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The Life and Times of Buckminster Fuller
The New Yorker features a review of the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition in New York 25 years after his death. Fuller was a deeply strange man. He documented his life so thoroughly (in the "Dymaxion Chronofile," which had grown to over 200K pages by his death) that biographers have had trouble putting their fingers on what, exactly, Fuller's contribution to civilization had been. The review quotes Stewart Brand's resignation from the cult of the Fuller Dome (in 1994): "Domes leaked, always. The angles between the facets could never be sealed successfully. If you gave up and tried to shingle the whole damn thing — dangerous process, ugly result — the nearly horizontal shingles on top still took in water. The inside was basically one big room, impossible to subdivide, with too much space wasted up high. The shape made it a whispering gallery that broadcast private sounds to everyone." From the article: "Fuller's schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past... He was a material determinist who believed in radical autonomy, an individualist who extolled mass production, and an environmentalist who wanted to dome over the Arctic. In the end, Fuller's greatest accomplishment may consist not in any particular idea or artifact but in the whole unlikely experiment that was Guinea Pig B [which is how Fuller referred to himself]."
Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
...when you can have the entire world referring to 'Bucky Balls'.
That should be enough for any man.
A couple of 30-somethings embark on the ultimate roadtrip
Given the stuff that I have read about him, he prolly would have fit in nicely with this little place we call Slashdot.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The best publication from America. (IMO, of course)
A great self-promoter. He made no contribution to civilization that I could ever see.
Maybe he was prophet, giving us a car that by today's standard would have been fantastic on gas mileage back in 1933. We're all gonna be using three wheels soon when we have to try to get gas at Bartertown
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I'll see y'all fellow New Yorkers at the opening of the Whitney show! :D
Limina.Log
Twitter, is that you?
Bucky balls? I am disgusted at myself for recognizing the name....I thought I had forgotten everything I "learned" in high school....
...is the conclusion I came to after trying to read "Critical Path."
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
For the article-reading-challenged:
One of Buckminster Fuller's earliest inventions was a car shaped like a blimp. The car had three wheels-two up front, one in the back-and a periscope instead of a rear window. Owing to its unusual design, it could be maneuvered into a parking space nose first and could execute a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn so tightly that it would end up practically where it had started, facing the opposite direction. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the car was introduced in the summer of 1933, it caused such a sensation that gridlock followed, and anxious drivers implored Fuller to keep it off the streets at rush hour.Fuller called his invention the Dymaxion Vehicle. He believed that it would not just revolutionize automaking but help bring about a wholesale reordering of modern life. Soon, Fuller thought, people would be living in standardized, prefabricated dwellings, and this, in turn, would allow them to occupy regions previously considered uninhabitable-the Arctic, the Sahara, the tops of mountains. The Dymaxion Vehicle would carry them to their new homes; it would be capable of travelling on the roughest roads and-once the technology for the requisite engines had been worked out-it would also (somehow) be able to fly. Fuller envisioned the Dymaxion taking off almost vertically, like a duck.
I for one hail our Dymaxion driving, geodesic dome dwelling overlords...It truly pains me to see someone with capitalization, punctuation, and even grammar turn himself into a blathering idiot by drooling "prolly" all over Slashdot.
This is neither YouTube nor MySpace; if you want to identify with us, please never say "prolly" again.
I have to admit, I've always wanted a city in the clouds, it would probably even be doable. Of course, some jackass will shoot it out of the sky before you can blink. I think that may be the problem with a lot of his ideas - they assume people have good will at heart.
He believed that it would not just revolutionize automaking but help bring about a wholesale reordering of modern life
It was the Segway that actually changed civilization.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
He was a genius. He had a way of understanding three-
dimensional structures that no one had before, and that
no one else may ever again. Really.
He was a visionary. He had millions of ideas, and they were
all solutions to real problems. I guess that makes him an
engineer as well.
And yes, he was certainly green ahead of the new green trend.
That's a really strange take on Einstein. I would suggest (unless I am hopeless misinformed) that you look into what he meant when he said that god didn't play dice, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
a bunch of wusses in NY who couldn't build a dog house don't impress me much as critics. I will have to RTFA to see if they completely missed his most important influence. As a kid in high school I read Spaceship Earth. That was mid '60s, a world most of you won't remember but be assured...nobody had heard of peak oil or cared much about gas mileage. I have pretty much been for greener and less wasteful ways of doing things ever since.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
If anybody wants a small sample of Bucky's genius, museum stores often sell die-cut sheets of paper which, when assembled, form a dodecahedral globe. This model is the "Fuller Projection", a more accurate representation of the world where landmasses more closely resemble their actual sizes (that is, Greenland is not as large as South America).
