[Edu-sig] seasonal challenge to calculator dominance in high schools

[kirby urner]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 10:54 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> I grew up in Omaha, NE and the suburbs of St Louis, MO. I don't remember
> when I leaned about the "Old Man River" proposal to build a dome over all
> of East St Louis in 1971
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project
>
>
Yes, I still weave OMR into my writings and videos as a good example of a
mega-project and a "city from scratch" (a giant stadium in shape, terraced
on the inside, bleacher seats more like apartment sized), centered around a
central "field" big enough to contain several Olympic-sized sports
facilities, amusement parks, you name it).  It's a design for many cities.
I'd focus on making it easy to disassemble, as we might want to take it
down and recycle.

What would life be like in such a place?  Would they use Python or graphing
calculators?

As a science fiction backdrop, we could create it sooner for the movies
than for real, but why not do both?

We need places to prototype new lifestyles (e.g. "autonomous vehicles").
Exactly what EPCOT was designed to do (it being a first prototype of such a
place, self booting the whole idea of an experimental prototype community
of tomorrow (what EPCOT stands for)).

I've launched the meme :Asylum City: (a kind of EPCOT) which suggests "a
place of refuge" although there's a bit of a "mental hospital" vibe (very
Oregon).

That's OK.  My own neighborhood in Portland is unofficially / informally
referred to as the "Asylum District" by many.  [Dr.] Hawthorne Blvd, the
main street, is named for the doctor who indeed created and ran the first
state mental hospital here in Oregon, under contract from Salem.  Oregon
was later famous for Ken Kesey and 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' -- all
good marketing AFAIC (as far as I'm concerned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey

Another famous dome in the STL area, BTW, is of course the Climatron in the
STL botanical gardens.

I've actually visited that one.  I enjoy STL (St. Louis).  I don't think
I've been to Omaha, only Lincoln.

Nebraska was the home state for a planning firm that Libya had contracted
with that my dad worked for when we lived in Italy, and I seem to recall
driving around Europe with "Cornhusker State" license plates, which
everyone would puzzle over.  Was it because we got a tax break for being
tourists?  I don't remember.


>
> The world's largest glazed geodesic dome protects the year-round desert
> environment through hot windy summers and cold snowy winters at the Henry
> Doorly Zoo in Omaha
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Doorly_Zoo_and_Aquarium#Desert_Dome
>
> Maybe easier to clean a geodesic dome than a fully-spherical structure.
> Are geodesic domes as or more resilient than regular domes?
> https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/geodesic-domes
>


The most famous geodesic full sphere, to my knowledge, is that one in
Disney World's EPCOT, dubbed Spaceship Earth.

I see Zurich Zoo has a new geodesic dome elephant house:
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/zurich-zoo-elephant-house.html

One tends to go spherical when doing a restaurant or lookout "ball in the
sky" type design, wherein people want to look down.  I'd think floating an
aquarium ball on the ocean (tethered, not tippy) over relatively shallow
tide pools, might be another application, but I haven't searched yet to see
if anyone's doing that.

On ordinary land, there's the "sphere as house-wall boundary" and the
"sphere as greenhouse boundary with other structures inside" model.

The design less tried is the latter, but is closer to Bucky's vision for a
mass-produced environmental bubble.

The idea is to have your free-standing structures inside the dome, leaving
the dome optionally transparent, more like a greenhouse. Privacy and
organization is established with theater prop grade internals, meaning you
can rearrange the floor plan without serious deconstruction, add steps and
remove them.

http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/martianmath/mm4.html
(Bucky holding container shipping size deliverable as dome home internals
e.g. kitchen, media room, loft)

http://www.solardome.co.uk/gallery/solardome-pro/  (some models in this
direction)

As the dome gets bigger, one thinks of small communities, even apartments,
scaling up to the "dome over Manhattan" meme.

I never took that meme seriously as an actual proposal (more science
fiction).  The OMR dome, on the other hand, seemed believable, given it's a
city from scratch to begin with.  With Manhattan, we're talking retrofit.
Why not start with a smaller city, like in Simpsons?

