Exploring STEM

:: celebrating the summer solstice ::

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonhuman Wanderers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Play for Pay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the Yanks will understand that, maybe.

Hypertoon Exercise

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

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

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

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

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

Camp Generators

Back to the Future

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

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

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

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

Evolving Mythology

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friendship Societies

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

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

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

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

A Billion Billionaires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Patriotic Vista

Curating Control Rooms

Question Authority (School of Tomorrow)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explaining: Control Room

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portland Python User Group Meetup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Wikipedia:

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

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

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

Recap: Data Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

• seaborn
• pandas
• matplotlib
• numpy
  

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

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

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

Arrowhead Math

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Critique of Protestantism

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

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

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

Kinda like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chattering About Quadrays

 

What does ChatGTP know about Quadrays in 2023? 

A is for Anthropology. 

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

Talking Points on Medium.

 

Version Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think how little kids play with dolls.  

Janet says our dolly just blew up Nord Stream.  

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

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

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