I think what's more interesting about the globe is how the continents are laid out on the die-cut paper. Real relationships between continents are "duh" obvious to viewers because it's clear how people would travel from one part of the world to another (or not). It all comes together when you assemble the globe. They're cheap, so buy two.
I had the great privilege to drive his Honda Accord (he was a spokesperson for Honda in the 70s, I think) with a relative of his across the country in 1979 or 1980 and had a chance to meet him and talk with him. The experience was transformative and motivational for me, and gave me more direction in life.
The above paragraph may sound mushy and corny, but apparently the curators of the Whitney seem to agree with some of my sentiments. And they're harder sells than a 23-year-old.
I can't say I would want a bucky ball as a personal home either, and frankly, am confused as to why anyone would even think a geodesic dome would work for such. However the Tacoma Dome in Washington State is a geodesic dome and works very well as an arena. No leaks or anything. Don't blame the design man... ;-)
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Putting religious beliefs before science? That's something I really don't understand. If there's anything I've learned by reading about Einstein's views on religion, it's that he was the quintessential scientist even in this respect: he didn't subscribe to any known organized religion, but vehemently refused to rule out the existence of god- and found atheists arrogant for doing so. His religious views seem to be somewhere in between pantheistic and agnostic, and I don't see how they affected his scientific work.
Perhaps you're referring to the famous quote "God does not play dice". I don't think this quote expresses a religious belief as much as it articulates a "gut instinct" about the way the universe worked: that it's fundamentally deterministic. Of course, being Einstein, he had to word it in a deliberately provocative fashion. I think gut instincts have a real place in science- they can often be useful starting points for hypotheses, or used to guide an investigation in a direction that one only grasps subconsciously at first. The only real restriction is that one needs to be able to recognize when experimental evidence has proven one's gut instincts wrong. I don't think Einstein lived to see this point; local hidden variable theories hadn't been experimentally ruled out by Bell inequality experiments such as the Aspect experiments before he died.
And I'm not even sure Einstein was thoroughly wrong about the universe being fundamentally deterministic. Even though the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics contains an element of randomness (the very randomness that Einstein railed against), the Everett-Wheeler interpretation says otherwise. The Many Worlds interpretation, as it is often called, asserts that random wave collapse merely looks random from within our own "branch" of a larger wave function that encompasses many universes. If you were somehow able to view the entire wave function, it would look completely deterministic. The only reason we see randomness in quantum "collapse" is because our macroscopic detectors (such as our eyeballs) induce decoherence in quantum states that cause environmentally-induced superselection. (Explaining that sentence in english would take many pages, so if you're curious I suggest you use those words, plus the abbreviation einselection, to do some googling.)
...is not a problem. Spray foam or ferrocement works just fine. I have helped build and lived in examples of each. As to subdividing for rooms, you can use cables and tensioners (turnbuckles) for the additional floor(s) supports, build from there, with nice drop down or spiral staircases. You can get a variety of living levels then in the same structure, plus suspended walkways and..you name it, use your imagination, it's slick. They make very nice living structures. They are *much* stronger than 90 degree flat square stick frame construction (which is actually about the weakest joints you can make, it is just easier, that is why it is done so much).
You should honestly go back and investigate Einstein's views and input on both subjects at some point instead of taking one out of context quote as you seem to have done.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert/?printable=true
That book should be required reading in all schools. It's out of print, but on the net. Take the time to read.
What?
Give it up, kdawson. You *REALLY* shouldn't be an editor here.
Fuller wasn't the only inventor with a cult following of dubious rationality. Just look at Ray Kurzweil. Though in Kurzweil's favor most of his inventions (1) work; (2) perform useful tasks; and (3) have had some commercial success.
Tesla came up with a technology that made electrical power practical. He got weird in middle age when he ran out of his better ideas and kept trying to find people to give him money.
We live in three twice-subdivided, spherically extruded gyroelognated pentagonal dipyramids built in 1972. Two of them are stuccoed and one is shingled. They don't leak.
They're each a single room, one with a pentagonal downstairs. I can't begin to explain how wonderful it is to live in a sphere. I love the geometry and the womb-like feeling. But I hate domes that are mangled and partitioned off like a normal house. You have to let the dome be what it is, if you do it works. And if you can't do that then you need to go with something else.
