- LIST THOSE IMPASSIONED

How to list topics of passion and their adherents.

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LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- LIST THOSE IMPASSIONED -

Great harm results when civilization places too many obstacles between its hoard of data and the compulsion of its info proletariat to learn from it and add to it. We are all the poorer for it. 

Nowadays, computer service providers resemble private water companies of ancient Rome, or telephone counterparts prior to World War I (sic). The rich choose from a jumble of start-up companies for expensive and sketchy service; the poor get very little (or nothing) useful without stealing it from the rich. We are still waiting for a massive system of free info viaducts and public fountains of limitless, free, clear stream: equal to Rome’s greatest achievement, its free, limitless and clean water supply to everyone in Rome.

Computer moguls peddle millions of independent computer terminals of meager potential and instant obsolescence. They draw monstrous profit from the sale of “personal computers” and electronic gadgets. Every household and business requires its own machine or a network of them. Those who can afford it pay an average weekly salary every few years, for a personal computer of the next generation and its marginally improved, over-written software. Transferring old data from obsolete hard drives and networking incompatible systems are additional headaches. Of course, these problems are more or less mended on a case-by-case basis for tidy additional sums. 

The software industry has grown into a monoculture of over-detailed, under-documented, costly and cantankerous digital dinosaurs. It takes extravagant hardware just to store current operating systems and application programs, much less do any serious work. A small country could be run on the files clumsy computers lose every day. Even though the capacity of computers has grown every year (which sloppy software fills immediately), their regal price tag never seems to come down, and novel service taxes accumulate.

We waste hours every month reacting to threatening computer viruses that our machines cannot ward off, much less track to their source and counter forcefully. Nothing better is available to oppose this computer plague mass-produced by smug idiot savants, except palliatives as costly and laborious as they are futile,. 

 Personal computer technology is at the “pre-Model T Ford” stage of development. Computers acquire their data through inefficient keyboards whose original layout was intended to slow the manual input of primitive typewriters. Current word processing software, based on Windows, Apple and other market-dominating companies, is hopelessly complicated, clumsy and inadequate. 

In the 1980s, Wang word processing software offered outstanding macro capabilities. With minimal training, a user could program it to search input text for specific combinations of alphanumeric and punctuation marks (many of which Windows won’t find), apply Boolean (and/or/not) logic and (</=/>) quantifiers in automated decision trees, and carry out complicated program sequences within a given document. Basically, Wang had a programming language of elegant simplicity. All its commands matched equivalent keystrokes and their screen representations, which Wang recognized and incorporated into its programming. That eliminated the need to learn another set of complicated command keystrokes and encoding protocols.

Only the most basic of these capacities are offered by current word processing software (most of them pirated from Wang), unless one studies abstruse, secondary programs like Java or Python.

Electronic mail, cable television and telephone database systems are expensive, complicated and un disappointing. Spreadsheets scanned in PDF format cannot be converted into workable Excel equivalents without more expensive, specialized software. Database brokers, corporate executives and government regulators conspire to make on-line protocols as restrictive, exclusive and costly as possible.

The French Minitel system oversaw an elegant, easy to use and reasonably secure commercial market online. Anglo-Saxon technocrats boycotted it in favor of their complex, problem-plagued and less and less secure alternatives. 

At enormous expense, microfilm technologies replaced bulky hard copy with illegible screen-loads of text. Those, in turn, produced lower quality second-generation copies. Micro-media files were bulky, expensive to create and difficult to access and maintain. 

A hundred or so daily newspapers “serve” a billion or so readers and their dependents across the planet. Each day, entire sterile forests of monoculture trees are cut down for newsprint. Nowadays, entire Canadian forests are flattened for fluffier toilet paper. All that should be plumbed for bidets. How can such ecologically devastating news companies promote a rational debate of environmental policy? They have centralized info flow and homogenized its content. If columns of different newspapers were transcribed onto plain paper, they could not be told apart. Each article reads as if an editorial board with the same political bias had approved it. 

