Notes on BASKET

If you're up on Bucky Fuller's Synergetics, as distinct from Haken's, and you could be up on both (or neither) then you'll likely know of BEAST, if not by that acronym. BASKET = BEAST + K.

I'm talking about the A & B modules, a pair, one easily distorted into the other, or "morphed", both wedges, tetrahedrons, slices of space. 

Then come the T & E modules, exactly the same shape as one another (tetrahedrons) but one radiating outward enough further from a common center to leave a gap, like a biosphere of a planet, between the two rhombic triacontahedrons in question, the one of volume 5 (120 T), and the one of volume 5 plus (120 E).

And finally: the S, wedged between the octahedron of volume 4 (D edge length; D for diameter) and the eight faces-inscribing 20-faced icosahedron, or a “dozeneighteyes” in Struppi's dozenal namespace. 24 S slices define the difference, a dozen left and a dozen right.

All these A, B + E, T + S modules are handed (L and R), come as inside-outs of one another (same diff).

Enter the K, and hence BASKET.

The K has the same T & E shape, so KET or TEK is a logical triple, as is BAT or TAB (all 1/24). The K is 1/120th of a rhombic triacontahedron of volume not 5, not 5+, but 7.5 i.e. the RT made of Ts, scaled up 3/2 times, volume-wise. K volume = (1/24)(3/2) = 1/16, or half the MITE volume of 1/8 (MITE = B+ A+ A- = A+ A- B-), though not shaped that way.

RD 6 yellow; RT 7.5 red; Octa 4 green; Cube 3 blue

The K is allowed to resonate with DK, or David Koski, in helping us remember the timeline and the fact that the RT of volume 7.5 did not occur in concentric hierarchy renderings until later.

The 7.5 volume RT shares vertices with the volume 3 cube and by extension with tips of rhombic dodecahedron short diagonals. That's the RD of volume 6, made of As and Bs.

In addition to the 7.5 RT, Koski and Kirby (KU, myself) talked a lot about the 21.21 RT (15√2), the one of volume 20 times Syn3 (Syn3 = 2nd root of 9/8). I often will say "2nd root" instead of "square root" given Synergetics addresses this very prejudice. Python lets me customize the namespace.

That's four RTs of interest, in order of increasing size: 120 Ts (5), 120 Es (5+), 120 Ks (7.5), SuperRT (21.21...).

Here are the volumes we're talking about again, this time arbitrarily extended to 50 decimals:

Here's the Jupyter Notebook that goes with this blog post.

Church Symbolism

Pirate Party Politics (School of Tomorrow)

More Geopolitics

A Philosopher's Journey

JavaScript: The Good Parts

:: Douglas Crockford ::

Python: Still Relevant

This professor works in the same ballpark as I do: Python as applied to data science, Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL: a subtype of ML) in particular. However my bailiwick has been earlier in the pipeline, between data gathering and feeding said data to Machine Learning models. That includes: preliminary analysis, normalization, standardization, cleaning, reorganizing, visualizing.

Statisticians didn't have all these fancy ML tools until recently and their discipline up until then hasn't faded so much as abetted what has of late become center ring: deep learning. 

In practical terms, what used to be managed in spreadsheets (volatile) and databases (more secure) is now managed with a hybrid of the two: the programmable DataFrame. Bring your rows and columns into a single complex object, and work with it in code, rather than with fleeting mouse clicks or other unreplicable magic dust.

Why am I plugging Python in the philosophy blog? For many obvious reasons, but let's just say because the School of Tomorrow, powered by latter day American Transcendentalism (a kind of intuitionism), is using Python to yak up the 4D meme. Yes, I'm referring to Quadray Coordinates and so on, not to be confused with (x, y, z, w) coordinates within the hypercube, or Quaternions. Disambiguation is important at this point, or you'll get rather lost in the 4D jungle.

A less obvious reason: I think the philosophers' obsession with such as propositional calculus, ala Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege et al, was really about laying the groundwork for Turing and Von Neumann types to add the electronic dimensions. Logic meets circuit boards, giving us logic boards, and eventually the CPUs and GPUs we think about, and program, today. Philosophers should learn to program, in other words, if only to keep in touch with the atomic layer, the domain of Democritus.