The accompanying chatter around the NYC poster, was about the relatively
big surface:volume ratio of radiator-like high rises, versus what it might
cost to keep the whole dome warm, with that more minimalist inside-outside
atmospheric interface.

Even though the dome is huge, it's exposing less surface area to the
outside.  We might use a Python Jupyter Notebook, to work it out.

When it comes to what's actually practical: these are so many open
questions in engineering to some extent, even where they pencil out on
paper.

That few engineers appear to be testing tomorrow's technologies today is to
me another sign of a civilization waiting to happen, that we got to
preview.

But then we decided we liked the dark ages a lot more for some reason.
Nostalgia perhaps, for when Planet Earth seemed more flat.

Among those doing the boldest pioneering:  the Eden Project has some of the
biggest pillow domes (greenhouse concept), which is the design J. Baldwin
was working on at the New Alchemy Institute.

https://www.edenproject.com/

Here's me talking about dome designs on a Youtube some years ago, at the
Linus Pauling House here in Portland:

https://youtu.be/QV4m76Om7bk (only about 3 mins, low resolution 240p)


> However I do make use of the "share and mix" features, similar to MIT
>> Scratch.
>>
>> We create a private "swimming pool" wherein any student can toss (share)
>> project they're working on, not visible to general public, and other
>> students can grab a copy.  I can bring up student code on the big screen
>> and discuss it in front of the class, or let them do it.
>>
>
> Like a pastebin app or more of a wiki? If codesters creates a screenshot
> (and links to them with og:image or schema:image metadata) that'd be cool.
>
>


Codesters does create a screenshot thumbnail of what's on the canvas, when
you share.

The idea of a private classroom is built right in.

When students are registered for an account, they're somehow associated
with one of these classrooms, by my company (a process I don't see -- never
visited the headquarters).


>
>> Scratch is on the whole enjoying a bigger budget and support team is my
>> impression, and is especially capable around sound (writing programs that
>> make music for example).  Codesters is not non-auditory.
>>
>
> I tried to lay down a track with concurrent beats with Scratch one day. It
> sort of worked. I'll have to try out the Codesters sound support in a lab
> someday.
>
>
My bad.  Typo.  "Codesters is not non-auditory." should have been
"Codesters is non-auditory."  I.E. It has no ability to use sound (yet?).

Graphing calculators aren't good at music either.

Great links for computer music, thank you.  I've dabbled but maybe barked
up the wrong tree in terms of software, I now see.

Recombining music with math ala the ancient Greek model, via computer
music, seems a rich area we could do a lot with.

There'd need to be lots of dancing to go with the music too.  Great
exercise for kids.

We don't allow math-music, math-dancing (rhythm, looping, scheduling,
scripting) nearly enough in our sit-still regimented graphing calculator
schools.


> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)#Game_designer
> might have some ideas about this presumably reinforcement-learning based
> game (with MathTeX, I'm sure) that you speak of. One word: Nbgrader.
>

Great link.  I think about SimCity a lot.  My daughter grew up playing Sims
quite a bit.

The simulations I imagine are designed to be much more about actual real
systems, like the water reservoirs around LA.

Did you know the main reservoir is coated with a layer of black plastic
balls (called "shade balls"), less to prevent evaporation than to prevent
the formation of bromate from chlorine?

https://youtu.be/uxPdPpi5W4o (yay sphere packing as a topic! -- I use
Python to explore sphere packing: 1, 12, 42, 92...).

The open source ethic applies to sharing about public infrastructure with
those destined to depend on it.  All of us in other words.

>
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2013/03/25/moores-law-vs-wrights-law/
>

Both laws examples of what Fuller called "ephemeralization" (doing more
with less materials as a function of experience / understanding).

Toynbee (historian): "etherealization" (same thing).

As one (a person, humanity, whatever) gains mastery over the principles,
the physical component tends to shrink.

Who gets the benefit of the added leisure time (slack) is the question,
i.e. time for elective versus mandatory activities.

That benefit doesn't seem to spread to all Global U student-faculty very
evenly.  More to simulate!

Get out your Jupyter Notebooks and search for relevant data!  Curate.
Analyze.  Visualize.

Kirby
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