global matrix jacket, a gift from Glenn, and then launched into a short monolog re the hexapent, over some excellent Thai food, on SW 2nd near Burnside in downtown Portland (Donzo was there too).

Mathcast: as the number of triangles defining the 12 pentagons, the rest hexagons, of the hexapent tiling, increases indefinitely, the positive epsilon difference twixt the degrees around each vertex (a local apex), and 360 degrees (perfect flatness), gets ever smaller. And yet these small differences, whatever they may be, add up as "taxes" to a constant 720 degree "budget" no matter how many or how few.

René Descartes knew about the 720 degrees. Bucky's contribution, I passed on to David, was more in terms of a cartoon: he made that 720 be a tetrahedron. In flying away from a flat surface, it subtracts exactly the right number of degrees for a convexity to form in its wake, say another tetrahedron, perhaps the first one's mirror image.

Tara, Brenna and I had lunch in the Providence cafeteria, Dawn joining us later for tea.

Before that, I had a heart to heart with Nirel over the phone, about her coffee shop scenario. Turns out we've had a lot of the same ideas, including around synergizing with television. Nirel'd be like that Greenwich Village character, the skilled behind the scenes match maker who introduced Bucky Fuller to Isamu Noguchi, changing the course of history thereby, and for the better.

Tonight we'll be sharing our New Mexico slides (projected off the Toshiba, through the Optoma) with Chuck and Mary Bolton, friends of our family since before I was born. We may swing by Rose's place on the way, so Tara might pick up some homework papers for Winterhaven she's missing.

:: Mary and Charles Bolton, Tara, Dawn ::

Wanderers 2006.12.27

Tonight was a small informal session, and I only showed up for part of it, in the middle somewhere. We talked Internet over optical fiber, the loss in data richness over the last leg of the trip (metal cable), and our own inhouse router woes, there being quite a maze of 'em. Glenn's son swung into it with gusto, thought maybe he could help sort it out. Terry is off writing at the beach we're thinking.

One thing we wanted to see on the Internet were these stereograms made from paintings by old masters (link).

Still later, I drove Carol (mom) and Julie (sis) back to their hotel, our pad not having sufficient floorspace, given all the offices.

I'm still reflecting on the apparent ability of Mayan civilizations to manage paradigm transitions in a self aware, non-catastrophic mode. At least, that seemed to be what was behind the intentional "decomissionings" of old HQS, with the new ones going in above. The old became the new basement, atop yet deeper basements, of world ball games gone by.

The Void

Synergeo 31185:

> I don't really know why I still try to convey this core concept
> to others; they almost never get it, nor get any better at
> getting near it.
>
> Peace
> JB
> jb@...
> Web: http://tetrahedraverse.com
>

From a slow laptop in Albuquerque (downloading IE7 in the background):

Buddhist literature may identify Void with Universe as well, but more in Fuller's sense, as "not a thing" but as a whole that we're only able to partially consider (as this or that).

Universe, in being non-simultaneously considerable, is not a point-to-able -- the pointer is included. You don't get outside of Universe in order to point to it, even by imagining a big bang (whatever you imagine is also included as more special case content).

How everything could just as well be nothing is what the concept of Void tends to encompass. We're as helpless to capture either in a thought or word (which doesn't stop the thoughts or words from occuring).

In Synergetics, Universe is "eternally aconceptual" meaning that whatever you're thinking of as Universe, ain't Universe (but is contained therein -- except the word "contained" implies some kind of "thing" with an inside and outside, a "concept" in other words, which ain't "it" either (there's no "it")).

The Void concept (yes, it has a life as a concept -- gets enmeshed with the rest of the machinery), hyperlinks to the "no self nature" concept, meaning no one thing or consideration has permanent or pure existence independently of the whole (Void, Universe, Nothing, Everything).

The cogito or ego, a belief in self nature, is an example of something we'd maybe like to hold on to in a static image or thought, as a kind of "thing" (like a stone). But "it" depends on, has meaning in the context of, an ever-changing environment.

"Me" and "not me" are codefinitional. Me + Environment = Universe. 0 = 0.

Kirby

Chimayo

photos by K. Urner

TechieTown

I continue brainstorming about remote technovillages wherein we'd showcase tomorrow's lifestyles today, including through reality television. One model is Oregon's Breitenbush, where a year round community provides the staffing for the visitor facilities -- all very laid back and rustic.