Televised media run twenty-four hours of monologue every day. No return input is anticipated from viewers. Commercial advertisers dictate media content: their motives are dubious at best, their taste as dull as the lowest common denominator. Radio stations are only marginally more responsive. We subsist amid multiple tiers of monologue information systems that blare out a constant roar of advertising for the most part worthless. Like weeds choking out healthy growth, they are as useless and stubborn as they are omnipresent.

The so-called information superhighway is an obstacle course of competing service providers and arcane software protocols. Its search engines are so clumsy that information of value cannot be picked out from their avalanche of random noise without tremendous additional effort and expense. Personal telephone numbers that used to be listed in thick telephone books issued for free every year, can only be obtained today from fee-for-service databases; ditto email addresses once found with a simple Google search, that now require a subscription fee to find. Not too long ago, a telephone call from one of thousands of telephone booths cost a single coin. Nowadays, it’s impossible without a contract worth several hours’ salary every month, along with a gadget that costs just as much or more, guaranteed to be immediately obsolescent. What progress! What progress? A few geek enthusiasts and the staffs of corporate Information Divisions can negotiate this morass successfully, unlike the rest of us computer illiterates. The poor get just about nothing useful. 

The latest computer priesthood intones complex incantations of computer jargon: the modern equivalent of Medieval Latin. In so doing, they earn fortunes to carry out arcane hardware and software sacraments. Computer documentation and training are costly, time-consuming and “built-in” obsolescent. 

This scattered and defenseless computer setup is more vulnerable to virus and worm attacks than a centralized one within which personal PCs would be input-output and memory devices and application software would come from central subscription services more easily defended and used by everyone, thus low-cost or free because tax-based.  

Current information trends zero in on these grim realities: 

 ·       Copyright protections are easier to breach. Malefactors distort and redistribute other people’s data with growing ease. 

·       A few info brokers monopolize computer-driven profits. Their clients pay them rent to get their personal messages across as a costly hobby or a commercial advertising project, while their old, production/consumption jobs dry up and blow away. 

·       Info elites gather more and more data. They massage that content for cheaper, more self-serving output, but at the price of monopolizing its use instead of handing it out for free and waiting for greater profits downstream in time, the way a public utility would. 

·       Given excessive user fees and hardware costs, info proletarians get less and less computer service. 

·       Independent analysts, researchers and commentators are barred from public discourse. They are excluded even though their ideas may be superior to those of corporate mercenaries, bureaucrats and academic drones consulted by the media daily. Such sought-after pundits suffer from special interest meddling, hierarchical thinking and blinkered profit taking. 

Our main problem isn’t the quantity of information available, but its terrible quality. We are drowning in torrents of useless information. More and more noise is produced, less and less significant. Trivia predominates, even on the Internet with its unlimited quantity of information. 

Deliberate Learner subsidy will allow public information utilities to serve high quality information in easily accessible increments at low cost. They will resemble well-regulated water utilities and not extortionate service providers like today’s cable and satellite television monopolists. Like 20th Century waterworks, tax-driven Learner utilities will distribute top quality information on a non-profit basis at minimum expense.

These public info utilities will provide user-friendly, well-documented and interactive software; e-mail and web hosting of fail-safe simplicity; enormous government, corporate and non-profit database services; editing, off-line batch printing and free translation; massive indexing and titanic memory storage; as well as gigantic collections of digital videos — the whole transmitted across optical cable or some superior medium. 

Tesla’s Earth-grounded, electro-gravitic energy and communication technologies may be adopted once Learners marginalize the corporate interests that profiteered from its sabotage in favor of much more wasteful technologies.

Personal computers will interact with these public utilities the same way personal checkbooks do with other commercial, banking and investment services. Complicated transactions will usually take effect invisibly within these info centers, as simply and transparently as possible for the end user.

These central repositories and traffic control centers will serve every static and mobile receiver. Libraries will become nuclei for vast new reference and research complexes, and will benefit from enormous economies of scale. 

What’s more, it will be easier to identify, isolate and punish wrongdoers and thus defend the whole system against information piracy and viral sabotage. They are unidentifiable and untouchable by personal computers and their naïve users who are helpless against such attacks. Foisting passive virus defense software on every private computer has been a doomed project from the start, however profitable it may have been for its distributors (who also spread the viruses?). Standing on the defensive everywhere protects nothing. It would be better to identify, isolate and punish info aggressors from central control hubs fully prepared to do so.

