Thursday, November 23, 2017

TG 2017

Carol and I were grateful for an invitation from the Bartons to share their Thanksgiving. Tara used to babysit for their kids.  Patrick and I were co-workers with O'Reilly School.

Now I'm back in my personal workspace (PWS) plowing through some instruction videos.  I did about two hours researching wars in the former Yugoslavia first.  That came up during dinner, as the war crimes trials in The Hague are just coming to a conclusion around now.

I'm thinking my next Python course should look at Bitcoin more, as an example of (a) applied cryptography and (b) using a complex API.  If you've followed me on math-teach at all, I've been pushed for more crypto along a high school DM (digital math) track.

The Bartons have a new adult dog named Quinn.  I've been getting time with Quinn when Patrick brings him to Mt. Tabor, a popular walk for a lot of us.

Tomorrow I'm up early, for travel out of state.

I didn't know that bokeh in photography meant peripheral blur, i.e. there's a contrasting focus on "what's relevant".  That gets me thinking of the Synergetics "sphere of relevance" meme, a system attuned to a frequency that dismisses a bokeh of twilight zone data.

Systems, in Synergetics, have a visual representation as spherical objects.  If you read Peter Sloterdijk's stuff, you'll get a workout thinking with this metaphor.  That could help make Synergetics useful, as a tool.

Friday, November 17, 2017


Python Lab

I needn't have conclusions regarding UFOs in order to pay attention to reports. In this Python lab, I use a UFO reports database as a means of introducing the DB API i.e. "this is how we talk to a SQL engine". I'm not aiming to settle any disputes.

Friday, November 10, 2017

Old Feuds

Buried in some distant past already, the prehistoric origins of Scientology, in science fiction writings by the same author.  A shift of gear, a change in tenor (or tense), and a new religion pitched a big tent, its founder a legend in his own time.

As cultural historians have shown, the culture was hungry for healing, having been through some bruising battles, literally as well as metaphysically.  Civil Rights were hard won, as we feel more acutely when the clock starts running backward.

A core tenant of Scientology goes back to P.D. Ouspensky and others:  taking the negative charge off of memories takes Work.  Maurice Nicoll, a Jungian Scots following in O's footsteps, capitalized Work the same way.

Then est came along and reiterated various practices, though certainly not auditing and e-meters and without the business model of a religion.  Many in the Scientology camp felt compelled to think in terms of a turf battle.  That's one of the old feuds.

A hit piece against Erhard by mainstream media, somewhat baseless, showed that money and politics were hard at work, seeking to keep some trends in check.  Bucky was fighting alongside Erhard around then.  You might wanna dig into that story sometime, if curious.

Another feud is between the reverent and irreverent more generally.  As one who grew up reading MAD Magazine as an alternative to Meeting for Worship (I'd go both ways), the irreverence of the Church of the Subgenius was sure to resonate.

I'm glad the Kickstarter project, to get the documentary out there, got funded.  I pledged my $30.

As these blogs disclose, I did volunteer work for the Centers Network around the time I enrolled in est, in my Princeton through St. Dominic years.  My friend Ray Simon was a big fan of Hubbard and Erhard both.  I've told that story.

Not just the struggle for Civil Rights across "races" but across generations.  Did these adults who thought a certain way have the right to derail young lives by sending kids to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia against their will?  What was the rationale?  To fight for freedom?

Muhammad Ali shows up, along with Malcolm X and Father Divine, as a bridge figure, taking us closer to MLK's dream of a post-apartheid America.

The Jungians have their own leading towards pacifist strategies.  Unlike Quakerism, the Jungian tradition is more a profession than a religion.  These two strands intertwine nonetheless.  When I'm tempted to feed into religion, I'm reminded of my existing outlets.  Praise Bob.

Monday, November 06, 2017

Another HP4E Story

Welcome to another episode of Hexapents for Everybody.  What's a hexapent?  Most simply, the Adidas soccer ball pattern, also found in Carbon-60, the buckminsterfullerene molecule.  FIFA appears to have moved on to a new pattern, but that's neither here nor there.

The topology at work is such that those twelve pentagons, evenly distributed on the classic soccer ball, might be more randomly distributed, even as the number of hexagons is allowed to proliferate ("higher frequency").  Nor are we limited to twelve pentagons if straying from a purely hexapent pattern. Why not allow squares too?

Adrian Rossiter of Antiprism fame has shared such a construction in the window below.

What's fortuitous for our HP4E campaign is we don't need the petitioned bureaucracy behind public road signage to cave, and show pentagons going forward.  We use the discrepancy, now enshrined, to suggest a productive thought process, a new thoroughfare.

Keep those signs exactly as they are, along with any number of similar exhibits suggesting unfamiliarity with basic principles of Synergetics, and leverage that circumstance to promote the missing ingredient.  The lack begets its antibody, the corresponding knowledge.

Thursday, November 02, 2017

Another Kirby

I'm not saying I don't see similarities, in that we're both pink and round, and I can be something of a demon in the kitchen, occasionally breaking things (Selma could tell you).

However, we should allow that's Kirby's strategy, above, of unifying opposites, is the time-tested remedy of alchemists. Maybe he stayed a little on the too hyper side, but then it's easy to second guess from the sidelines.