Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #736 - Making Code Tinker Friendly and Net Neutraility

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #736 - Making Code Tinker Friendly and Tinkering

Hi Mom,

Here we are again, Mom, in the continuing series of "material will present itself," the unplanned, new material that hammers out from the Internet like Cosmic Rays battering the rocket containing the soon to be Fantastic Four.

It all started on SLASHDOT with this link

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/07/11/2157238/we-need-to-reboot-the-culture-of-view-source

I added SLASHDOT to my RSS reader (nothing fancy... I just add RSS feeds to my custom The Freed Dictionary page) after being at Penguicon. Self proclaimed "news for nerds about stuff that matters," SLASHDOT's main topics target Open Source projects and mostly computer related stuff (hardware, management, development, linux, mobile, etc), but the site also streams entertainment news (book reviews, game news) and science content.

Here's the "about" from the FAQ.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What is this?

This is Slashdot, a website based on and running the Slashdot-Like Automated Story-Telling Homepage software. You're reading the FAQ.

Who does this?

Slashdot was created in 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it's owned by BIZX, LLC. Slashdot is run primarily by a handful of editors and coders, with the help of many others. As of April 2016, the Slashcode is wrangled and taunted by Drew ("SlashDrew") Kroft. The editors are Beau ("BeauHD") Hamilton, Manish ("manishs") Singh, David ("EditorDavid"), and Logan ("whipslash") Abbott.

What does the name "Slashdot" mean?

"Slashdot" is an intentionally obnoxious URL. When Rob registered the domain http://slashdot.org, he wanted a URL that was confusing when read aloud. (Try it!)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And because SLASHDOT writes about Open Source software it runs Open Source software itself.

That link to the Slashdot-like Automated Story Telling Homepage software goes to a git hub, but it's not easy to track. This link is better to see the Slash repo (from newbies, a repo is short for repository, it's a storage place for Open Source files.

https://sourceforge.net/p/slashcode/git/ci/live/tree/

SLASHDOT is itself running a news reader and filter system. For instance, check this out from the FAQ:

The Firehose

What is the Firehose?

The Firehose is powerful viewing tool for Slashdot content, from comments and journal entries to RSS feeds and story submissions. You can filter and interact with the Firehose in a number of ways. The plus/minus box on the left side of each Firehose entry lets you vote on that item. A context menu will appear when you click on the plus or minus, giving you the option of adding certain tags. You can also expand the submission if you'd like to add other tags, such as "northdakota" or "spaceflight." Voting and tagging are helpful; they inform other Firehose users, and help the editors decide which ones make it to the front page.

How can I filter the Firehose?

You can enter filter terms in the text field at the top of the firehose page. Sort for any particular type of entry by entering its type into the field and hitting enter. For example, entering "journal" there would sort for journal entries. You can also sort for story, comment, feed, bookmark, and submission. Putting a "-" in front of a type will exclude that type. For example: "-feed" would exclude all RSS feeds. You can also sort for things like "linux," "openbsd," or "riaa" to see stories with those tags or comments and submissions that mention them.

What do the colors mean?

The colors serve as a rough quality rating for entries in the firehose. You can sort for colors by using the color-picker next to the filter field. Red is the most popular, black is the least popular, and story submissions enter the firehose at blue. Your nods and nixes affect this, so the more often you vote, the more useful color sorting becomes. The lower your color threshold, the more content you'll see.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So, this all serves to get me thinking of different ways I can use the Internet to learn.

The FAQ is quite long, and I have not digested it all yet. I love any FAQ that has a section called "Karma, Thresholds, Abuse etc."

So, while exploring, I have found that I have not yet signed up for a SLASHDOT account, which I will fix now.

Okay, I'm in.

Gee, lots of news.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

GLITCH

Glitch is an app builder community. It solves the problems of the inscrutable view source mode. An embedded video teaches users how to use Glitch in two minutes. You can create a new Node app or remix one, and it's FREE. There is resource sharing to be able to code with friends.

I like it's retro style and simplicity.

It's great to build your own Twitter bot as Clive describes in his article reprinted below.

CODE PEN

Confused by indecipherable Javascript under the hood of the front end of your favorite web site?