Virtual reality sunglasses will provide easy access to any digitized performance, video or text.

Advertising and political disinformation will be quarantined to TV, radio and print media, those senior services crippled by disgraceful traditions of profit mongering, deliberate disinformation and laughable public service. Even their inferior quality will improve as curious and critical audiences replace today’s brain-dead cud chewers. 

Interactive university programming will offer free lectures, in-person seminars and research projects on every topic. These presentations will be available in real-time, live and played back at the speed and on the timetable chosen by the user. 

MIT pioneered just such coursework; it is placing class notes and documentation online, accessible for free, if skeletal therefore not yet very useful. Every ivy-league school will follow suit. As usual, Learner is ahead of the pack. The Google Company plans to index many rare books and place them online. 

A new electronic version of the “silent university” of researchers in alliance from each discipline will fulfill the original intent of the Internet’s first visionaries. An Intellectual Yellow Pages will emerge, listing every Learner and topic of passion. Hours of online interactivity that Learners spend on recorded topics will establish their academic certification without other qualifications, limitations and exorbitant fees. Referrals to specific documents will measure author payoffs and establish social prestige. Age, origin, occupation, prior schooling and other criteria should be ignored. 

No longer will peer review validate research in paperbound journals. The publish-or-perish, dog-eat-dog competition of prestige science will grind to a halt. Research papers will undergo simultaneous and unlimited review across the entire Learner network, regardless of apparent validity. The new system will accept any information input, to be graded thereafter by the entire community. 

If someone refuses to learn algebra yet wants to audit a Calculus class, so be it. On-line tutors will recommend pre-canned learning modules to under-qualified students. If necessary, such students will be referred to other mentors for preliminary studies. 

Private users will fine-tune their personal filter programs to screen out undesired data and attract those of particular interest to them. 

We will cease enduring irrelevant advertisements broadcast at all and sundry. People will wonder how olden-days advertisers could nag everyone about goods and services most of them didn’t need, instead of satisfying the specific needs of a chosen audience or bowing out otherwise. Such a waste of effort!

The Internet was warped in the opposite direction. As usual with new weapon technologies, its high-priority users fell in line as follows: 

1.     military requirements foremost, with the most cash;

2.     elite academia; 

3.     commercial exploitation; and 

4.     individual needs met last — replaced by spam, viruses and infotrash.

New teaching machines will handle repetitive training chores. Many talented idealists will claim the honor of mentoring. This job may be one of the last structured ones in a post-industrial peace economy. It will evolve from a drudgery of rote repetition, idiot clericalism, parental appeasement and disciplinary scutwork; into the one-on-one exchange of inspiration and guidance with, by and for enthusiastic Learners. 

Please take note of this vital Learner transformation. Under weapon management, authoritarian professionals ‒ judges, teachers and politicians, among others ‒ automatically hinder and punish their clients. They will become benevolent counselors and intimate guides under peace management, forsaking the capacity to inflict harm except under the guidance of an extensive group of outside experts. Indeed, they will find the infliction of penalties distasteful and detrimental to their dignity as professionals. As among doctors, “do no harm” will be the key to one’s professional calling; its opposite, unacceptable by honest practitioners.

Children should get an advanced degree by puberty in at least one of their topics of passion. Nearly everyone will achieve expertise at some study of peace; most in several disciplines. 

The under-motivated and abuse-crippled will benefit from novel systems of remedial care; they won’t overburden standard learning systems until both parties profit from the exchange. Sophisticated biomechanical aids will help those with severe disabilities to reconnect with the standard Learning system. No-one will be left behind unless they so desire. The more challenging the Learning scenario, the more dedicated and smarter the peace mentors drawn to that task by their topic of passion. Special academies will serve those who require restrictive accommodations until their cure liberates them. 