Lots of public school teachers'd come through on the public dime, as a part of their inservice training. They'd go home full of new ideas, about Pythonic mathematics and such.

Culturally speaking, it's difficult to win budget for such USA OS facilities, as anything so kwel and cutting edge gets appropriated as lures by the military's recruiters. Civilians aren't supposed to get out in front when it comes to high tech toyz, especially given the brokeback army and overstressed marines, with two whole foreign countries to keep safe from competing fundamentalisms (or whatever the mission, I've lost track, but anyway it's ongoing job security for a lot of career Iron Mountain types, helps 'em stay outta trouble).

Of course the compromise is to make these showcase remote techie towns paramilitary. Marines could train on their new biodiesel dirt bikes, preparing to protect the desert medevac communities we'd like to rapidly deploy to Darfur and such places, to get civilians out of their death camps and into something more comfortable.

If the USA were to source disaster relief in high gear, as it started doing during the South Asian Tsunami, that'd improve national security, as enemies wouldn't have such an easy time pointing to an out of control blundering idiot, mindlessly spazzing out around the globe, destroying civilian infrastructure, scaring everyone witless. Nobody loves Moron Nation, the puppet of a dying LAWCAP (what our gentle genius Medal of Freedom winner called the loser paradigm).

New Mexico would be a good state in which to get going with these experimental prototype communities of tomorrow. I would have said Florida, given Walt Disney already had the right idea (EPCOT). But LAWCAP's top management took over The Mouse and pretty much destroyed Disney's dream, turned it into another dreary moneymaking enterprise.

Competing Solutions

:: san miguel, socorro ::

I'm laptopping from Socorro, New Mexico, using a line of site antenna to New Mexico Tech, with an authorized static IP. I've been comparing notes with local faculty on various topics. For example: the right handed XYZ coordinate system is far more standard than the left handed one used in POV-Ray -- but we already knew that, didn't we?

So how should we improve students' education in America, make it "world class" as we say? My thinking has evolved in the direction of improving the average teacher's job description, less directly in terms of money, and more in terms of what opportunities for further education it provides.

Teachers need to role model the paradigm life long learner to their students. Inservice training, long a feature of the job, needs to become a relatively larger slice of the pie, in terms of the time and energy devoted thereto. A larger cast of players needs to take responsibility for giving teachers better overview, a better grasp of what goes on in various walks of life.

In this way, my own geek culture will get more of a footprint in K-12. More teachers will become aware of such innovative solutions as Pythonic mathematics.

Won't this approach lead to increasing rates of teacher loss to private industry and/or public service, as teachers learn programming say, on the public dime? Yes. We need to build that in to the model. Young, energetic grads, closer to grade schoolers in age and presumably culture, get into teaching as a way to continue their own educations. Perhaps only a minority stick with it as a life-long career.

Why should that be a problem?

According to this model, the job is more attractive up front, including as a stepping stone to other careers, so recruiting new teachers is suddenly that much easier. The military uses elements of this approach, with the draw of "the best toys." Civilians like toys too. A summer camp for teachers might feature newfangled shelter solutions, permaculture, hands-on access to tomorrow's high tech brands.

Master teachers that stick with it for the long haul become mentors for the relative newbies, perhaps roving the country in bizmos, helping to establish the new schema, based on what's already found to work in other regions of the country.

Relevant essays:
Re: Reality Check @ Math Forum
Re: What Is 21st Century Mathematics? @ Math Forum (Dec 19, summary, autobio)

Tough Choices

Another USA "education in crisis" report has bubbled up and grabbed some headlines. Some New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce has a pseudo-plan to make it all better.

Like other such reports, it dances around, defining terms, suggesting a party line, without ever diving into hard core content in any way -- except in terms of money.

Such science fiction is so typical of Americans: if we just pay high enough salaries, we'll get the most competent people, and our problems will simply fix themselves under the management of these highly paid superheros -- just give us another fifteen years, you'll see.

This is how CEOs like to self-mythologize, in terms of high "personal net worth," and their self-centered myopic ethos has rubbed off, spread into academia, with similarly corrupting consequences.

LAWCAP chewed through the USA's military's backbone long ago, leaving it mostly paralyzed and defenseless, easy prey for high personal net worth seeking politicians and their CEO backed lobbyist friends, all looking for more ways to deplete inventory, generate reorders, no matter the cost in human suffering.

