Introducing LA Steam
It begins now, more or less.
We at Apple are excited to share with you…
Dateline May 2024
Things are both heating up and cooling down. The drama of having to work two jobs for me is over. I am now working at the new startup I’ve been plotting to join since the beginning of the year and officially started at the beginning of this month. That means I am no longer in sales and I am back to R&D. Most importantly it means I can focus for longer periods of time and architecture and not spend so much time looking up at the sky waiting for bluebirds to squat money into my open arms. (Or kiss the butts of potential whales). But most of all, not working two jobs means my brain is freed up to do more and better writing, especially here at Tessellations.
Dateline November 2024
That was then, this is now. Now I am stuffing down the dreamy ideas of getting rich building something that somebody else wants. I think I’m a bit too cranky for that as well. I don’t know, really. I can be something of a stochastic system. So for the first time in 13 years, I’m out of work and looking for a job, which is really strange and a bit uncomfortable for me. Lucky I have cash and I can hold out for a minute. In the meantime I have some spare time to focus on the projects I have been wanting to build for a long time. One of them is LA Steam.
I am making a concerted effort to focus my particular contributions to the Foundation for Free Black Thought in STEM advocacy. For me, that means putting together the ideas and showing people what I mean given what I have learned about K12 and higher ed in the past three years.
A couple things are clear to me.
I don’t care about the race of people. I treat everyone the same. I can’t change the way people see me, and I have been black in a way that a lot of people kind of sorta understand. I’m giving priority to the networks I know, but I am not any kind of ethnic, racial, religious or other identity champion. I care what you think. I care about your virtues. I don’t need people to ‘look like me’ in order to do right.
There are powerful groups who speak about ‘empowerment’. And they fund organizations that claim to empower. I am taking an ‘Eastern’ approach. Enlightenment comes from within, not from without. I am all about showing people what that looks like.
K-12 parents who are not affluent will struggle to find networks and resources for STEM. There is an incorrect assumption that students ‘get it’ or they don’t when it comes to math, science and music. Most people don’t appreciate that success in these area come from hard work, trial and error, and focus as well as talent. I want to share networks and resources from the bottom up and from the top down.
The nation needs the scientific process. We have too many people who want to blame, fight and turn things upside down, and not enough who know how to debug. Good solutions only come from good debugging. We need this attitude to be more prevalent.
Long form deep reading, concentration and focus are transformative life skills. Those without these skills will fail to handle sophisticated problems whose solutions are the most rewarding in life. Too many capable people are not encouraged and find themselves bored and transgressive. This is a threat to civilization.
So that’s my assessment. It very much matters that people who understand these things show our faces, work towards civilization, share our scars, and keep practicing.
Tessellations will be the place to talk about this. Join me.
The First Compendium
The first project will be the Tessellations Compendium which will be a combination of a Google Doc and a git repo with links to resources. At some point I’d like to get a web developer to help put up a static site and maybe I can get some funds for that. Actually, I’m pretty sure I can. So you can look for something simple by Jan 1, and prototypes before then.