To pick up the pace of Learning, these Networks will use every Madison Avenue fraud and mass culture fantasy humanity has dreamt up to slow it down. Subliminal messages will flash across “Recreation Arcade” Channels. All day long, those special channels will offer brain-dead video entertainment we have grown used to. However, they will also encourage young viewers to pursue literacy and number crunching and thus discover their ultimate topics of passion. These “commercials” will take a fraction of the enormous memory and processing power available. Participation or refusal to participate will be considered equally valid.

Well brought-up children grow up in a lenient and rational society; not the coercive one we’ve grown accustomed to, that produces many soldiers dependably. Mothers will nurse their babies for years: a natural form of birth control. Extended families will cooperate to carry their infants at adult height during waking hours. These family-based and extra-familial acts of cooperation will continue for the first five or so years of each child’s life. 

Well-behaved children, raised in a rational society, will enjoy many more freedoms than are allowed today. Escaping the torrid daytime heat, Balinese children attended public entertainments until 3:00 in the morning. Shielded by special protections against child abuse, no harm befell them from this habit. 

Much like a communal TV room, the physical plant of schools should serve as a voluntary gathering place rather than a detention center. Learner schools will operate in shifts by day and by night to attract bored children and adults with no better destination. Few classes will demand regimented attendance daily. Instead, many facilities and instructors will sponsor ongoing sports, recreation, practical craftwork and business-related projects. Learner Networks will coordinate, schedule and advertise a staggering array of classes and entertainments. 

 Children on the loose will be watched over by community members as intent on their welfare as most teachers are today. Schools will evolve from funky outpatient jails into obvious places for bored kids to seek entertainment. “Go out and play” will become “Go amuse yourself at school.” As during prior Golden Ages, avid youths will gather at the feet of brilliant mentors. 

Learners will consider Learning a good in itself. For an honest day’s salary, Learners will soak up information on any topic of their choosing and at corresponding levels of expertise. 

A programmed learning cycle will teach the functions of a standard computer terminal, then preliminary literacy, data entry and numeracy. Thereafter, Learning networks will provide dictionary definitions, encyclopedic essays, in-depth programmed Learning, state-of-the-art classes, real-time graduate seminars, professional journal articles and book reviews on any given topic as well as full-text printouts of them. Unlike the Internet, which offers an incoherent, poorly indexed and depthless smorgasbord of information, the Learner Agora will shepherd young Learners along structured paths of accelerated Learning. It will also coordinate head-spinning detours down equally well-lit paths, in response to the needs of each Learner in pursuit their info quest.

For brevity’s sake, let me confess that my childhood instruction was a blueprint of how not to teach mathematics to kids. I speak for those whose math skills were crushed during their first years at school. It is too late for us now, but not for generations to come.

What is my proposal? Some country’s Department (or Ministry) of Education should issue a $1 million request for bid to SEGA, Nintendo and any other group that cares to make a bid. The project: build the best first-person shooter arcade game, like DOOM (DOOM+? BOOM?). Once written and paid for, it would become public freeware loaded onto every computer platform (like Windows, UNIX and Mac) from now on. Any player with access to a computer should be able to use it for free.

In this game, oncoming monsters will be tattooed with an equation. The game’s gun-sight will focus on specific elements of this equation (toggled by the player, the gun-sight reticule would adjust its focus enough to target the equation he wants to simplify). The game would have add, subtract, multiply and divide gun keys similar to current pistol, shotgun, etc. keys.

The goal would be to “shoot out” elements of the equation until the monster gets “killed” (the equation simplified for X or some other variable). An equivalent game for peaceful children would “prune” a wildly growing vine until it “flowered.” Faulty simplification steps would register as “misses.” Failure would result in the player being “killed;” failure to “prune” the vine would result in its “strangulation.” Advanced players could impose additional time and ammunition constraints on themselves so as to renew their interest. Get it done more quickly and with fewer shots, or lose the game.

Levels of greater complexity and banks of “control” keys would allow players to solve more and more complicated algebra, including trigonometry, absolute values, calculus, vector matrices, etc. Other game modules would include probability, statistics, physics, engineering, chemistry and computer programming.

