[Wittrs] Re: [C] Readings in Martian Math (2010.8.26)
- From: "walto" <walterhorn@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:14:01 -0000
Hi, Kirby.
Thanks for that. Fun stuff. How did you like Haack? I'm a fan of her
"foundherentism." She's very hard on Rorty in a number of her papers and
books, and particularly objects that he calls himself a pragmatist (like her
hero, Peirce). Did Rorty ever reply to any of her critiques in your class?
W
--- In WittrsC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, kirby urner <wittrsamr@...> wrote:
>
> Sometimes I'll republish a posting of mine here
> as a blog post. Case in point:
>
>
> I had the privilege of leading a course in Martian
> Math for a nonprofit school of many skills that
> operates here in the Portland area, many PDXers
> among its grads. The venue was Reed College
> in or near the Woodstock neighborhood. My web
> site for the site, links below, offers a satellite's
> viewpoint [0].
>
> Excerpt from Martian Math: geosynchronous orbits
> around Mars, are they possible? Does the planet
> spin more slowly or quickly than Earth about an
> axis? What is that axis, in relation to the plane of
> its orbit around the sun? Is that plane itself tilted,
> relative to Earth's? -- Lots of basic geography-is-
> astronomy questions, like in National Geographic.
>
> Wittgenstein has helped bridge us to Martian Math
> in the sense that the latter is a marketing vehicle or
> thin wrapping around an older 1970s philosophy that
> still has working parts, is not entirely a rusted-away
> Model T.
>
> I am speaking of the one based around tetrahedral
> mensuration and a concentric hierarchy of familiar
> polyhedra embedded within a sphere packing
> lattice known variously as the CCP, FCC, IVM
> and octet-truss (IVM being its name in some
> Asiatic philosophy)).
>
> Bucky Fuller's in other words, his chronofiles at
> Stanford, his Institute in Brooklyn, and his network
> far flung as he was good at circumnavigation,
> by means of jet airplanes especially.
>
> <storytime type = "nonfiction" >
>
> On the local scene, I'm a collaborator with one of
> Fuller's jet partners of the 1970s, one Lanahan, friend
> of the Applewhite family (two sons in the same
> well-endowed schools that really knocked a lot
> out of ya). Just thought I'd mention, could be
> construed as a promo for his book...
>
> Flextegrity: Equilibrated Polyhedral Structures
>
> ...just released in preview to some of our leading lights
> (Belt & Baldwin).
>
> A little rough in patches, but lavishly illustrated and
> professionally done. I'm a contributing editor in having
> some of my art works featured (ray tracings and
> photographs) -- plus I hammered on some of the prose,
> though by no means all of it (Sam did most of the
> heavy lifting on this one, unless he had ghost writers
> I don't know about (LaJean I do know about -- she's
> no secret)).
>
> Lanahan and Bucky jetted to Manila as guests of the
> Marcos family. Imelda recognized right away that
> they could use some new shoes (so could I by the
> way, rather desperately).
>
> I later got to meet Imee, their beautiful and intelligent
> daughter, in a psychological anthropology class,
> with Fernandez at Princeton U. I'd grown up in the
> Philippines, through my high school years, and was
> actually there at the time Bucky and Sam came
> through -- but wasn't tracking back then.
>
> I studied Wittgenstein under Rorty at Princeton. I've
> since met Dr. Susan Haack at the Linus Pauling House,
> in town for an ISEPP lecture (which I also attended)
> and compared notes about Rorty. I've yet to meet
> anyone who knew Wittgenstein personally. I did
> get to meet Henry LeRoy Finch, author of one of
> my favorite books on Wittgenstein's later philosophy
> (which was the subject of my senior thesis). He came
> in to give a talk as a guest of the department.
>
> </storytime>
>
> Wittgenstein's remarks on the foundations of maths,
> which very much dovetail with Philosophical Investigations
> (posthumous), cover the ground of "gestalt switches"
> and "seeing according to an interpretation".
>
> He hammers on this idea of "aspects shifts" as a
> part of "meaning" and which for convenience one
> might term "right brained", with the more lexical
> "left brained" material in PI Part 1 having to do with
> "reading" and "understanding", with more numeric
> sequences as examples, as in "please continue
> this series, according to your interpretation of its
> rule..."
>
> Of course RFM also has its numeric sequences.
> His philosophy is "full spectrum" i.e. appealing to
> both left and right hemispheres, which might
> account for his popularity among artists and
> filmmakers, not exclusively among academic
> logicians (a claim Russell's fans might also make,
> given the recent debut of the previously cited
> Logicomix for example).
>
> One needs both left and right brain skills to tackle
> that 1970s philosophy I was talking about, so-called
> "explorations in the geometry of thinking".
>
> For starters, this "tetrahedral mensuration" thing
> is a bit of a puzzler, in that it draws attention to
> our propensity to say "squaring" and "cubing",
> as a kind of shorthand, as a kind of stuttering or
> barrier to understanding, vis-a-vis this alternative
> modeling of 2nd and 3rd powering.