Then hit up CODE PEN!

There's tons of articles, projects you can join, and so much more.

And they plug conferences, like this one - http://squaresconference.com/.

After hitting the GOOGLE IO last year -- Hey Mom #318 and Hey Mom #319, I became very interested in UX (User Experience), IE. the front end of the system. I am still interested in this area of computer science, even though coding is probably where I am aiming to end up (and probably the back end of things - data base code).

and there's......

PLAYGROUND TENSOR FLOW 
























Though not germane to this specific set of topics of an easy on ramp for Internet coding, in a related note, it's Net Neutrality Day.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15960484/net-neutrality-day-of-action-protest

You can tinker with a neural network.

Okay. this is what I get for copying pages with source code that I can't decipher.... just like I am writing about...

Stopping while I am ahead and this is at least somewhat readable.

Net neutrality day of action: everything you need to know

Contributors: T.C. Sottek, Colin Lecher, Nilay Patel, and 3 others

With net neutrality on the chopping block, web companies and activists have once again banded together in its support. On July 12th, over 200 groups — from Kickstarter and Etsy, to Vimeo and Netflix, to Pornhub and High Times — updated their websites with statements, banners, and spinning wheels to tell their visitors about the troubles that could come with an internet free from net neutrality rules.

Not sure where to start? Read this first:

THE INTERNET IS FUCKED (AGAIN)

Save the Internet from being FUCKED.




Join the EFF!

https://supporters.eff.org/donate/join

FIGHT FOR NET NEUTRALITY.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/todays-day-lets-save-net-neutrality

I have had to write about this before...

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/05/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-684-anti.html

Here's the note I added to my letter to the FCC:

The Internet is the single most valuable resource since the invention of the sun and water. I mean, really? Why is this even an issue. The Broadband market is not competitive. A handful of corporations control access. I don't want to be held ransom by AT&T. Information needs to be FREE and that means free access, even for the things I don't like and the things you don't like. It's like nature. If you kill off all the predators, then the peaceful vegetarian animals do not thrive, they die off. They starve.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FROM - WIRED AT THIS LINK HERE:

https://www.wired.com/story/clive-thompson-tinker-with-code/

• CLIVE THOMPSON
• BUSINESS
• 07.11.17
• 07:00 AM

IT'S TIME TO MAKE CODE MORE TINKER-FRIENDLY

BACK IN YE olde days of the information superhighway, curious newbies had an easy way to see how websites worked: View Source.

If they clicked that option in the browser, presto! It would display the HTML and bits of Javascript that created the page. Cut and paste that code into their own domain and they could produce their own version of the site, altering and morphing it to their taste and learning along the way. That’s how many of today’s mid-career coders learned: They peeked behind the Wizard of Oz curtain.

But the world they enjoyed has nearly vanished. Websites have evolved into complex, full-featured apps; click View Source on Google.com and behold the slurry of incomprehensible Javascript. This increasingly worries old-guard coders. If the web no longer has a simple on-ramp, it could easily discourage curious amateurs. We don’t want the field to de-­democratize and become the province solely of those who can slog through a computer science degree.

So we need new tools that let everyone see, understand, and remix today’s web. We need, in other words, to reboot the culture of View Source.

The good news? A renaissance is approaching. This spring, New York’s Fog Creek Software launched Glitch, a site that hosts hundreds of simple web apps—everything from Tetris clones to databases and to-do lists—written using Javascript. The code for each is visible and usually helpfully studded with creator comments, so noobs can grok it. You can easily spin off your own copy of the app, tweak it, and publish it. (Full disclosure: I’m friends with Fog Creek’s new CEO and former WIRED columnist, Anil Dash.)

“As programmers, we’ve become a priesthood, and I wanted to smash down the walls,” says Daniel Moore, Glitch’s lead developer. The goal, he notes, was to make it as easy to publish a web app as a blog post—no need to wrestle with back end server code.

