Spazeboy writes further about his Tour de Tunxis.
I’d like to see him write more about a logical full-time faculty staffing number. I think we need five more English faculty to cover work load. That’s a lot of faculty. What forces prohibit a reasonable number of full-time teaching faculty?
Is this the correct question?
He might ask, “Why don’t you write about it?”
And I would answer, “Because I’m a cynic.”
Jesse Ives adds to a post with this comment
The “Game†of life is a serious one, and goals can be important. Of course that’s one of the problems people are facing; a lack of goals. I’m guilty of it myself, but that’s neither here nor there. If a person chooses a path often they can’t go back, but sometimes it’s not worth going all the way along a certain path for one reason or another (perhaps another has opened, or some other aspect has shed light on an undesired result) they choose to adjust or switch to another.
Life is hypertextual.
One question I would ask is can a person commit without some sense of goal. One can have a goal, a mind for an outcome, and this establishes path (Gawain). One can proceed on a path (Buddha, Spiderman) and acquire a sense of outcome.
I don’t want top players. I want students like Jesse.
On E8 and symmetry
At the most basic level, the E8 calculation is an investigation of symmetry. Mathematicians invented the Lie groups to capture the essence of symmetry: underlying any symmetrical object, such as a sphere, is a Lie group.
Lie groups come in families. The classical groups A1, A2, A3, … B1, B2, B3, … C1, C2, C3, … and D1, D2, D3, … rise like gentle rolling hills towards the horizon. Jutting out of this mathematical landscape are the jagged peaks of the exceptional groups G2, F4, E6, E7 and, towering above them all, E8. E8 is an extraordinarily complicated group: it is the symmetries of a particular 57-dimensional object, and E8 itself is 248-dimensional!
To describe the new result requires one more level of abstraction. The ways that E8 manifests itself as a symmetry group are called representations. The goal is to describe all the possible representations of E8. These representations are extremely complicated, but mathematicians describe them in terms of basic building blocks. The new result is a complete list of these building blocks for the representations of E8, and a precise description of the relations between them, all encoded in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries.
Nobody seems to be writing about what all this means.
Every time GWBush adds to the subject of schools. a whole host of writing follows, which basically cover all the same ground. Public school quality, choice, NCLB, alternatives. As I’ve said before, states can create all the choices they want for students and families but none of these will solve a core problem: the spaces where people live. A student subject to a poor-quality school may be bussed to a wonderful school in the pristine woods, but where will that student study and apply their knowledge?
No, performance isn’t fundamentally a school issue.
What needs to occur is a national movement to improve neighborhoods and cities so that they form a supportive space for learning and creativity to happen.
1. Troubled neighborhoods should be incorporated as economic entities by cities or states.
2. Local leaders should organize, plan, and manage neighborhood improvement, hiring local talent and workforce, putting efforts right into the spaces where quality of life can be improved. House by house, those who live in the area should the designers and the builders.
3. Connecting these areas to the life of the region would happen naturally.
4. Schools, in this context, would attract teachers, parents, and would naturally improve because space would improve and children would be a part of the activity.
5. Economic output would increase. Regions would explode. People would have work.
Nothing will work until the people who live in neighborhoods are provided the opportunity to build things themselves, from the inside out.
If I were a mayor or a president, this is the kind of plan I would encourage.
Provide not the choice to move to another school. Provide the choice to change the very ground.
I want to thank everyone for their wonderful help and offers of aide and support. I hope I deserve it and have the opportunity to help anyone who needs it in the future.
There’s lots more to be said about family and friends.
At the moment I feel a bit like a rodeo clown at the sharp end of a bull. The surgery went well, and I have no idea when, where, or how long it took. I can’t remember anesthesia being given. But I do remember waking in the recovery room with Iago in my throat. Something about Othello being tricked. Anyway, the pain is incredible, but it’s a pain I can deal with, so much more bearable that the deep and slimy pain of an intestine knuckling its way out of my abdomen.
The surgery taught me and the surgeon a few things. He informed us that there were in fact two hernias, one on the left and one on the right and that these were congenital. He caught the second via the laparoscopic procedure. He claimed that I walking time-bomb, with threats to testicles and all kinds of other bad things, this after years of heavy stone work, rock climbing, weight lifting, fence building, light construction, carpentry, child-making, and other day to day functions of life.
The first cars I drove as mine were a ’69 Buick Lesabre and a 57 Chevy four-door (too bad). These cars were broken but functional, high-mileage vehicles, and fun. They worked as long as you didn’t fix what had been fused over the hole or crack. That’s how I’ve felt for a long time, that something wasn’t quite right in the lower regions. Like a squeak deep in the engine that you just live with. Yes, this tangible pain is a better kind of pain.
A few weeks back I found a fairly large lump in my abdomen. It was soft, flexible and stayed in my mind for a few moments before something else grabbed my attention. I’d been doing lots of work on the basement walls and building and installing some understair shelving for storage and as a fort for S. General wear and tear is also starting to catch up.
A few days later, the midriff started to hurt and the bulge had grown. I knew exactly what had happened. On the 15th I went to see Dr. C and he knew what happened too.
“So, Steve, you think you have a hernia.”
“Think so,” I said.
“You have a hernia,” he said. “It’s got to be repaired.”
We contacted the UCONN Health Center and made appointments.
However, by Wednesday, my condition quickly worsened–partly by driving–and Thursday my wondrous wife rushed me in to see the surgeon, who made lots of time for us, and scheduled the fixup for Monday the 22nd. Now I must get back to laying still. But laptop warmth is quite soothing.
More soon.
Susan Gibb sends this link to if:Book’s snip of Linden Lab’s announcement opening its Second Life’s code to the public. Exciting stuff.
From Verlyn Klinkenborg
Nearly every image of nature I have ever come across misses the sense of intricate confusion underfoot in the woods, the thickets of goldenrod collapsing into each other along the roadsides, the rotting tusks of fallen beeches broken against the western hillside. It almost never makes sense to talk about the purpose of nature. But now — until the snow comes at last — I could easily believe that the purpose of nature is to create edges, if only because every edge, no matter how small, is a new habitation. As purposes go, that could hardly be more different from my own, which is to reduce the number of edges here, so that the big pasture is bounded by four clean lines only, free of interruptions from sumac or knotweed or shattered maple limbs. Left to itself, nature is all interruption.
UNC at Chapel Hill is up to some interesting work under the rubric of mapping
In referring to the work of Foucault and post-Foucaultian social theory as the ‘new cartographer’ (along with the new archivist), Gilles Deleuze pointed to a mode of investigation and writing that sought, not to trace out representations of the real, but to construct mappings that refigure relations in ways that render alternative worlds. In this project, we begin with this understanding of new cartographies/new mappings, and then turn to the ways in which these new mappings are emerging within social movement, activist, and artist projects to rethink economic practices and institutions. In forging this research group, we are interested in understanding how this particular genealogy of a new cartography is being and can be mobilized to render new images (and practices) of economies, how it is being deployed in community and alternative economic projects, and how it is being used to understand the institutions and networks of economic organizations such as corporations, military-state economies, and the university.
The practice appears to be about mapping relationships and defining how human geography can be reshaped to create alternative links, paths, circles, and relations. The accompanying disOrientation guide to the university’s connectedness is a visual (re)presentation. It would be interesting for my own college to have such a map. We often sit about confused, wondering where we are in relation to identifiable points, such as an economic sector or other university program.