>
> Furthermore, the author wishes we'd say "instairs"
> and "outstairs" instead of "downstairs" and "upstairs",
> as that would more clearly delineate the features
> of the gravitational space (or "gravity well") in this
> picture.
>
> These mental gestures leave everything as it is i.e.
> there's no disputed thesis or facts of the matter at stake.
>
> The "upstairs" people know that they live on a spherically
> shaped planet and are diverging from a common center
> in a radial direction.
>
> They realize that going "upstairs" does not entail
> asserting a normal in a forest of vectors all parallel
> to one other ad infinitum, in some "infinity forest" of
> parallel lines (so-called XYZ -- purely an abstraction
> with no physical existence except locally and by
> analogy, in material forms).
>
> What other more practical applications might we look
> for from this philosophical school, other than some
> bridging function between Martian and Earthling Math
> (a kind of shorthand for 60-degree versus 90-degree
> based brands)?
>
> <applications type="practical">
>
> <campaign>
>
> The Fuller syllabus introduces the concept of "corporate
> personhood" in a vilification of capitalism known as
> 'Grunch of Giants' (1983) and free on the web.
>
> It gets quoted in epigram in Thom Hartmann's
> 'Unequal Protection'.
>
> A campaign in this neighborhood would include keeping
> Havana fast food free, in the sense of exempt from the
> need to host fast food franchises (chains), many with
> ties to the very same organized crime syndicates that
> ran the casinos in pre-Castro days.
>
> Just as Disneyland is exempt from needing to host
> a KFC or Taco Bell (both PepsiCo properties last
> I checked), so might Havana and all of Cuba if it so
> chose, remain innocent of McDonald's.
>
> This would actually attract tourism (witness Vilnius,
> with only one last I visited), and would help keep a health
> food culture intact, in a time when North Americans crave
> more urban gardening skills, being close to overdosed
> on processed food products.
>
> I call this Operation Ben & Jerry's, as we'd like a
> family friend ice cream plant that perhaps delivered
> to locals and visitors by bamboo bike trailer fleet
> (no need for obnoxious music), with visiting Global U
> trainees lining up to take part in such an athletic
> activity (we also teach socio-history, visit the beach,
> have an engaging academic program, ala CDI's).
>
> Want to know more, contribute, sign up?
> Read all about it:
> http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2010/07/marketing-campaigns.html
>
> </campaign>
>
> <campaign>
>
> Another topic some discussed in GofG (St. Martin's
> Press, 1983) is the Doctrine of Discovery, though not
> by that name, i.e. the concept of land-ownership-by-fiat
> which Roman Imperials, Holy Romans, and later the
> Vatican and Anglican dogmatists would espouse
> as law of the land.
>
> Episcopalians have voted to renounce it, and the
> Quakers have its repudiation in committee (for study,
> not because it was ever approved or assumed as
> a part of their faith and practice, at least not to my
> knowledge).
>
> This same has come up in recent Parliaments of
> World Religions (Melbourne most recently), one of
> which our family attended as Quaker delegates
> in Capetown, just before the Y2K apocalypse (glad
> to have that one behind us, not happy about what
> happened instead).
>
> There's a lot of interest in this story in our region,
> where land-grabbing my "illegal immigrants" (aka
> "white people") has been going on for a long time.
> Turning tables doesn't mean grabbing it all back,
> but it does mean respecting title, when casinos
> buy it back at fair price.
>
> Want to know more, contribute, sign up?
> Read all about it:
> http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2010/03/wanderers-2010316.html
>
> </campaign>
>
> </applications>
>
> Obviously the Bucky stuff only partially overlaps
> with the above campaigns, being worked on by many
> people who have never heard of 'Grunch of Giants'
> or maybe have, but couldn't read it, because of its
> style.
>
> Fuller's reputation as a difficult writer precedes
> him, with some reviewers complaining "not English"
> or "worse than Finnegans Wake" or some such
> protest against what they construe to be unreadable
> gobbledygook.[1]
>
> Real philosophers, on the other hand, specialize in
> reading difficult stuff, so long as it's judged to have
> quality (in the eye of the beholder in large degree),
> so in that regard I am grateful for my training at
> Princeton.
>
> Fuller's stuff is pretty grokkable next to Heidegger's
> and Sartre's, and just as pregnant with applicable
> ideas if not more so (hence its ties to American
> pragmatism, even though I'd categorize Fuller as
> more a transcendentalist than existentialist).
>
> Back to Martian Math: because of its links to
> Wittgenstein, I think we're well positioned to offer
> a new kind of philosophy course at the college level
> that begins to assume this heritage I was talking
> about, that of Leibniz, Ada and Hopper (Turing,
> Hollerith... Alison Randal, Richard Stallman...).
