User:Dc.samizdat

I am David Brooks Christie, born April 3, 1951. He knew that he had about as much chance of understanding such problems as a collie has of understanding how dog food gets into cans.

and yet...

Oh, what good it does the heart, to know it isn't magic!

Polyscheme project
The Polyscheme project is intended to be a series of wiki-format articles on the regular polytopes, the fourth spatial dimension, and the general dimensional analogy of Euclidean and spherical spaces of any number of dimensions. This series of articles expands the corresponding Wikipedia encyclopedia articles to book length, to provide textbook-like treatment of the subject in depth, additional learning resources, and a subject-wide web of cross-linked explanatory footnotes that pop-up in context.

Some of what's in these companion articles is opinion, not established fact, as of this date of publication.

Research articles
Wiki articles I write or contribute to which contain original research or commentary, and so cannot be published as Wikipedia articles, are hosted here at Wikiversity instead. When complete they can be submitted for peer review, and in some cases for publication elsewhere. Perhaps eventually some will even qualify to be cited as sources by Wikipedia articles.

History
I was influenced by the works of Buckminster Fuller, whose Education Automation I discovered in college at Oberlin. Over the next years I read everything he published, and built a tensegrity icosahedron tree house centered 73.5 feet up between the twin trunks of a white pine tree in Vermont. I once walked in at the middle of one of Bucky's famous 5-hour lectures about everything, at U.C. Santa Barbara on my first trip to California in January 1971. Later I taught an Experimental College course at Oberlin on Fuller's works, where we built and flew a geodesic hot air balloon that we watched fly away to Canada over Lake Erie. We didn't think it set anything in Canada on fire with its open flame burner, because it didn't appear to start its descent until it had exhausted its fuel.

After college I moved to Chicago, where I did programming in assembly language for one of the first large (nation-wide) online database transaction processing systems, hosted by a single IBM System/370 mainframe that occupied an entire floor of an office tower in the downtown Chicago loop.

From Chicago I led summer-long Wilderness Projects in canoes through the Canadian taiga, straddling the 60th parallel near where the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Manitoba and Saskatchewan meet clockwise at a four-corners, 1400 miles northwest of Chicago, 400 miles north of the northernmost town you can reach by road, and 500 miles north of our nearest radio contact, in those days before satellite phones.

In 1978 I landed a programming job in California working at a tiny microcomputer manufacturer, one of the earliest such start-ups, the year after the Apple II personal computer was introduced, three years before the advent of the IBM PC. In 1982 I reached Silicon Valley, the end of the rainbow for ambitious programmers, epicenter of the emergence, swiftly urbanizing frontier homestead of the digital revolution. We lived in a refurbished cabin in a redwood forest on the wild San Mateo County coast, and I commuted over-the-hill every day to my job at a computer manufacturer, in the same truck I had commuted to Canada in with 3 canoes on the roof every summer from Chicago. At that company, the job I held longest in my peripatetic career (7 years) and learned the most from, they built the first fully concurrent, ethernet-networked office workstations from Intel's newest microprocessors (before the silicon was even dry and fully debugged), and I wrote code for the internals of their distributed, message-based operating system. At last I had arrived at a long-sought destination, the root systems of the computer.

In Silicon Valley I worked for stock options at a series of interesting start-ups that did not work out, until one of them that was starting to work out was bought by Netscape (for its engineering talent, not its software product) in the year of the Netscape IPO, 1995. This was a pretty good place to wind up, at the hottest start-up I had ever been early to, growing so fast it made our heads spin just to come to work the next day, at perhaps the most interesting nexus in Silicon Valley history thus far, the birth of the internet. But Netscape did not work out either in the end, as everybody knows.

So I retired at the end of 1998 from writing programs other people wanted, to look for work that interested me. My principal interest had become studying symmetries in and among languages of non-deterministic computational mathematics. I had hard-won experience with computer programming languages and operating systems' internals, and a deep fascination with the problem of concurrency, but I had no mathematics. I had always disliked doing math homework assignments, the same way I detest repetitive unoriginal programming tasks. They were both hard for me for some reason. I could barely bring myself to do the grunt work my trade often demanded, and got into trouble at several companies by spending too much time making the assigned task interesting to me by biggering the design. After I failed the AP calculus exam in high school by failing to practice doing enough calculus, my formal education in mathematics ceased.

At Netscape, where I was not a researcher just a programmer, and not of the original Netscape browser (Mosaic/Navigator/Mozilla), I had met the researcher R.V. Guha, whose Meta Content Framework (MCF) was in the process of being standardized as Resource Description Framework (RDF), the semantic data representation that would later become a core component of Tim Berners-Lee's semantic web initiative. RDF is a language root system of semantic triples, subject-predicate-object, essentially the same data model used by the original AI researchers, who sought to construct language models by design, long before modern large language models were invented. Those are grown, not designed, from machine experience of the symmetries to be found in vast quantities of human speech found in nature. Modern AIs are not built by hand as RDF models by human architects; they are products of Darwinian natural selection, like us, rather than products of design, like the things we build.

