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.