>
> Should we call it "the philosophy of open source"
> or "open source philosophy"? I'm not sure. The
> point is instead of just paper and pencil logic, we
> explore analytic geometrical vistas by means of
> one or more computer languages, with the intent
> to serve as a "vector" for these skills among needy
> populations (a link to the One Laptop per Child
> campaign, on which I've also worked). Philosophy
> with a field work component is going to fare far
> better, in terms of enrollment, than some Ivory
> Tower "stay at home" genre. Remember, beaches,
> Havana... (one of our household just back from
> Jamaica in the last couple weeks, a kind of
> Casino Math gig (lots of card playing)).
>
> This connects us to investigations of "hacker ethics"
> (much in dispute these days) and the use of social
> networking tools (e.g. wikis), the idea of smart and
> dumb mobs per Howard Rheingold. [2]
>
> It'll be fair game in these courses, to discuss the
> various "meme viruses" that have spread themselves,
> akin to real and software viruses in the ability to
> increase and decrease in non-linear time-space.
> How did the Eugenics craze, with headquarters in
> Cold Spring Harbor, manage to jump the Atlantic
> and infect the author of Mein Kampf. Wasn't he
> already susceptible? Wasn't the zeitgeist
> (noosphere) conducive to these memes, for
> which few had the antibodies? That's a topic on
> the Math Forum right now, where Martian Math
> is further exposited (although this is Earthling Math
> that we're talking about, a lot of it IBM's).
>
> http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2108795&tstart=0
>
> What's interesting about this emergent philosophy
> (school of thought, invisible college) is its inclusion
> of so much video and television, right down to the
> commercial advertising dimension. For some, that's
> reassuring, a sign that a philosophy is finally taking
> some responsibility for itself at some organizational
> level. For others, that seems more like a threatening
> development, as who needs another new kid on the
> block at a time like this, upsetting a bunch of apple
> carts?
>
> To the latter group, I would say reassuringly that
> we're really just talking about another Neoplatonism,
> nothing all that new in western civ (including the
> Asiatic components, which have long been influential).
> Did the linguistic turn mean we'd never again see a new
> metaphysics with a respectable following? That would
> have been a simple outcome, but unrealistic to expect,
> judging from history. If one buys that at least some
> Quaker schools are respectable, then I think I have
> the gist of a counter-argument.
>
> Looking to the Future
> ===============
>
> We hope the Japanese probe due to enter Venusian
> orbit in December is successful in doing that and
> reporting back data, is this will give us another
> opportunity to offer this trademark mix of astrobiology
> and philosophy of language (including computer
> languages, unless you're busy missing the boat).
> Martian Math could feed into Venusian Math with
> a lot of the same questions and discussions.
>
> Whereas the college versions will be interesting and
> well attended, I'm also keen to have the more informal
> atmosphere of the coffee shop augmented with more
> intelligent debate, possibly simply through more
> inspiring and interesting LCD content (doesn't have
> to be loud). The Coffee Shops Network is devoted
> to this purpose. [3]
>
> I'm also eager to see wider adoption of at least the
> tetrahedral mensuration thread in the earlier grades,
> along with a broader acceptance of Silicon Valley type
> technologies, such as Youtube, Facebook, Python,
> Linux and all the rest of it. [4]
>
> Kirby
>
> [0]
>
> http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/martianmath/
>
> [1]
>
> This criticism extends to his presentation of A & B
> modules, tetrahedra with plane-nets, angles and edges
> computed, which assemble as left-right-left and/or
> left-right-right, to make Mite, Rite, Bite, three of the
> four space-filling tetrahedra known as of 1923, as
> discovered and/or chrono-logged by D.M.Y. Sommerville,
> though not using that nomenclature (1/4 Rite was his
> fourth).
>
> There's nothing incomprehensible about the geometry
> here though admittedly it's highly specialized. We've
> got some unfamiliar concepts (most of spatial geometry
> is off limits in most high schools, so not a part of the
> average reading vocabulary), now more everyday and
> accepted thanks to cellular automaton studies, which
> have legitimized using space-filling tessellations (e.g.
> Archimedean dual honeycombs) as a staging ground
> for energy studies.
>
> http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2005/12/incomprehensible.html
>
> [2] http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2010/04/smart-mobs.html
>
> [3] http://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/
>
> [4]
>
> Kids go to school with the legitimate expectation of
> learning skills valued by the ambient culture. Four
> years of math without programming is a national
> disaster, if not a global one (many others ahead,
> compensating). I think the Litvins text used at
> Phillips / Andover is a step in the right direction.
>
> Once you get some real computer skills going in
> your math classes, you're not going to settle for only
> "flat stuff", will want to explore using stereometry,
> spatial formats, per computer game standards.
> Simulations will assume this approach, even
> where "flat stuff" (like Tetris) remains a popular
> genre. Aristotle was right, remember the Mite.
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>
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