[Wittrs] Readings in Martian Math (2010.8.26)
- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:15:49 -0700
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.
==========================================
Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/
Other related posts:
