Gray's leaf insect (Phyllium bioculatum): Professor Hennessy (former President of Stanford, and current Chair of Alphabet), Gaels / Celtics, Taking a Realistic Virtual Earth for everything to the next level - STEM, Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts + realistic virtual Harbin for actual-virtual ethnographic comparison ...

Dear Susan, Hugh, Abigail, and Prof. Hennessy, and All, .... (Prof. Robert Harrington MD, Peter Norvig, head of AI at Google, Profs McLeod, Lovell, West, Graburn, MacCannell ... )

So nice to see you here in Canyon, California 94516 on Friday, Susan! Thanks for coming to visit from Pittsburgh PA (where we Scottish Country Danced in high school in the '70s!).

Abigail (whom I know from 2003-2004 when I was studying visiting virtual St. Kilda online in the school of Celtic & Scottish Studies at Univ. Edinburgh), and Domhnall, I enjoyed reading this recent article about your teachings at the University of Edinburgh, and at the University of Highlands and Islands, as Scottish professors, which I just came across -  

"Interview: Abigail Burnyeat and Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart"

http://www.studentnewspaper.org/interview-abigail-burnyeat-and-domhnall-uilleam-stiubhart/ - and especially with regards to turning it into opera, and its last line: "So, it is much a part of the world heritage as well as just Scottish and Irish heritage." (https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/abigail-burnyeat)

Your teaching of this ninth century narrative as opera makes me wonder how best we could add the textual and visual evidence into a realistic virtual earth (think Google Street View with TIME SLIDER / Maps / Earth / Tour Creator / TensorFlow / Translate / Avatar Bots) and examine this narrative and texts in brand new ways, by potentially even turning it into opera(s) in a 3D virtual world - e.g. with animation, avatar bots, and interactivity, and eventually even for conversation re linguistics (and re all the British Isles' languages you know, Abigail). And how could we make this 'come alive' for students in your courses as well especially, and in new ways?

And Hugh, we've also talked about exploring creating this realistic virtual earth for historiography re your current medieval focus on King John's court (1199-1216) - https://people.miami.edu/profile/h.thomas@miami.edu. Hugh and All, in my blog post from today, you'll find some ideas (for your next book, Hugh!) about re-conceiving the book in brand new ways - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2019/04/acanthoxyla-prickly-stick-insect.html - and about a new social science  theory I'm calling ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy - and with some Scottish small piping (re upcoming CD potentially engaging Google's Bach Doodle AI composing software, newly conceived of as "Piping Google Doodle" - which I may have to make - for an upcoming CD, "Honey in the Bag").

I'm glad to write too that my actual-virtual ethnographic field site - Harbin Hot Springs (~ http://tinyurl.com/p62rpcg ~ https://twitter.com/HarbinBook ~ http://bit.ly/HarbinBook  ~) - just re-opened for day visits (after being closed since September 2015 due to the devastating Vally Fire in Lake County, CA, which razed Harbin, but not the pools themselves). And in a related vein, I'm seeking to develop a new social science method I'm calling ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/search/label/ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy - re my actual-virtual, physical-digital Harbin research, and to allow all of us to create / develop our field sites / visit our historical sites (eg archaeology too) - and eventually with interactive avatar bots too - simply by adding the data and evidence we have (the wiki idea) to start. I'm interested too in creating a realistic virtual Harbin in which to visit Harbin Hot Springs in a digital mask, for example, for both soaking (from our home bath tubs for the relaxation response - meditation), as well as for many different kinds of field work (see blog re "brain' science, and "field site" labels+).

On Friday, Susan, her son and I accidentally stumbled upon an apparently unused water-holding container (on public East Bay M.U.D. lands) that is the right size to become a warm pool. And it could be fascinating to explore turning it into a warm pool for soaking! A morning and evening walk and soak there could be wonderful, and one that would parallel walking up the hill to the actual Harbin pool area itself (for the benefits of movement). And with a digital mask, soaking there could become social, where the sociality of soaking at Harbin is one of the things that makes it unique, and which I explore in my 2016 book: 

Naked Harbin Ethnography:                   

Hippies, Warm Pools, Counterculture, Clothing-Optionality & Virtual Harbin

by Scott MacLeod

sgkmacleod@worlduniversityandschool.org

Foreword by Nelson H.H. Graburn

UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus of Sociocultural Anthropology

http://www.scottmacleod.com/ActualVirtualHarbinBook.html

Academic Press at World University and School

http://worlduniversityandschool.org/AcademicPress.html

Professor Hennessy, I really enjoyed again reading your book "Lessons from My Journey" after hearing you twice recently, once with Marissa Mayer (when I got your book). As chair of Alphabet, I wonder how best to proceed with these questions of creating a realistic virtual earth for STEM, social science, and Humanities' research. What would you suggest?

How best to develop a SINGLE realistic virtual earth for STEM (at the cellular and atomic levels too) and academic heritage research (Scottish and Irish here, but the heritage of all 7,11 known living languages too) and scholarship? (And also, Robert, and David - how best to eventually develop a realistic virtual earth for tele-robotic heart surgery, for example, and beginning to study consciousness in new ways re your fairly recent Stanford talk on the Virtual and Real)?

And here's Peter Norvig explaining how machine learning works, with the beginnings of what could be a virtual Harbin warm pool at the 38 minute mark - https://youtu.be/T1O3ikmTEdA (which I explore a bit here re my research: https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2019/03/lingcod-methinks-that-what-makes.html).

Am proceeding here with licensing World Univ & Sch with California's BPPE (Bureau of Private Postsecondary Education), and would love to stay in touch about how best to take this to the next level. Am also interested in an ongoing way to explore collaborating with Stanford about this - and re Stanford Medicine and Law OpenCourseWare or similar (since MIT doesn't have a medical school l or law school, and thus now MIT OCW in many languages with this). In what ways would it be possible to explore best becoming a professor at Stanford to further facilitate collaboration both with A) CC-4 MIT OpenCourseWare-centric World University and School in ~200 countries, and 7,111 living languages +), and B) with this actual-virtual realistic virtual Harbin / earth / universe project? 

And thanks for visiting Susan and re this Celtic questions especially :)

Warm regards, Scott

My actual-virtual St. Kilda paper is accessible from

my recentheritaly updated CV, from ~ 2 > 15 pages
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y4vXG-QoGZkMWqK6Y5WbuNqdDihPyUVqMAgp2HS6hpU/edit?usp=sharing -
& at top here:
http://scottmacleod.com/papers.htm
> https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2019/04/green-headed-tanager-doing-major.html - 

Some lovely dancing here - https://twitter.com/TheOpenBand/status/1105535227093381120 - in a Scottish Country Dancing vein, where Margaret Lepley here has a degree from MIT, I learned recently at Open Band. 

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

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