Related reading:
Re: Report Urges Drastic Change, Higher Salaries @ Math Forum
Re: PUFM - Missing the Point @ Math Forum
Re: Fwd: What Is 21st Century Mathematics? @ Math Forum (Dec 19)

Shop Talk

We joined in the Xmas frenzy a bit today, sweeping through both a Valde*mart and a We Be Toys (names changed to protect the innocent), ending up in an upscale toy shop, Wakey's, in downtown Portland near the Multnomah County Library.

On another front, we chickened out of a "Class C" camper van opportunity, once the subject of antifreeze came up. It'd cost extra to thaw the unit, plus we'd need to commit to supplying an AC umbilical cord solution come evenings, with temperatures averaging in the low teens, well below freezing (Fahrenheit, sorry) -- otherwise her sink 'n can would freeze right up again.

Using keyboard and mouse, I morphed the camper into an SUV and felt relieved for having done so. Lining up campus housing isn't a problem. The bigger vehicle will help us lug around the O2 concentrator, useful at high altitudes.

[ When more gnu math teachers take to the road in real bizmos someday, the problem of "mooring" will have more routine solutions depending on which economic sector is being served, e.g. a brand X certified pro might snuggle up to an appropriate campus building and jack in, whereas other brands of roving road warrior might prefer the sweet seclusion of less urban sites, less smack in the middle of some academential funny farm.]

Uncle Bill swung through again in his red Aztek, bearing pie and an invitation to lunch up on Hawthorne (Bridgeport's Portland Ale House was our selection). He's done about all he might humanly do to promote his well crafted history of pre-WWI submarine building in the Pacific Northwest. He's taking some time off to just enjoy life, is looking forward to Colorado.

We're bummed about missing Laurie's and Terry's Hannukah party again this year, but still plan to celebrate. Plus there's another party I'm not mentioning, a surprise -- but we're missing that too. Turning down invitations is a part of life. Ed had to do it all the time, especially as he got older.

Milestones (to be continued)

:: branch office implosion ::

:: momento of mom's ::

AntiRacism

Scientific American did a cover story in December, 2003 questioning the dogma of races, zooming in to the genomic level, and finding genetic correlations among subpopulations, regionally mappable dispersions of this or that risk factor and so on, suggesting the "race" concept wasn't entirely empty.

Coming at it from another angle, the obvious superficial feature groups men hoped to capture with the Twelve Races idea (or was it Seven?), don't have any inherent genomic integrity, in the same sense that only twelve orders of a 52 card deck might be considered "the pure ones" -- except, of course, in some humanly contrived game of relatively fleeting historical interest.

Nature, however, escapes such easy schemata and gives us an exponential library of genomic possibilities, each specific human a checkout example from said digital library. Presuming humans persist with this base template, a lot like King Kong's, the flexibility of our design will continue to undergo testing by the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial environments, with many new readings constituting a response.

There is no seven reading "core syllabus" from which all the others deductively derive, not really adding anything new. This was the snobbery of the "racial purity" buffs: they wanted to typify the archetypes while branding competing readings as "mongrel" i.e. tainted by degenerative impurities, ala Dr. Strangelove. They feared a level playing field, needed this artifical bias twixt "pure" and "impure" to handicap the competition.

So yes, by all means lets correlate genes and risk factors, genes and other genes, following wherever the statistics lead us. It's an empirical science and we have much to learn. Making good on the promise of personalized medicine, wherein we craft unique treatments, depends on our getting on with these detailed genomic studies.

The science fiction layer was this "just a few pure shuffles" myth, which, even if nationally geographically based, isn't a good roadmap to the future, where inbreeding will likely reflect other proclivities, such as the desire to live with and raise other skiers, other specialized Olympians in one sport or another (to take one example of humans forming voluntary affiliate subgroupings).

Lifestyle and ethnicity go together, with genomics along for the ride, a prehistoric substrate, still very relevant to medical science, but not especially useful to the various racisms, not really leverage or ammo for would-be Ozymandius type dictators over future breeding patterns.

We don't really know what all the interattractive ethnicities will be, have lost track already, there being even today so many from which to choose.

Related reading:
Re public education @ Math Forum (December 2006)
Re teaching advise sought... @ Math Forum (December 2006)
No Race, No Class @ grunch.net/synergetics/terms.html

Coffee Shop Talk

Wanderers was open agenda this morning, and we were blessed with a world traveling couple, friends of Milt's, freelancers attracted by Portland's cosmopolitan kulture, and with a lot of combined and individual experience in organizational development.