As a knowledge root system RDF interested me, but it has no operations, only a data model. After leaving Netscape I worked independently for years programming a kind of symmetry group, consisting of the 3-dimensional RDF triples extended in a temporal 4th dimension like the one in Minkowski spacetime (the 4th field I added to the triple was a creation timestamp), and with Gelernter's four concurrency group operators rd, out, in, and eval. I realized my system as C++ template metaprograms for a nesting set of these operators, implemented as ACID-transactional C++ sequence iterators over the progressively more complex spaces traversed by each of Gelernter's operations. To this hierarchy I added an anonymous 5th operator (operator function call) between in and eval. None of this graph database transaction processing monitor that I built bore any conscious resemblance to the sequence of 4-polytopes (hyper-polyhedra) of increasing complexity, with their 4th operator the 24-cell (hyper-anonymous), as I had not yet resumed my college-days' study of geometry. I had studied some physics (relativity) in college and understood it as the geometry of 4-dimensional space, I had wondered about Bucky Fuller's jitterbug ever since those days, and I had been pleased to "discover" Pascal's triangle of the n-simplexes back in Chicago. But I had not read much of Regular Polytopes yet, and had not made the acquaintance of the more astonishing objects Schläfli discovered in 4-dimensional Euclidean space. Particularly not yet the unique 24-cell (hyper-cuboctahedron), the radially equilateral vector equilibrium Bucky Fuller saw the cuboctahedral shadow of. Fuller searched all his life for this object (the utterly unique realization of the 24-point symmetry group of the tetrahedron), but never quite found it because he was looking for it in the wrong space (3-space).

....

Nature is symmetry
It is common to speak of nature as a web, and so it is, the great web of our physical experiences. Every web must have its root systems somewhere, and nature in this sense must be rooted in the symmetries which underlie physics and geometry, the mathematics of groups.

As I understand Noether's theorem (which is not mathematically), hers is the deepest meta-theory of nature yet, deeper than Einstein's relativity or Darwin's evolution or Euclid's geometry. It finds that all fundamental findings in physics are based on conservation laws which can be laid at the doors of the distinct symmetry groups.

....

Poetry is symmetry
Edna St. Vincent Millay and many other American and non-American poets knew that poetry is the Insurgent Art of inventing symmetries, and at its best contains a discovery of nature's symmetries. Poetry is metaphor, which is to say dimensional analogy, and the sonnet is a strict form of it, like the analogy between regular polytopes in three and four dimensions discovered by another woman poet, Alicia Boole Stott. Poetry and mathematics have common origins and their greatest practitioners use the same method, which is simply to look, see, and find the symmetry. One of Millay's sonnets begins "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare". When she went off to Paris for her Fatal Interview with him, perhaps she sensed in George Dillon the soul of an earlier Parisian youth who burned brightly, Évariste Galois who discovered the mathematics which underlies geometry, inventing symmetry group theory before his own fatal interview at 20. Millay's contemporary poet Emmy Noether, the greatest mathematician of a time which is remembered for the emergence of the great physicists, found that Galois's poetry underlies all physics, too. Noether's theorem, the deepest mathematical finding in physics, is her intricate sonnet that expresses how each great formula of physics expresses a conservation law, which in every instance is itself an expression of an exact symmetry group. These poets knew how great poetry emerges from discovery, or rediscovery, of nature's symmetries.

Justice is symmetry
Anyone should understand Israelis' unquenchable thirst for vengence for all acts that have attempted to exterminate them. Precisely because it is unquenchable, a survival instinct acquired at immeasurable cost, we must implacably resist, by all nonviolent means available to us, their attempt to slake it. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. We are deceived into believing that we can get the kind of world we seek by doing the very things we are trying to get rid of. "Just a little more violence to end violence." "Just a little more hatred to end hatred." "Just a little more oppression to end oppression" -- and on and on.

We are taken in because good people are doing these things, sincere and brave people. And this is why the finer their qualities, the more dangerous they are, the more thoroughly we are fooled.

All the finest qualities in the world cannot change the simple, immutable fact that the ends cannot justify the means, but, on the contrary, the means determine the ends. In all of man's history this stands out clearly and intellectually indisputable; yet it has been perversely, insistently, sentimentally and tragically ignored. In this universe the means always and everywhere, without doubt and without exception, cannot, in the very nature of things, but determine the ends. This cannot be repeated often enough.

We get what we do; not what we intend, dream, or desire. We simply get what we do. Recognizing this and applying it would, in a generation, bring about the transformation that alone can put an end to the fear, suspicion and misery which at present hold such terrible sway over all of our lives.

If we see and act upon this (I will say again, unabashedly, what it is -- the means determine the ends!), then what the prophets of the ages have wistfully called Utopia will become a reality.

“Nation shall no more lift sword against nation” nor unloose napalm, nerve gas or nuclear weapons. “Neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” Because they will have at last understood, because we will all have at least understood, what is required of us. “To do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly” with the knowledge that all our means are but temporary ends and that all our ends are but new beginnings. We will have learned what every flower has never forgotten and what all oceans patiently remind us of.


 * - Ira Sandperl

Religion isn't symmetry
They say a dog is a man's best friend, but not every man should have a dog. It depends on the man. And the dog.

If you want to have a dog, or a religion, as a companion and soulmate to help you answer important questions outside science's purvue, like how to be happy without making other people unhappy, have at it, and dog bless you.

People who treat their religion as a source of facts about the world, instead of as a source of mystery, haven't received word yet that we have already passed through that revolutionary period in human history a few centuries back called the Enlightenment. Hello, we've discovered that the origin story of the facts is not mythologies, it's science.

Just as you musn't let a dog drive your car or let a religion drive your government, you mustn't let a dog advise you on investment decisions or let a dogma dispute the facts that science has discovered. Religion has to stay in its lane. People who drive their religion weaving all over the road are a menace.