I think Glitch succeeds. I know a bit of Java­script and had always wanted to write a Twitter bot, but when online tutorials veered into the incantations for Node—Javascript for running server code—I stalled out. On Glitch, I found Twitterbot code by web developer Stefan Bohacek. In barely an hour I remixed it into a bot that tweeted haiku-like poems based on lines from poets like Sappho and Basho (“have i been here before? / i can almost hear your song / o planets”). Surprised by how easy it was, I started remixing video games and chat apps. After a couple of days, I realized that, whoa, I was beginning to absorb the logic of Node.

Glitch joins several View Source efforts that help people recombine code in useful ways. In Milwaukee, Chris Coyier has amassed roughly 1.1 million users for his CodePen service, which features about 12 million reusable front end demos. “I’ve been in plenty of rooms with Girl Scouts learning to code, and when they can see they can take a project, change a few bits of code, and see those changes immediately, it’s powerful,” he says.

And why stop there? I’d argue we need View Source tools for every phylum of software—like, say, the thicket of impenetrable mathematics that is machine learning. Google has taken a stab at this, creating TensorFlow Playground, a simple classification neural net in your browser. I spent an hour changing the features being fed into the net, adding or subtracting neurons, and watching the AI’s performance improve or degrade. I can’t say I became an expert, but I began to get an intuitive feel—an almost tactile appreciation—for these AI mechanics.

Hands-on tinkering works—as educators and hackers have long known. And as tech gets increasingly complex, we have to make sure tinkering is not only possible, but also encouraged. Let people twiddle the knobs, and you demystify the world.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Days ago = 738 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1707.12 - 10:10

NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #735 - Devos' Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #735 - Devos' Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States

Hi Mom,

Overdue for some political content, and this caught my eye.

I love that the students at Bethune-Cookman University booed and turned their backs on  Devos when she attempted to speak at their graduation on May 10th: WASHINGTON POST. Much like the Notre Dame students who walked out on Mike Pence: TRIBUNE.

In other news...

Students from for profit schools are suing Devos.

Stuff like this makes me sick, which is the theme, right? I was disgusted about something else yesterday, and now I am disgusted by this vile woman who has no business being head of the Department of Education finding herself in that important position.

This article discusses mixed signals from Devos' office. Could that be because she has not clear vision and doesn't know what she's doing?

Friday, July 7, 2017

DeVos’s Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States - The New York Times

DeVos’s Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States - The New York Times: 

DeVos’s Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who made a career of promoting local control of education, has signaled a surprisingly hard-line approach to carrying out an expansive new federal education law, issuing critical feedback that has rattled state school chiefs and conservative education experts alike.

President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 as the less intrusive successor to the No Child Left Behind law, which was maligned by many in both political parties as punitive and prescriptive. But in the Education Department’s feedback to states about their plans to put the new law into effect, it applied strict interpretations of statutes, required extensive detail and even deemed some state education goals lackluster.

In one case, the acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, Jason Botel, wrote to the State of Delaware that its long-term goals for student achievement were not “ambitious.”

“It is mind-boggling that the department could decide that it’s going to challenge them on what’s ambitious,” said Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who worked in the Education Department under President George W. Bush. He called the letter “directly in opposition to the rhetoric and the promises of DeVos.”

After more than a decade of strict federal education standards and standardized testing regimes, the Every Student Succeeds Act was to return latitude to the states to come up with plans to improve student achievement and hold schools accountable for student performance.

It sought to relieve states from the federal pressures of its predecessor, which required that 100 percent of the students of every school reach proficiency on state tests or the school would face harsh penalties and aggressive interventions. Unlike No Child Left Behind, the new law does not set numerical achievement targets, nor does it mandate how a state should intervene if a school fails to reach them. The law does require that states set such benchmarks on their own.

Proponents, especially congressional Republicans and conservative education advocates, believed that a new era of local control would flourish under Ms. DeVos, who pointed to the new law as illustrative of the state-level empowerment she champions.

But her department’s feedback reflects a tension between ideology and legal responsibility: While she has said she would like to see her office’s role in running the nation’s public schools diminished, she has also said she will uphold the law.

“All of the signals she has been sending is that she’s going to approve any plan that follows the law,” Mr. Petrilli said. “And when in doubt, she’s going to give the states the benefit of the doubt.”

Mr. Botel defended the department’s feedback, saying it was measuring state plans against federal statutes — including a requirement that plans be ambitious.