Our conversation veered through the Khyber Pass, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, to Ken Wilber, to Lesotho, to South Africa (protea in particular), to Cape Town, where it turned out we'd overlapped as attenders at the 1999 Parliament of World Religions, our family as Quaker delegates, and guests of the Deputy Minister of Defense at the time, Nozizwe Madlala- Routledge, also Quaker.

When the discussion turned to coffee shops, given Nirel's project, we learned about The Great Good Place, a book helping to define the role such institutions might play in our culture, or already do in some cases. The Communknitty in San Jose also typifies this pattern language, which doesn't have to center around coffee.

Dawn filtered the newspaper for me this morning, before getting her toes done with Aimée, pointed me to a Math Wars report on B2, and to an email address on C1 for reporting "early user impressions" of the new Metro-Fi service. I'll forward a link to my recent report on that subject.

A New Beginning

:: closing PKL ::

Many thanks to Patrick for the use of his truck, and to Derek, for lending a hand. Today the Portland Knowledge Lab vacated its first home, an ActivSpace incubator on 8th & SE Main.

:: reopening PKL ::

Now I'm sitting in the above depicted chair (foreground), using wireless from the Toshiba Satellite laptop.

The wall design was made for Dawn by her friends: some 10K cranes glued to a repainted crafts table she'd used for Turning the Wheel, a small business for teaching rituals around the eight Celtic high holy days: Samhain, Winter Solstice, Imbolc, Spring Equinox, Beltaine, Summer Solstice, Lughnassad, and the Fall Equinox.

In front of me: a cuboctahedron atop an icosahedron, symbolizing the ascendency of Mind over Brain (a theme in Synergetics, an important philosophical work on our syllabus).

:: advent ::

Bridge City Friends have been celebrating Advent for some years now. We've been less active in the life of our Meeting of late, but are continuing the tradition, which includes reading aloud, lighting a candle, and opening these little doors in an Advent Calendar in the days before Christmas.

Wanderers 2006.11.28

Terry Bristol (foreground) feeding
video signal of Micheal Sunanda (background)
to Doug Strain (on screen)

Micheal Sunanda regaled us with stories about spirals, their omnipresence, their vortexial and toroidal properties, with a special focus on the Earth's magnetic field.

Other Wanderers chimed in, both supportively and with skeptical wise cracks. Micheal was very engaged, the opposite of a shrinking violet. He's a credit to his hippie ethnicity.

Doug Strain, metrologist, joining us by closed circuit TV, reminded us that words in a vacuum are difficult to control, meaning-wise, which is why sharing measurements and observations is so important -- we need shared access to lots of raw global data to find common ground, even before we pinpoint any areas of real disagreement.

But it wasn't as if Micheal was avoiding all data, plus he's right that lots of relevant empirical info is shrouded in secrecy, locked away from public view (motivations vary as to why), so "establishment scientists" don't always appear to be playing with a full deck either.

The game is to get some dots (data points) out there, then edge-connect them into some credible model, the more omnitriangulated the better. The result is always full of holes (dots + holes = connections + 2). That's just in the nature of thinking. We improve our models over time, provided we're still open to feedback.

Science should be in a relationship of friendly banter with its own fringe, participating in the give and take, not hunkering down defensively in humorless silence. Micheal's emotive polemics, his wild theories about the Earth actively synthesizing matter from energy, physically growing as a result, deserve continual reality checking. Science is an ongoing enterprise, not a completed body of work.

It's these feedback loops that we need, intelligent cybernetics, not one side or another proclaiming eternal victory, picking up its marbles and going home, outwardly prideful, aloof, disengaged, snooty to the max.

The best way to showcase mature theories is to compare and contrast them with competing alternatives. Simply dismissing the competition out of hand with a haughty sniff robs onlookers of educational opportunities. Micheal wants to be grappled with. Wanderers provide a good venue for him.

We had a great turnout, including dear Nancy, to whom I waved from my darkened alcove off to the side of our packed meeting room. Then she vanished into the night as stealthily as she'd arrived.

I got home late, after hobnobbing with principals, stopping by Glenn's new apartment, closer to his work. I donned my wireless headphones, so as not to disturb sleeping family members, and caught up with Couric and her CBS team (example story: the dying Dead Sea).

poster about spirals in nature

Space Needle

:: spy story ::

:: observation deck ::

:: spys' nest? ::