School of Tomorrow

Introducing Some Players (School of Tomorrow)

Happy Thanksgiving

From the Archive

Graph Theory

In case you're unsure what Graph Theory is, it's a lot of games with dots and arrows, showing how stuff connects. Arrows become directional and start to mean specific things such as "is friends with", "was employed by".  Arrows might be weighted, to show how much energy it takes to travel along them (think of roads).

When thinking about Graph Theory, just think of the Web and its hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Here you are, reading a node or dot (it's OK for dots to have content). Any hyperlink you click takes you to a neighboring node, along an edge.  

Think "circuit diagram". The data structure we call a "tree" is not supposed to have cycles -- adding them turns a tree into a web.

How to read a graph: by the conventions of topology, the exact route an arrow follows in a diagram need not be significant i.e. need not be "to scale" (which is why added numeric labels, showing info such as mileage or time, are not at all redundant).

The YouTube suggests the genre where the "dots" are various people, say mathematicians or chess players or... no special category need apply, or perhaps many do. 

This is hardly a new idea. A lot of graphs are precisely in this ballpark of wanting to record vast and evolving networks (they could be vast) of interpersonal relationships. Large databases are sometimes committed to discovering these inter-connections internally. Think of Ancestry dot com and such projects.

One could claim or state, as a matter of definition, that fleshing out the arrow relationships among the objects in question, is to "systematize" the information. Getting "systematize" to connote "adding edges to a graph" helps concretize the idea of "systems".

The embedded YouTube, only a minute and a half long with no sound, with each slide set for three seconds, also includes an early draft of the speaker notes i.e. provides a set of captions. 

This YouTube is a "preview" in the sense that the slides being filmed have since evolved, developing more nodes and edges. I can use these slides on the road and/or in meetings, in the role of tour guide.  I'm far from super knowledgeable regarding all the partially overlapping graphs.  Let's explore them together.

In the Youtube comments, I chat with Andrius about whether I'm being egotistical in throwing my hat in the ring as it were, showing how I'm potentially one of the nodes in the system.  Andrius sees this enterprising behavior as more a labor of love than purely one of self promotion.

I would encourage thinkers to develop maps like this of their own, for the benefit of researchers looking for a way to fit them into a bigger picture. Sometimes it's not that easy an exercise, to think in terms of "influences" as this may call into question one's own originality in some existential way. I'd suggest not worrying about it. 

Provide some guidance why not? I know many of you have already done so (in which case, bravo and keep it up, why not?).

Finally, as of this early edition, I have a long way to go in graphing out my relationships (if that were really my central ambition -- maybe not in this project). I've not gone into any detail regarding my Python community affiliations for example, nor Wanderers in my Portland context, nor Quakers (other than through dad and Kenneth Boulding that is -- some Quakers claim Walt Whitman as one of their own). 

Having computer science in the picture (Babbage, Ada, Hinton, The Turk...) is already an invitation to keep exploring.

More to the point though, is I've gone into more detail already in my YouTube channel, so in that sense "preview" means more like "welcome to my world". In the meantime, the network I'm providing is an invitation for others to connect theirs to mine, or to share a network that doesn't connect at all. The web facilitates such mergings and divergings.

Refugee Planet

Hypertoons Explained

City of Tomorrow (New Gaza)

Ideas in City Planning

Why Don't Cities Use Hexagon Blocks?

Learning Heritage

Philosophy Shop Talk

Myth, Math & Magic: Buckminster Fuller's Legacy & Hall's Hermetic Wisdom...

A conversation with Benjamin Lowder, connecting Buckminster Fuller's legacy using Geodesic Geometry and Sacred Geometry to the Hermetic Wisdom Traditions shared by Manly P. Hall.

Staying the Course

Buckminster Fuller Explains Why Politics Is Obsolete

Humans mostly chose to stick with their scapegoat political leaders because (a) they're used to having scapegoats and (b) political leaders need to project some sense of their political power.  Symbiosis at work.

The book The End of Power suggested this time-honored arrangement might become unsustainable soon, and was coming to an end. A new equilibrium would be the outcome.

Although Fuller had laid some groundwork for a transcending maturation process, most of academia decided his unit volume tetrahedron and whole number volumes approach to rationality could be abandoned without much debate. They made a choice on our behalf.

Those of us keeping the debate alive seemed to have few friends in high places. A few is enough sometimes though, especially when said friends are not politicians.

Musical Interlude

Fractal Universe (Mandelbulb 3D fractals)

More Book Sharing

Homework (H4T)

:: heuristics for teachers ::

Coffee Shop Trax

What is Andragogy? (School of Tomorrow)

Per the above video, you might have an interest in teaching others, teaching self. Looking for tips?

One heuristic I'll leave you with is "don't underestimate the role of private eye detective". There's the whole noir genre in filmmaking to back that up, plus some splendid animation. Then there's Sherlock Holmes. Great TV shows like Columbo (Falk) and Murder She Wrote (Lansbury).

Didn't Einstein credit an uncle for making the "finding of man X" a worthy framework for boring algebra?

There's a world of difference between a detective and someone working back from a final conclusion i.e. cherry picking in order to backfill and bolster, i.e. between an open minded investigator and someone making or building a case, pro or con. The same individual may switch between both of these modes, as when gear shifting a manually shifted car model (I had a couple of those).

Now that you're wearing your detective hat, you have some new decisions. An important one is: are you drawn to hop on a rolling bandwagon, a project already well joined, by others, or are you drawn to something you have a hard time finding others with any interest in? 

I'm sketching extremes along a spectrum, from public to private.

For example, on the public end, choosing to dive into the JFK assassination theories, the many overlapping conspiracy threads, is to join a huge community of several generations, and including some of the best investigators you'll ever meet. I'll admit to having permitted myself a lot of time in this arena. As a window onto the world, the hours have paid off (by my own accounting, granted).

Something more private would involve a private language you're working on, a computer one or maybe a human one. Think of Tolkien laboring to devise Elvyn, including a script. No team is peer reviewing your work on a daily basis, or scrambling to find preprints. If you find a tiny coven of fellow travelers, count yourself lucky to have found a mini-bandwagon. Enjoy your party. Love the burn.

Now, course correction, naturally your self education needn't be confined to one rabbit hole. Just because you're doing deep research, in detective mode, for some hours almost daily, doesn't mean you can't also be muscle building (literally, like at a gym) or learning to drive, or learning to fly or whatever it is. 

So this choice of whether to join a large community, or to take a lonelier route, need not be made for your whole life all at once. I'd suggest hopping on at least three major bandwagons. In my case, I'd say Python's has been one of them. I've met a lot of interesting people through Pythonic listservs, for example, edu-sig in particular.

Another course correction: although detective mode is one of the great modes, I'm not suggesting you won't need other modes in the course of a business day. There is such a thing as defending a narrative, as some form of partisan warrior with a canton to protect, shades of Kagemusha. 

I call this role "manning a think tank" which is purposely sexist in flavor in recalling some WW1-or-2 stereotype poor slob in a mobilized gun box. Being a detective can be a luxury, compared to needing to side with your comrades in arms, or feed your own fan base, nurse your wounds.

Glenn would suggest the I Ching be included in your practice somehow, partly just for the combinatorics. You're reminded of a pattern language, in the Christopher Alexander tradition. Sometimes life is this way, your posture that, sometimes life is this other way, still in the matrix. 

The I Ching's action frames consist of "way it is" and "vector forward" i.e. there's a dv/dt feel to each posture.

Back to detective mode: if you find yourself relying purely on the recommendation engine, without refining the searching on your side, then reawaken to your power to actively shape the search space, to narrow it down, to zoom in. 

You'd like to hit bedrock from time to time, just to stay grounded. 

In other words, as a detective you will want to zero in on occasion, which may mean snagging an obviously relevant puzzle piece. Your story moves forward. The narrative builds momentum over yet another day in the neighborhood.

If you're new to these blogs, maybe do some random sampling and use the search box top left, to see if we overlap in keywords at all.  Do I ever write about this or that?  How about proper names:  people and places.  

This is who I often approach blogs, which I'll come across through other blogs as often as not. The blogosphere is a real thing, and is abetted by the "vlogosphere".

As I was writing to Thirsters (discussion listserv), a specimen from my "under sociology" outbox (this is an excerpt from a longer email):

Russians are somewhat divided, and express a rather broad spectrum of opinion, as we also get here in Oregon (where Russian is the 3rd most spoken language after English and Spanish [1]).

A Russian vlogger I've followed for years left the country because she's fed up with all the Z stuff (pro war propaganda).[2] She's from the far eastern part of the country, like near Vladivostok (more Pacific Rim). Then I follow this other guy, who also left, who mocks the Z stuff incessantly.[3]

In my July 2 posting, I list a bunch of journalists I follow. I'm in an echo chamber for sure.

I'm pretty fluent with how Lavrov and other Kremlin officials tell their side of the story. They're pretty lucid IMO, as one would expect. But I leave it to them to keep bringing up the Minsk agreements or whatever, as I really don't know all the history that well. Not really my part of the world. I find the Russians to be effective communicators, not so much the DC Americans.

[1] https://www.wweek.com/culture/2017/12/13/welcome-to-the-russia-issue/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/@NatashasAdventures
[3] https://www.youtube.com/@roman_nfkrz

In case you're wondering why I find it relevant to bring up the Russians in this context, check out my YouTube on Pythonic Andragogy.

Navigating Among Namespaces

Some of the most uber-orthogonally minded are eager to treat Fuller's 4D as some kind of "tesseract" straw man (as if Synergetics were merely an offshoot of their own orthodox thinking).

Then, once put on this false pedestal, they can tear it down as not politically correct enough, from a hypercross dogmatists' viewpoint. 

Either that or they think he's aping Einstein.

It's a vapid philosophical position that never held much water, and one I'm always happy to dispel.

Silicon Forest: Curriculum Radio

Designing Your Own Course (School of Tomorrow)

Project Renaissance

Two Kinds of Twoness: Multiplicative versus Additive

Back to School

Meetup Culture

Followup:

• Quotable Quotes
• School Teaching
• Triangulating
  

Expo 62

More from Marketing

[ excerpt from Morning Coffee with Kirby in Control Room ]

What I dream about are specific Coffee Shops that operate openly as places you can try various potions, poisons, concoctions, other toxins.  Yes, they're modeled on opium dens to some extent, but they're not clones of one another either.

Those operating these establishments are well trained (in theory at least) and psychologically attuned to the needs and wants of their customers, but they're also up on medical science.  

These coffee shops may be like a health club in being membership based, and like bars in exercising their rights to eighty-six specific people, based on their track record.  Like a video rental shop (remember those?), they may have a record of customer orders (as do the streaming services).  They may be highly regulated.

If you're the kind of cowboy who jacks up on some substance, then starts brawls on a regular basis, don't be too amazed if your membership fob (or key) stops opening doors at specific establishments.  Operators have the right to ban access, just as they have the right to ban firearms on private premises (like hotels), perhaps checked into a safe or locker (retrieve when you check out).

It's Showtime (School of Tomorrow)

Philosophizing About Truth

Watch the Youtube

Synergetics Slide Show (School of Tomorrow)

My YouTube channel contains quite a few examples of me presenting this slide deck. 

This latest version dives into more technical detail on many of the slides. 

My treatment this time may have been influenced by a changing sense of my audience. Since connecting with the Math 4 Wisdom (M4W) community, headed up by Andrius Kulikauskas, I've senses my audience having higher bandwidth -- as in "intake capacity" -- regarding the mathematics of what we're doing. 

I was also inspired by some recent work on the S-module, in turn inspired by David Koski and Casey House.

I'm continuing to see Synergetics as more a philosophical work in mathematical foundations, but with a built-in critique of "foundations" as a metaphor, given our conceptual space is more gravity-neutral than we experience as tiny guys on Planet Earth. 

We're more apt to see our system as a planet in and of itself i.e. infrastructure of a spherical nature cohered by gravity, and capable of functioning as a transceiver i.e. as both a tuned in recipient and a caster-emitter of intelligence and information.

Continuing the Conversation

Joe Clinton opens by reading a lengthy passage by some philosopher, which begins to sound like Bucky in places, but is this text by Joe Clinton himself? Is Joe into being this metaphysical? He quotes Bucky internally, so clearly the outer quote is not Bucky. 

Funny how the term "dictate" forces itself into so many discussions of metaphysical rules.  Grammar police.

OK, they're his own words, he's taking credit (these are notes in real time). He addresses his convention of colorizing internal Bucky quotes.

Joe is a big Froebel fan.

Lots of good pie crust language around the Jitterbug Transformation.  Yeah, Bucky called just about everything he treasured a "dymaxion" at one point or another.

Joe has spent a lot of his time on this Jitterbug Transformation, a centerpiece in Synergetics, a kind of dumbbell dorge if we look at symmetrical expansions to outer limits around a zero center, called a "bow-tie" by Bucky (he used a symbol):

⋈

A Memorial Day Meander (School of Tomorrow)

I was up early making this YouTube. 

I'll blame Sydney, my dog. But then I wanted to get some kind of YouTube out.  So Sydney was more my excuse.  I like being productive in the early pre-light hours.

Then I pushed myself to walk to the top of Mt. Tabor and back, starting before 6 am.  As I was up until maybe 2 or 3 am listening to Ram Dass, I was operating on next to no sleep and found I was battling brain fog, even after drinking a lot of coffee and doing this somewhat off the cuff (impromptu) YouTube.

By the time I started down, the cold air and continued exertion level had put my brain back in gear.  I'd forgotten my iPhone and my Apple Watch ran out of change before my return.  

Actually finding said iPhone required quite a bit of movement as well.  Matters improved when I realized said phone still had charge and I'd be able to make it ring using the watch, once it was charged a little.   

The iPhone was under the living room futon, the kind of place it'd take forever to find were it not able to make noise.

I'm chatting a lot about my devices because they're a big part of my up close reality these days, along with my pets.  I also took a Lumix camera up Mt. Tabor.  I have two such cameras since that night I fell and thought I'd lost one of them and so purchased another (used).  That was in 2022.  I still feel that knee injury sometimes.

Connecting the Dots

Synergetics in Schools

Synergetic University Project

Question Authority (School of Tomorrow)

Pascal's Triangle and GST (School of Tomorrow)

Think Tanks: The Game

Synergetic Dramaturgy

A Principal's Address (School of Tomorrow)

Slideshow (CMO)

Access Point (School of Tomorrow)

Recruiting Film for School of Tomorrow

Playing World Game in 2023 (rant)

A Comprehensivity Meetup