“Because the statute does not define the word ‘ambitious,’ the secretary has the responsibility of determining whether a state’s long-term goals are ambitious,” Mr. Botel said.

In the department’s letter to Delaware — which incited the most outrage from conservative observers — Mr. Botel took aim at the state’s plan to halve the number of students not meeting proficiency rates in the next decade. Such a goal would have resulted in only one-half to two thirds of some groups of students achieving proficiency, he noted.

The department deemed those long-term goals, as well as those for English-language learners, not ambitious, and directed the state to revise its plans to make them more so.

So far, 16 states and the District of Columbia have submitted plans, and more states will present plans in the fall. Delaware, New Mexico and Nevada were the first three to be reviewed by Education Department staff and a panel of peer reviewers.

State education officials in Delaware said they had spent a year engaging the community on their plan and would resubmit it with clarifications.

But Atnre Alleyne, the executive director of DelawareCAN, an advocacy group that helped draft the plan, agreed with the department’s findings.

He said that his group had challenged the state about accountability measures, such as setting firm goals and consequences for failing to meet them, and found that “there was a lot of fear about being bold or aggressive” after No Child Left Behind.

“Ultimately this has to be about every student succeeding, so to say that one-third are going to be proficient in 10 years, the department is right to call that into question,” Mr. Alleyne said. “A lot of people thought it was just going to be a breeze. I was glad to see it was a push.”

Since Ms. DeVos was confirmed, civil rights and education advocates have expressed concern that state plans would get assembly-line approval and states would be allowed to skirt responsibility for low-performing and historically underserved students.

For all of its flaws, the No Child Left Behind Act was praised for holding schools accountable for performance data. Under the law, a school was considered failing if all of its student groups, including all racial and ethnic groups, English-language learners and students with disabilities, did not meet annual achievement targets. By the end of the law, more than half of the nation’s schools were considered failures.

But even after the first round of feedback, the advocates would like the department to be more aggressive and reject any state plan that lacks specifics on how they will account for the performance of historically underperforming and underserved student populations.

“Pushback and feedback in and of themselves are of no interest and of no value,” said Liz King, the director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Chad Aldeman, a principal at Bellwether Education Partners, who led an independent examination of state plans, said that some states, like Louisiana, New Mexico and Tennessee, had innovative plans to improve student achievement.

But Mr. Aldeman agreed that many state plans reflected “process without specificity” when it came to the two most important parts of the new law — identifying how schools will account for the performance of all students, and how states plan to intervene in low-performing schools. And Ms. DeVos and Republican lawmakers were partly to blame.

“The administration has signaled that they’re willing to take plans that are half-baked, and we’re seeing plans that aren’t finished and are not complete,” Mr. Aldeman said.

Christopher Ruszkowski, the acting secretary for the New Mexico Public Education Department, said the idea that the new law would yield total state control was merely “rhetoric from the Beltway.”

“I think a lot of the euphoria over return to local control was an overpromise,” he said. “What this signals is that U.S.D.E. will continue to play the role they’ve always played in the years ahead.”

In feedback for five more states — Connecticut, Louisiana, New Jersey, Oregon and Tennessee — the Education Department avoided criticizing the ambitions of the state plans. But it did maintain its scrutiny.

For example, the department noted that Tennessee neglected to identify, as the law requires, languages other than English spoken among its student population because it considers itself “an English-only state.” According to the state’s population profile, nearly 50,000 students speak English as a second language.

And in Connecticut’s plan, the department pointed out that the state discussed ways to identify schools that had “consistently underperforming” student groups, but did not actually define what that meant.

The state was also criticized for its use of an alternative system for measuring academic performance instead of more standard “proficiency” measurements on state tests, as the law requires.

Such feedback signaled that the department “appears to be resorting to very traditional and narrow ways of interpreting student and school performance,” said Laura Stefon, chief of staff for the Connecticut State Department of Education.

Connecticut was also among a handful of states faulted for including science as a subject for measuring achievement, even though the law allows the use only of reading and math. This feedback was widely criticized by academic groups, including the National Science Teachers Association, who said the department was interpreting the law too literally.

