In my Graph Theory 2025, I admit to not being a Marxist, or even a fan, which simply means I haven't done enough homework to count myself within that inner circle.
That doesn't make me unteachable, but on the other hand I'm pretty old (almost 67) so probably not really in need of yet another semantic framework, or dialectic or whatever we call it.
I get by with these holes. I'm a fan of Wittgenstein's and Bucky's. Many more. Storm Large...
I'm recycling a favorite recording, with permission from the original hosting channel, of a lecture-interview between myself and some math-savvy high dimension seekers and visualizers. A privilege. I'm using "hypertoon" lingo in "looping through" in the sense of revisiting one of the node-frames in our toon graph.
Operation Duckrabbit is about using Wittgenstein's later philo as a launching pad for another language, experientially based and informed by some of our greatest minds, such as Euler's. This language is somewhat meta to our knowledge base, metaphysics having somewhat given up the ghost by the time Fuller came along and breathed new meaning into that word. Ephemeralization is in the direction of the more metaphysical.
One of my themes is the peaceful coexistence of XYZ and IVM, two kingdoms never so conceived until recently, as no one had championed the IVM as a thing. XYZ defined the bottom rungs or steps of a ladder or stairway, toward a higher dimensional heaven, a game of ascension. The IVM arrowhead showed up proclaiming its 4Dness, which took attention, in the sense of limelight, away from the cube.
From the tetrahedron's point of view, or the 4eyes, the cube needed help anyway. This wasn't replacement theory, this was coming to the aid of an unstable fellow Platonic. This instability is usually not mentioned in polite company, where physical attributes, especially immutable ones, are unfair to use in any arguments. Bigotry has no place in Euclidean geometry.
The duo-tet cube, is still the cube, at which post most of the audience is relieved and moves on. However the die-hards want to examine the fineprint and they find a suggestion that their beloved cube, now stabilized, as an unseemly size, as anything other than unit would seem unseemly insofar as the cube is concerned. Dialing in a unit cube, volume-wise, takes the edges out of integer-ville and that's an unforgivable heresy in the die-hards' book.
I'd say the misapprehension of the blockhead group, the most cube-loyal, is our constant rejoinder that XYZ is one of Man's Wonders, using "Man" in that generic guy sense. Three basis vectors count as most elementary, with a secondary negative threesome comprising an omni-symmetrical beacon to any wayfaring spaceship.
"Ahoy, XYZ octahedron ahead at 3 o'clock" meaning that familiar "jack" pattern has been detected, meaning an origin, a (0,0,0). We have the API for that, and can refuel in a jiffy.
Also floating in this same space: the occasional caltrop, a four basis vectors affair, with no twinning, not that negating is discouraged, just unneeded, to span all-space. These beacons will have a (0,0,0,0) origin, and we have the API for that too.
The story I'm telling here is meant to remind us of other readings we may have done, including in Python source code, wherein a Vector and Qvector contain (x, y, z) and (a, b, c, d) data structures respectively. Each has a way of turning into the other. A Vector turns into its corresponding Qvector and vice versa. The addressing flips back and forth between systems.
How much of all this decodes, and how much stays mumbo jumbo, as a lot to do with what the psychologists call gestalts, where literary critics might speak of heuristics. Wittgenstein talks a lot about aspect shifts, in the course of investigating the meaning of "meaning" (his core concern). That's where the duckrabbit in Operation Duckrabbit comes from.
Since AI is what everyone's talking about... I could add my two cents regarding CHOP (chat oriented programming), which I first learned about (the acronym that is) at a Python User Group here in Portland. I've been chopping and hacking and finding Gemini in Google Colab more helpful than just StackOverflow. I love the term "chop slop" and plan to keep using it.
However, my use of chatbots is more of a natural language processing flavor in that I'm not looking for source code prototypes as often as I wanna lurk in on gossip. For example, I made up a query about spin doctors wanting to rebrand these LLMs as "whisper chambers" and getting back a lot of inside scoop on how marketers are thinking these days, when it comes to sounding sincere.
Beyond lurking in on the disciplines, I like to mine history. If you prompt the right way, giving a lot of proper names and context, you're likely to get back something that hangs together. I was able to overlay what we call the Naga Story in my classrooms, with something more scientifically credible, and yet still a myth, as the book that includes it comes up as poetical in its approach. Hello Ezra.
One of the big stories I've been trying to tell is the Westward Ho! migration, eventually along the Oregon Trail, of European high culture, such that Portland, Oregon would become a capital of open source and glass bead games. German Idealism via Kant and Hegel, forking to Marx, with another fork through Pragmatism, yet reuniting with a Transcendentalism. Emerson. Whitman. Back to Coleridge and Kant.
You might be thinking: these paths are all known. Romanticism was a backlash against the ugly side of industrialism (automating stuff) after which New Englanders followed, with their first take on Transcendentalism, already encountering more Asian thought patterns, foretelling the Californian subcultures, theosophy and so on. Yes, true, but such complicated stories bear retelling with the benefit of hindsight. Call it revisionist if you like, but lets keep it neutral on whether "revisioning" is a bad thing. That depends. Could be enlightening.
The evolution of the women's movement in the context of voting democracies figures in, along with two world wars galvanizing their participation in both the factory and the office space, blue collar and white, thereby finding out first hand what their husbands had been doing. Have men been exploring in the other direction. The roles need to be studied and experienced from all sides for the society to understand itself well enough to cohere. I start with women more than equal to men as intellectuals. That's a reference to my Graph Theory slide deck.
