Worthy Cause

Pictures from STEM Expo, San Antonio, TX.

Dan Suttin helped galvanize interest around spatial geometry.

His "OCTA TETRA" Museum nearby is a storehouse / warehouse of such exhibits.

click on pix for Flickr views

More in BizMo Diaries

Another Gem

31 directions 4+12+15 by David Koski

Ignite Portland 11

Civic participation was galvanized by the Ignite event format, which featured pre-screened five minute talks by an interesting cross-section of willing presenter.

Our line up tonight included people giving advice based on hard won experience regarding mountain climbing, designing voting systems, spying electronically, mothering, computer game playing, naked bike riding and Muppets.

Some of the talks expanded historical horizons by reaching back through time, while others expanded our sense of today's geography.  Antarctica was a feature this evening.  One of the first talks was by a dad who has been collecting data about a toddler, exploring her new world.

An engineer spoke on the innards of slot machines, which I thought was pretty interesting.  He reaffirmed what I often say, that the gambling industry has every incentive to keep the games based purely in the mathematics of chance.  Theoreticians have developed criteria to prevent control beyond what the laws themselves would dictate, but this doesn't prevent designers from make the games as alluring as possible.  A near win (i.e. a loss) is more motivating than an actual win in some ways, so the games do have ways to make the loss look like an "almost win".

The Muppetologist referred to Muppets from after my time, which proved my advanced age to myself.  I'd watched Sesame Street in high school a lot, in the Philippines, but Sam the Eagle, Gonzo and Animal had not yet joined the cast.  I knew who Elmo was, and Kermit of course...

An organizer for Portland's Naked Bike Ride went over some of the history and safety tips in a humorous fashion.

The voting / election infrastructure expert emphasized that free and fair elections alone do not a democracy make.  High levels of civic participation remains key.

The talk about coding slot machines connected to the voting machines in that the former are subject to more scrutiny than the latter.

The Brony talk opened some insights into the Django world, although the thinking there is "pony" stands for "feature request" and "not getting one" is reflective of Django's conservative, not-promising-the-moon culture.  There's another joke about half-empty versus half-full, with the optimist saying "there's gotta be a pony in here some place".  That's a nice way of saying you've been digging through a steaming pile of something obnoxious and remain hopeful that there will be some sort of payoff down the road.

Ben, with our company, was a chief organizer, though through Stumptown Syndicate.  I attended with our out of town school principal, a mentor in chief.  We call ourselves "graders" in that we have some control over steepness ("grade") and calculus is all about the gradient at each point (our school teachers calculus, though that's not what I do for them).  And speaking of grades, cousin Lee sent out a picture of a grader tonight, a type of road equipment I've always found somewhat fascinating.

Collagen:  a family of proteins, more or less tightly wound, making bone, ligament, skin.  A triple helix hey?  I made a note of that on Synergeo.

Lets not forget FLAC, the new lossless codec.

Last but not least, I want to mention the talk about living in one's RV in an urban area, as a lifestyles.  The seeds of the bizmo idea were being planted, as this guy indeed runs his web site design business out of his remodeled Rialta.  He has designed a handsome interior.  He made a good case that "minification" i.e. "more with less" is the way to go.

An important point:  he doesn't drive it that much (yes, it needs short trips to the RV dumping ground to empty sewage).  An average bizmo may relocate more often than a mobile home (unmotorized) but may stay put for weeks or months at a time.  If you're Dave Ulmer, you pull a trailer with motorcycle and snowmobile for your radius around a base camp.  In Portland, a bicycle + rain gear would serve that purpose.  Upshot:  larger numbers of people working from bizmo bases does not necessarily translate into greater per capita fuel consumption.

I salute the bizmo lifestyle evangelist for tackling the issue of stereotypes head on.  He didn't mention Breaking Bad, a fictional made-for-TV series in which a bizmo stars from the opening scene (a mobile biological weapons lab, one might call it, in that it's used to make neurotoxins) but he did address a cultural tendency to associate wandering RVs with "hippie badsters" of some kind.  And yet our speaker was not of that breed.  Nothing scuzzy or untoward.  One could almost see the lights going on in peoples' heads.  That's why it's called Ignite, although some make a connection to Burning Man as well.

Fluid Dynamics

The Flow III from Bose Collins on Vimeo.

Wanderers 2012.8.22

David DiNucci, the computer scientist, was asking me about where I did Wanderers write-ups.  Mostly in three other blogs, but why not do something different?

