State of the Discussion

Then there’s prog metal, so, yeah…
I get annoyed with the metal technocrats. I can listen to clinical demonstrations of technical proficiency for a bit, but I can listen to 70s/Bon Scott AC/DC for who-knows-how-long. It’s not a contest. Make me feel something. (There’s also a happy medium, but the extremes are good for illustration.)

...legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security.
I expect there will be a lot of countries that boycott the LA Games, rather than send their athletes into reach of ICE's by-then very large corps. If they risk it, I can easily imagine almost open insurrection between ICE on one side and California/LA on the other. Or between the California/LA law enforcement and the rest of the state/local government if the local police decide to side with ICE.

I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs
Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.

Speaking of heroes, I note that the 2028 Olympics are currently scheduled for Los Angeles. Two problems there:
1) Getting international tourists, or even just Olympic athletes, into and safely back out of the country. I belong to an organization which holds international conferences. It is sufficiently difficult for would-be attendees to get visas that attendance plummets when we hold one in the US. Which will doubtless hold down Olympic tourism. Not to mention the increasing fondness of the current administration for arbitrarily holding up travelers, even those with impeccable paperwork.
2) Trump would doubtless find it impossible to resist (not that he'd try) showing up and making the whole thing all about him -- see "hero in his own mind". To see how this might go, consider the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
I'm already seeing calls here for Los Angeles to bail on the whole thing. Those tend, so far, to focus both on those issues, as well as the legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security. Currently Federal law enforcement agencies are, thanks to ICE, not in good oder in LA (or California generally).
Plus, staging the Olympics is expensive. Local government budgets are already strained, and nobody can see Trump kicking in financial support. If anything, he might decide to bill LA for the security costs.

Michael, this is just way cool!
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)

Perhaps the greatest calculator ... was Kepler
Perhaps. But the ladies who did all the calculations for the Mercury and Apollo Projects were no slouches either. Men's lives hung on their work. As the story goes, John Glenn asked explicitly for Katherine Johnson to do the calculations for his flight. He wouldn't trust anyone else with his safety.

I love maps. All kinds: altases, road maps, city maps, world maps. Give me a map to use, read, ponder, and I can be absorbed in it for hours.
I remember, when I was in Athens (Greece, not Georgia), getting my hands on a fold-out street map, assuming I'd be able to make some sense out of it based on knowing the general names of streets, and where things like markets and bridges were. And I remember the delightful/terrifying feeling of not, in fact, being able to do that even a little bit. Thanks to the different alphabet, I was unable to tease out any meaning at all. Terrifying for obvious reasons, but delightful because it was rather fun to see one of my most-cherished objects - a map! - manifest as incomprehensible.
Michael - The issue of records being kept, preserved, and accessible for more than one generation is one I think about a LOT. Just seeing how quickly electronic media become obsolete makes me shake my head in bleak wonder.
We can read the direct writing of people from thousands of years ago - multiple thousands of years - right up to, what, a couple generations ago? When did people stop writing letters or keeping written journals?
It just seems like humanity, or at least the industrialized portions, is engaged in a headlong rush to erase itself from the record. (Which, considering where we are right now as a species, is kind of understandable, though no less alarming.)

Why spent minutes (at minimum) on the screen when a sketch on paper takes seconds?
Tablets are getting better at imitating what paper and pencil do. But it's still a pale imitation. And, from what I've seen, the rate of progress towards duplicating it as slowed markedly.

There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory
The more ways you can engage with a body of material, the more it will stick with you.
The greater the degree of attention required of you as part of that engagement, even more so.
Humans should think, machines should work, as the saying goes. That said, thinking *is* work, and attempts to find short cuts around that just make us stupid.

...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.

First we smash all the (electronic*) calculators.
Get the logarithm table and/or the slide rule back.
That's how one teaches the basics!
In all seriousness, I work as a tutor and by now mainly for math. Before one can teach them abstract concepts, they need to get the basics right and that means calculations (preferably without electronic help). I see no justification to teach set theory** when they get still puzzled by "Is 123 divisible by 3 without residue?" or "What's the square root of 81?". If that's 19th century, then Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser!
To me that sounds like the unfortunate discussion about why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age. Why learn orthography when there are spellcheckers? And what by the way is the use of kids reading fictional literature of guys long dead or ancient (pre-1990) history?
Yes, understanding should have priority over rote learning buy everyday math is still mostly basics. And I am cynical enough to say that we are failing there already. Imo math at school should concentrate on practical problem solving not Zermelo's theorem.
*abaci will be tolerated
*exception: difference between natural, integer, rational and real numbers.