     In advanced games, monsters could be tattooed with a series of equations more and more complex. All the rules of mathematics would be gradually revealed as tutorials, hints and clues. Classic formulas and historic discoveries would be “cheats.” 

Except on its own level of complexity, imaginary results would produce “tilts.” “Congratulations: you have just nuked the dungeon!” Since advanced mathematics are based on equations called “complex,” this fate would include an escape hatch that led precocious Learners into “imaginary,” more and more complex and rewarding levels of mathematics.

This software will emphasize the story line, gorgeous graphics and game playing rather than didactics ― evermore play and less drudgery. Children should learn math skills at their own pace as a fascinating game. Ensuing mass numeracy and its technological domino effect could produce staggering results. 

Orthodox responses to this educational problem have been bureaucratic sops doomed to fail in the long run — however satisfying they may appear to current teaching bureaucrats. In the future, math classes will reinforce this primary teaching game rather than suppress electronic games and their potential. Math classes will become well-supervised game arcades to develop math skills.

After generations of computer learning development, no such game exists, much less one distributed to every computer for free. Current math games are clunky, overly didactic and restricted to basic skills. 

I ask you: what bureaucracy is served by this plague of innumeracy? Who gets more and more funding to fail at teaching math, since it has become a neatly packaged drudge stripped of satisfaction and spontaneity for all but a handful of gifted students? 

This new math game will be my revenge on all those insufferable bores. As war is with respect to generals, teaching mathematics is too serious a task to leave in the hands of math teachers.

Had I had access to this kind of game when I was very young, I might have been more qualified to address today’s pressing problems. Without this type of game, I was denied timely mentoring in math. My childhood proclivity was suppressed. I sank into passive indifference to the slow crawl of latter-day classes. Here I am, unschooled in advanced mathematics —  my window of opportunity froze shut. I am a frustrated spokesperson for gifted Learners of the future.

I turn away too easily from most difficulties and shut them out too promptly. I tired too soon of obstacles and made tracks from them too quickly. Less often since my quest for Learner began, however.

It will be up to each Learner to take up their own level of play study. This network will provide names, addresses and direct video links to Learners who share the same topic of passion. These listings will include amateurs and authorities distant and local; it will constitute the computer Yellow Pages of the future.

The poor will gain access to these services for free, for the same reason they go to school today for free. They will receive tax subsidies for computer purchases and Network usage. Learners will distribute free remote computer terminals across the planet. At first, every Third World marketplace and classroom should get one. 

In regions where life support services are insufficient for local youngsters, newly established Learner Academies will provide survival needs, human warmth and follow-up Learning. 

The pooled genius of these Third World children’s starving minds, properly nurtured and tutored, will provide every technological breakthrough, theoretical insight and societal novelty we require.

Finally, and of final importance, the conventions of mathematical formulae should be transformed. 

To begin with, citing Master Soborno Isaac Bari, 5-year old math prodigy: “First of all, you have to draw a diagram.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Xu37gEvsA&t=1967s

That diagram may be a classical XYZ… axis graph, a cartoon showing action, a Venn diagram, whatever applies. It will be labeled with every variable known and unknown. Every constant should be listed and its effect portrayed. Any other data involved should be indexed for immediate retrieval.

Equations thereafter, no matter how complicated, should not be written horizontally as we do today with poorly defined terms and operators. Instead, they should be written vertically, with each term and operator microscopically described and this description placed horizontally alongside each item. Thusly:

A – The sum of apples

+ – added to

B – The sum of pears

= – equals

C – The sum of fruit counted in this case

Or 

A – The sum of people counted

/ - divided by

B – The sum of political parties

= – equals

C – Average of political party counts

(Always including specific units of measurement).

Most mathematical formulas impose poorly documented terms that must be interpreted, guessed at or recalled on the run. This leads to such common but shameful errors as transposition of formulaic negatives and confusion in units of measurement

We should make our math maps as easy to follow as possible, with every element defined exhaustively, instead of turning them into evermore difficult puzzles fit only for geniuses and subject to simple errors even they find hard to avoid. 

Or it could simply be a smart phone app, along with DOOM+ mentioned above. 

Above all, simplicity, specificity and clarity!

…

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net