I've presented the basics of Coffeeshops Casinos or whatever we call them, a few times at Wanderers, which meets in a boyhood home of the Nobel Prize winning Linus Pauling (February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994)).

David has written a book on concurrency to help people think about the challenges of programming many processes to run in parallel, an exercise often undertaken, in life outside electronic computing.

My top people in this organization are people I consider top ranking.  They represent characteristics I would want in chiefs of some company, staff or tribe.

Our topics were free ranging as usual.  Jon Bunce brought one of his comical drawings from the 1980s.  I thought it was excellent.  Glenn had three books he's recently purchased.

There's only partial overlap twixt Wanderers and those whom I describe as my chiefs, with me chief marketing officer or CMO.

The CEO is entirely fictional and/or mythical, like a deity, so of course that means we cannot be a "white man LLC" i.e. a post Civil War corporation with personhood.  The CEO is manifestly a white man though, by the name of Dobbs, smokes a pipe.

You could call this a placeholder business or emulator (similar to incubator).

You might spin out a business based on the open source templates presented here.  Others might do the same, but differently.

More Reveries

These Mandelbulb fly throughs have been important to me as I contemplate the relationship between CSN bars and the flipped classrooms of adulthood, with the childhood corollaries.

You want a safe enough space to immerse yourself in arcana if need be, because in obscure Chinese herbs you may find a cure, or so goes the promise of the archetypal apocathery.

The remedy may as well be metaphysical, and the right studies (and/or left), with aesthetics, will have power to spin you out of a slump, just as other metaphysics may have helped get you into one.

So stay on your guard, or develop one if you have none.

In the earlier 21st century we have the paradox of people attempting to drive places in ways that not only squander fuel, but pose significant risk to their personal and financial health.

They pack the freeways in blizzards.  Is this an intelligent species?  There's strong evidence to the contrary.

As a subset of this mad need for travel, people who make a major commitment to paying off a home cannot then afford to enjoy them without leaving them empty half the time, as partners commute and children board a bus to some loud and competitive place wherein viewing Mandelbulb videos is probably not a big pass time.

Fractals aren't much mentioned, despite the spike in interest awhile back.  We need to study those spikes more.  Intellectual history is a glue, and not just for the over-specialized.  STEM needs a bigger slice of the news, more air time in the media.  Lets work on that.

Hypertoonery

Le Hypertoon is classically conceived of as an animation consisting of segues twixt a set of key frames.  It's not like you, as a viewer, necessarily know which frames are key, however over time this may become more clear, as some of the vistas are definitely deja vu.

Depending on the design, key frames my show up less than once a minute (one can imagine really long loops) or many times a second, though that's reaching a threshold for even short attention spans.

In the rarified world of pure geometry hypertoons, which may act as a kernel, anchoring a broader sampling of STEM topics, we have the concentric hierarchy hypertoon, somewhat signature within CSN as a part of its decor, blends well with a McMenamins style, an influence on your first CMO (moi).

Imagine tetrahedrons, variously sized, and spinning.  They glom together in certain ways.  Turns out they have interesting capabilities, to assemble one another.

Koski's U, V and W all build one another using phi-scaled versions of themselves.   They make a spiral.  They make the fat and thin hexahedrons of quasi-crystalline fame.  The U may be considered 2 K modules in volume where 1 K = 1 T module scaled by 1.5 i.e. K + K = T + T + T = A + A + B = 1 Mite in volume.

A self-referential pool like this will take you to high speed geometric hypertoons at various singularities.  Then the show will slow down again.

A nice jungle scene with parrots, some foreground discussion of the ecosystem's feedback loops, with cutaways to animations.  Humans have done a lot of homework here, but without doing permanent damage.  We feel happier every time that happens.

Note that there's nothing to say a hypertoon can't use live action, in the sense of adding physics rules. Classic hypertoons are based in pure geometry because the makes the key frame connections reversible whereas documentary footage tends to run best one way (not always).

My Python prototypes compute their frames on the fly allowing for real time interactivity, with the user spinning and zooming as the action unfolds.  Higher resolution hypertoons or "reveries" might be pre-rendered and streamed by a kind of player / reader that doesn't need to recompute.

Hybrids use a combination, say a computed foreground against a pre-rendered background.  This gets us into game territory pretty quickly.

Back to Koski modeles, some equations from the Poly list, in lightly edited form:

I use this method for differentiation of the various sizes of phi-scaled tetrahedron:

. . . U6, U3, U, u3, u6 . . .

since volume changes by phi to the 3rd, 6th, 9th power when linearly scaling by up phi.

U3 > U (U=u) > u3 and so on.

The U,V, W tetrahedra are composed of these amounts of lessor sized U, V, W:

U = (2)w3 + (5)u6 + (4)v6 + (2)w6

V = (2)v3 + (3)u3 + (1)w3

W = (2)w3 + (3)v3 + (1)u3

The Fat rhombohedron  = (18)W + (6)u3 + (6)v3 + (6)w3

The Thin rhombohedron = (6)W + (12)u3 + (6)v3 + (6)w3

Thanks
Dave

Local Politics

CSN has its global network Philobiz aspect, but then comes "on the ground" and "in your face" in the sense of needing to deal with what's in front of you.

In my town, people are out with clip boards seeking signatures, hoping to get Oregon law amended to where a casino might open where the old dog track used to be.

In the meantime, Oregon's education system is starting to go down thetubes in its present format. Liberal moms are out picketing in favor of a casino where the dog track used to be, things have gotten so bad. Are they on strike in Gresham already? [ link ]

The argument is the jobs and tax revenue it generates will go to serve the local area.

Most these clip boarders won't have a lot of time for my stump speech or marketing rap.  There's no setting up for PowerPoint on the street corner (not easily).

However, they all know what Oregon Lottery is, and know that if all the people using it could make the money follow their preferences (what's know as "exerting one's will"), then the school system might be in less trouble.

If players could earmark their contributions down to the school...  what a concept.  On the ground, we'd need real statistics.  A political gold mine.  Good thing we're friends with DemocracyLab (here in Portland -- FNB too).

That's the short blurb of what CSN seeks to provide a community, a circuitry, an infrastructure, for channeling funds voluntarily, on a philanthropic basis, with a pump primed by local merchants and their sponsorships.  Religious institutions, NGOs, are more often recipients than sponsors, though charities do support other charities in this world, no question.

Customers get a slice of company net profits, as if shareholders for a day (as consumers, why not?) and when they win big, they get to give big (commensurately, might not be that much in absolute terms -- but even pennies add up big time).

"Church bingo" is the shortest tag line, but assumes a fair amount of background.  Catholics get it faster.

Anyway, it's pretty clear that the spread of this business plan represents friction in the everyday casino industry.  Indian Gaming takes a new turn and yada yada.

More Geometric Reveries

TAILOR-MADE (Tokimonsta remix) Daedelus with Milosh
from Victor Acevedo on Vimeo.


MY DRUM LOOP IS STUCK IN MOLASSES - Shlohmo (2:30 edit)
from Victor Acevedo on Vimeo.

 
ANDREW - Jonwayne (3:11)
from Victor Acevedo on Vimeo.

Happy Leap Day

I'm somewhat surprised how little is made of Leap Day.  Why isn't it a big festival day, every four years (caveats apply)?

I'm booked in to US Pycon this month, coming a little late but in time for the main keynotes.  I've been learning a lot about charitable giving and Internet infrastructure as a member of the PSF (Python Software Foundation).

CSN is about providing infrastructure similar to video poker run by the Oregon State, except the player is expecting to donate winnings, normally considered losings, to worthy programs.  Winnings for self may be a part of some games as well, as may one be a recipient of others' directed winnings, perhaps ear-marked for some purpose. 

Yes, the rules could get complex, but then it's a game we're already playing, simply formalized with new infrastructure and software (and games).

In the physics namespace, it's about energy transformation, information theory, and value added.  You have the energy that drives your day, and the work that you do with that energy. 

These concepts trace back to early GST writings in personal workspace 284 (like a time-share) in the early 1980s -- is how it worked out in my case. 

Given the Noosphere, it'll have come to others in other ways.

Some of these concepts matured into First Person Physics, which got the attention of Dr. Bob Fuller, a man of much experience, including in Burma.  I follow his progress on CareCalendar these days, following a serious medical event.

I'm booked into Philadelphia tomorrow.  I don't know how that will go, but I do expect to make some valuable headway.  Watching the AFSC do its business, contributing here and there, is another way I observe philanthropy in action.

I've had recent visits will all my officers except Jody.  The financials aren't that complicated yet, when it comes to real properties on the ground.  Cyberia doesn't require much of a footprint, when it comes to testing ideas.  More servers in the cloud are but a finger snap away.

I have a new bio on-line.

Lighting Check

:: humma hedron ::
(koski collection)