State leaders said they believed they were all but promised their plans would be approved. Instead, Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said some aspects of the Education Department’s feedback were “overzealous” and could undermine community involvement.

“It’s going to be really hard for a state to go back and say, ‘I know I told you we were doing all of this, but we’re going to change it because the federal government told us not to,’” Mr. Minnich said.

Correction: July 7, 2017 

A version of this article misstated the fraction of students that could achieve proficiency under a Delaware education plan. It was one-half to two thirds, not one third to one half.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Days ago = 737 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1707.11 - 10:10

NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #734 - Sacrifice (for Leonard Peltier) - Musical Monday for 1707.10

https://www.pinterest.com/rickgoodsell/free-leonard-peltier/

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #734 - Sacrifice (for Leonard Peltier) - Musical Monday for 1707.10

Hi Mom,

This playlist is centered around the song "Sacrifice," a song written for Leonard Peltier by Robbie Robertson for his album Contact From the Underworld of Redboy.

Though I book end the playlist with two versions of "Sacrifice" (at least in terms of video), and though I do feature three tracks from the Redboy album, the rest came about mostly from the You Tube algorithm and wherever it leads, which is how I came across several of these songs that I would not otherwise have included, such as those by The Dead South, Anohni, and Allen Stone, all of which are brand new to me. "Native Son" by U2 is an unreleased track about Leonard Peltier. "Same Thing" by Flobots is also about freedom for Leonard Peltier.

Thematically, the songs in this mix only loosely fit together, but I like what has come about from the connections and the threads of the algorithm.

Leonard Peltier's story of being a scapegoat for the 1975 conflict at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation has always moved me deeply and profoundly.

Robbie Robertson's recorded interview with Peltier that he laid into the song "Sacrifice" as a soundtrack is even more compelling.

Leonard Peltier is an innocent man paying for the crimes of others. He's a symbol of the racism deeply entrenched in this country, especially against the most oppressed people, such as the original people, the natives, those who first ruled this land, and those who were shipped here as slaves.

The story of Leonard Peltier is an example of the travesty of "American justice" and the power of the government, mainly the FBI in this case, to falsify evidence and mount a systematic and decades long campaign against an individual to make an example of him a statement about the dominance of the conquering white men who stole this land.

It's disgusting, and it makes me sick.

The best hope for Leonard Peltier not to die in prison evaporated when the Obama administration denied his application for clemency just a few months ago. The decision was announced January 18, 2017, just after Obama left office.

Okay, so I edited this entry because originally I did not have a playlist made in You Tube or listed here. Fixed that on Wednesday 1707.12.

Here's the YOU TUBE PLAYLIST LINK.

I would do an embed but then that defeats the purpose of the blog, eh?

SACRIFICE - FREE LEONARD PELTIER - A MUSICAL MONDAY MIX FOR 1707.10

1. "Sail" by AWOLNATION covered by Kawehi
2.  "Sacrifice" - Robbie Robertson - from Contact From the Underworld of Red Boy
3.  "Native Son" - U2 - LIVE
4.  "The Sound is Fading"  - Robbie Robertson - from Contact From the Underworld of Red Boy
5. "Same Thing" - Flobots
6. "Peyote Healing"  - Robbie Robertson & The Red Road Ensemble
7. "In Hell I'll Be In Good Company" - The Dead South
8.  "Walk Unafraid" - First Aid Kit
9. "Drone Bomb Me" - ANOHNI
10. "American Privilege" - Allen Stone
11. "Easy Money" - King Crimson - LIVE
12.  "Deeper Understanding" - Kate Bush - from The Sensual World
13.  "Foundations" - Kate Nash
14.  "Does This Bus Stop At Samariterstrasse" - Brook Pridemore
15. "Tomorrow Never Knows" - The Beatles - covered by Daniela Andrade
16. "Sacrifice" with interviews with Robbie Robertson
  - Robbie Robertson - from Contact From the Underworld of Red Boy

https://www.pinterest.com/lakotalaw/the-problem/

VIDEOS YOU TUBE POD PLAYER



VIDEOS ONE BY ONE

https://www.pinterest.com/jcroome/leonard-peltier/

https://www.pinterest.com/jcroome/leonard-peltier/

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Days ago = 736 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1707.10 - 10:10

NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #733 - Gödel and Time and the Modern Mind

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #733 - Gödel and Time and the Modern Mind

Hi Mom,

Just need a quick share today. We accepted an offer on our house. I thought about blogging on that but may save it for Thursday.