For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms)
Absolutely, however teaching "formally define concepts, axioms, proofs, etc" are taught in PLANE GEOMETRY, not so much in calculation/algebra type classes.

Here's a post from Keith Devlin working through some thoughts about the tension between calculation and mathematical thinking.
https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/05/calculation-was-price-we-used-to-have.html
For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms), with various forms of calculation (numerical, algebraic, set-theoretic, logical, etc.) being tools developed and used in the pursuit of those goals. That’s the only kind of mathematics we have known.
Except, that is, when we were at school. By and large, the 19th Century revolution in mathematics did not permeate the world’s school systems, which remained firmly in the “mathematics is about calculation” mindset. The one attempt to bring the school system into the modern age (in the US, the UK, and a few other countries), was the 1960s “New Math”. Though well-intentioned, its rollout was disastrous, in large part because very few teachers understood what it was about – and hence could not teach it well. The confusion caused to parents (other than mathematician parents) was nicely encapsulated by the satirical songwriter and singer Tom Lehrer (who taught mathematics at Harvard, and did understand New Math), in his hilarious, and pointedly accurate, song New Math.
As a result of the initial chaos, the initiative was quickly dropped, and school math remained largely unchanged while real-world uses of mathematics kept steadily changing, leaving the schools increasingly separated from the way people did math in their jobs. Eventually, the separation blew up into a full-fledged divorce. That occurred in the late 1980s. The divorce was finalized on June 23, 1988. That was the date when Steve Wolfram released his mammoth software package Mathematica.[...]
Devlin is really good on matters pedagogical, and always worth the read.
I do tend to think, though, that students will have a very hard time with understanding math (or written communication) if they have not had enough experience with doing the work, and not seen enough examples to get an idea of the possible range of approaches to doing the work, etc.. Early in my teaching I tended not to give enough examples, figuring that teaching the conceptual side would lead students to sort through their own database of examples to see the underlying principles. I've since learned that most students come in having seen and understood too few examples, and having no idea of more than one approach to the tasks they have been called upon to do.
I do a lot more modeling of approaches, and evaluation of those approaches, now that I'm finally starting to figure out this whole teaching thing.

I was taught using the School Mathematics Project, which seemed OK to me. But I may not be one of the "normal people".
I suggest that being able to divide accurately with pen and paper is now almost useless, whereas being able to divide approximately in one's head is useful for avoiding fat-finger errors. That is, the underpinnings have turned out to be more important than the algorithms.

Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
It is interesting that it is widely used in domain names, e.g. KaiserPermanente.org Clearly the sales and marketing folks think it will be easier to parse that way.

Michael, the scrambling thing is called Typoglycemia. In German it's Buchstabensalat (letter salad) and at a pedagocic course I had to suffer through at university as Badewanneneffekt (bathtub effect, no idea why).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposed_letter_effect#Internet_meme
With long words with completely random letter scrambling it's rubbish even if first and last letter are retained.

"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words.
To paraphrase a friend, "No one can get a PhD dissertation out of pushing phonics. You have to claim that something else is better." Or at least that something else is as/more valuable than recognizing the words early on. The new things are all well and good, but memorizing a few hundred words-as-a-chunk is still necessary. You can't sound out "bat" and "cat" forever; at some point it has to be automatic.
There are assorted postings -- the internet has made them more common -- that ask whether you can read "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae." Is this just an English thing? Does Romanized Japanese tolerate the same sort of misspellings for fluent readers?
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.

It's just convention that one does not write railwaystation or particleaccelerator or internalcombustionengine but imo those are perceived as units.
German also has the useful convention of capitalizing nouns. Using Internalcombustionengine would at least signal it's a noun, even though it starts off with an adjective. Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
The example everyone remembers from college German is Handschuh (hand shoe) as a generic glove/mitten term, Fingerhandschuh for gloves, Fausthandschuh for mittens, Panzerhandschuh for armor, etc. The German is at least consistent. In English, it's another of the English/Norman dualities. Glove is from Old English; mitten is from Norman for mitten; gauntlet is from the Norman for glove. I understand there are more types of Handschuh that correspond to some of the other uses English has piled on gauntlet, like "throw down the gauntlet" or "run the gauntlet".
I'll just go ahead and invite Hartmut to explain how wrong I am :^)
* Off and on for a half-century now I have occasionally tried to adopt camel notation when I'm writing code. It never lasts, and I always go back to underscores: source_index rather than sourceIndex in something I've been writing this week.