I have had the book Gödel, Escher, and Bach that has been hovering around my reading stack for years.

Here's sums from Amazon (with linky for purchase): Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.

So, this article on Gödel and the Vienna Circle caught my eye.

And here's an extra video for fun, which provided me with the graphic.

Happy Sunday.

Remember, things like this fall into the category of my study not my teaching as in Hey Mom #729.


Vienna Circle Exhibition - Exact thinking in demented times

Published on Feb 3, 2016

On the occasion of its 650th anniversary, the University of Vienna organized a bilingual exhibition in German and English about the Vienna Circle. This video gives an overview of the content of this exhibition, which took place from mid-May to mid-October 2015.

The curators are Karl Sigmund and Friedrich Stadler, both professors at the University of Vienna.

FROM -

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/20/janna-levin-a-madman-dreams-of-turing-machines/

Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks: Janna Levin on the Vienna Circle and How Mathematician Kurt Gödel Shaped the Modern Mind

“The past does not exist except as a threadbare fragment in the weaker minds of the many.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

If it is true — and true it is — that creativity blooms when seemingly unrelated ideas are cross-pollinated into something novel, then its most fecund ground is an environment where minds of comparable caliber but divergent obsession come together and swirl their ideas into a common wellspring of genius. There is hardly more concrete a testament to this principle than the Vienna Circle — the collective of scientists, philosophers, and novelists, who met in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century and shaped modern culture by bringing art and science into intimate, fertile contact. But in the 1930s, as they demolished the boundaries between these disciplines, the Vienna Circle also exposed the limits of logic as a sensemaking mechanism for the nature of reality, limitation being perhaps as necessary to creativity as freedom of thought. (“The more a person limits himself,” Kierkegaard had asserted a century earlier, “the more resourceful he becomes.”)

The paradigm-shifting ideas that emerged from that unusual petri dish are what cosmologist and novelist Janna Levin explores throughout A Mad Man Dreams of Turing Machines (public library) — her lyrical and darkly enthralling novel, partway between magical realism and poetry, yet guided by science and rigorously grounded in the real lives of two of the twentieth century’s most tragic geniuses: computing pioneer Alan Turing and trailblazing mathematician Kurt Gödel.

Inside Café Josephinum, the convening place of the Vienna Circle

Levin casts the making of this small, enormous revolution:

A group of scientists from the university begin to meet and throw their ideas into the mix with those of artists and novelists and visionaries who rebounded with mania from the depression that follows a nation’s defeat. The few grow in number through invitation only. Slowly their members accumulate and concepts clump from the soup of ideas and take shape until the soup deserves a name, so they are called around Europe, and even as far as the United States, the Vienna Circle.

Barely a generation after Bertrand Russell shook the verdure of mysticism from the tree of knowledge to reveal the robust barren branches of logic, the Vienna Circle made it their mission to weld reality with the axe of Logical Empiricism. Levin transports us to the singular atmosphere of their gatherings:

At the center of the Circle is a circle: a clean, round, white marble tabletop. They select the Café Josephinum precisely for this table. A pen is passed counterclockwise. The first mark is made, an equation applied directly to the tabletop, a slash of black ink across the marble, a mathematical sentence amid the splatters. They all read the equation, homing in on the meaning amid the disordered drops. Mathematics is visual not auditory. They argue with their voices but more pointedly with their pens. They stain the marble with rays of symbolic logic in juicy black pigment that very nearly washes away.

They collect here every Thursday evening to distill their ideas — to distinguish science from superstition. At stake is Everything. Reality. Meaning. Their lives. They have lost any tolerance for ineffectual and embroidered attitudes, for mysticism or metaphysics.

Vienna in the 1930s. The sign, belonging to a gambling parlor, reads: “Don’t let luck pass you by.” A horseshoe and chimney sweep, superstitious symbols of good fortune, appear above it. (Photograph: Roman Vishniac)

The members of the Vienna Circle were endowed with minds exceeding the average not by degree but by kind — the kind of genius that risked bleeding into madness, nowhere more so than in Gödel. Levin paints his conflicting multitudes — the internal tensions that powered his, and perhaps power all, genius:

In 1931 he is a young man of twenty-five, his sharpest edges still hidden beneath the soft pulp of youth. He has just discovered his theorems. With pride and anxiety he brings with him this discovery. His almost, not-quite paradox, his twisted loop of reason, will be his assurance of immortality. An immortality of his soul or just his name? This question will be the subject of his madness.

Levin, who has written beautifully about the complex relationship between genius and madness, adds:

Here he is, a man in defense of his soul, in defense of truth, ready to alter the view of reality his friends have formulated on this marble table. He joins the Circle to tell the members that they are wrong, and he can prove it.

[…]

He is still all potential. The potential to be great, the potential to be mad. He will achieve both magnificently.

In his incompleteness theorems, which he began publishing that year, Gödel set out to prove that there are limits to how much of reality mathematical logic can grasp — something many intuited but none had substantiated. (Nearly a century earlier, the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell articulated that intuition, if not its empirical proof, in her diary: “The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.”) With poetic precision, Levin conveys Gödel’s ideas and their broader significance:

Gödel will prove that some truths live outside of logic and that we can’t get there from here. Some people — people who probably distrust mathematics — are quick to claim that they knew all along that some truths are beyond mathematics. But they just didn’t. They didn’t know it. They didn’t prove it.

Gödel didn’t believe that truth would elude us. He proved that it would. He didn’t invent a myth to conform to his prejudice of the world — at least not when it came to mathematics. He discovered his theorem as surely as if it was a rock he had dug up from the ground. He could pass it around the table and it would be as real as that rock. If anyone cared to, they could dig it up where he buried it and find it just the same. Look for it and you’ll find it where he said it is, just off center from where you’re staring. There are faint stars in the night sky that you can see, but only if you look to the side of where they shine. They burn too weakly or are too far away to be seen directly, even if you stare. But you can see them out of the corner of your eye because the cells on the periphery of your retina are more sensitive to light. Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.

But the truth is not something everyone wants to see — it can be inconvenient, even obstructionist. In the spring of 1936, as the ideas of the Vienna Circle were becoming increasingly threatening to the Nazi party rising to power, Moritz Schlick, chair of the Vienna Circle, was shot by a former student of his on the steps of the University of Vienna, where he taught. Meanwhile, Gödel’s swirling genius was spiraling further and further into madness. Having already necessitated psychiatric care two years earlier, he was destroyed anew upon hearing of Moritz’s murder and endured an even sharper nervous breakdown that landed him in a psychiatric institution. Levin writes:

In his quiet room in the sanatorium with the narrow window over the big groomed lawn, Gödel rested alone, slumped and motionless, and wondered, where did he go? Where is Moritz?

What does it mean to say that Moritz lived in the past? Nothing. The past does not exist. The notion of a past refers to a paltry and brittle memory, incomplete and flawed. Moritz is dead. He is lost but for fragments in the minds of those who have moved around the globe since his death. The Vienna Circle died with him as the headlines condemned Moritz Schlick as a Jew sympathizer who got what he deserved at the top of the stairs in the University of Vienna at the hands of a pan-Germanic hero who rightly killed this Jew philosopher. Moritz was a Protestant. Facts of the world are sealed in minds. People wear a facade. All of reality goes on behind their eyes, and there lie secret plans and hidden agendas. A tar of false motives and intentions. Truth mauled. Because the past does not exist except as a threadbare fragment in the weaker minds of the many.

Complement the enormously invigorating A Mad Man Dreams of Turing Machines with philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on how Gödel and Einstein changed our understanding of time, then revisit Levin on free will, the vitalizing power of obsessiveness, the century-long quest to hear the sound of spacetime, and her remarkable Moth story about the unlikely paths that lead us back to ourselves.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Days ago = 735 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1707.09 - 10:10

NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.