A lot of his prose sounds like schizophrenic word salads, with all kinds of unnecessary neologisms that don't convey any information. He reads like a neo-Platonic philosopher on hallucinogens.
There is no true randomness in the universe that I have encountered (and I am a physics grad) only chaos. Chaos looks like randomness to the untrained eye but once you see that all we take as random is only the results of chaotic behaviour (which IS deterministic) then the universe seems a lot less wacky.
Maybe they leak, too.
As with most things the religious nutters believe, this just doesn't happen to actually be true.
I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.
- Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945,
You can't take the sky from me...
FTA:
The first prototype of the Dymaxion Vehicle had been on the road for just three months when it crashed, near the entrance to the Chicago World's Fair; the driver was killed, and one of the passengers-a British aviation expert-was seriously injured. Eventually, it was revealed that another car was responsible for the accident, but only two more Dymaxion Vehicles were produced before production was halted, in 1934. Although Wikipedia claims "The cause of the accident was not determined, although Buckminster Fuller reported that the accident was due to the actions of another vehicle that had been closely following the Dymaxion."[1][2][1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car
[2] http://shl.stanford.edu/Bucky/dymaxion/index.htm
The Synergetics Collaborative (http://synergeticists.org/) is building on Bucky's scientific, educational, and design methods and principles which we think may be his largest contribution.
but overspecialization also brings lack of innovation, vision, and in general invention.
just think how frequent were the inventions in the 19th century. if you force yourself, you can see that institutionalization and specialization of new science branches have also brought refinements of earlier discoveries, but decreased the number of discoveries and inventions too.
we need discovery, inventions. we are sorely lacking them these days.
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Give it a rest, you moron. Your pet obsession is not wanted here. Get the fuck out.
(Anonymous because one of your 10 sock-puppets probably has mod points)
I think you did pretty well, for what that's worth.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I've been inside two geodesic dome houses, and neither of them leaked, nor were they shingled (which seems like a big pain in the ass completely contrary to the principle of the dome). The residents were very happy with the living conditions, and not just because they were into "science fiction". One had lived in it since the 1970s, and the other had worked pretty hard to get to be the latest resident of one that dated from a few years earlier.
The interior of the domes had cubical/rectangular rooms built within them, with the spaces between then and the dome structure used for storage, not living space. Nothing stops anyone from hanging floors inside the dome, or hanging walls from the floors. And above 3m high, the top floor can have a dome ceiling. The structure itself is very strong, so you can hang all kinds of stuff off it, like a hot tub on a non-reinforced floor (because it's hanging inside a distributed load webbing, not standing on a compressed pillar). The point is to use a very small amount of material and not have to worry about straining the structure as you do things with it.
I guess if you're like the hippies who just bought Stewart Brand's _Whole Earth Catalog_ as a conversation piece, a coffeetable book (rather than a book about how to make or do without coffee tables), you would just use a geodesic dome as a conversation piece. You'd fail to clamp plastic sheeting along the joints or caulk the joints properly, but you'd probably do that wrong on your regular old house, too.
Fuller was a geometer, a mathematician, not a magician. His designs can be executed spectacularly wrong, just as they're spectacularly right when executed right.
--
make install -not war
Geodesic domes work quite well if built properly from the right materials. They've been protecting big radars in arctic environments since the 1950s, which is an impressive achievement.
The residential domeheads took a wrong turn when they tried to make small domes out of "natural materials". Trying to shingle a sphere was a terrible idea. Putting together prefab parts is the way to go. Fibreglas works well, but the "Mr. Natural" types didn't like Fibreglas. As Fuller pointed out, domes have to be manufactured products made cheaply, with precision, in quantity.
There's also a subtle structural problem with domes that wasn't well understood until they could be computer-simulated. The abstract geometry produces a good structure. But in the real world, differential thermal expansion, when the sun is hitting one side of the dome more than the other, produces sizable stresses in the dome, which distorts slighlty. This was one of the major causes of leaks.
The other major problems come from the fact that domes require a whole range of architectural components specifically designed for them, from electrical conduits to kitchen cabinets to windows. Parts designed for rectangular structures don't fit well.
Einstein if religious at all, was a Spinozan.
Fuller's domes may not be The One True Faith that people like Brand wanted but they're still a damn good choice for certain kinds of commercial structures. They also got modern engineers thinking about dynamic load distribution in ways that are very relevant and important now, a time when yurt design, for example, is going high-tech fast.
Tensegrity Posts are just now starting to be appreciated for the resource-frugal, vastly compressible wonders they are. I guarantee that we'll see more and more variations on this scheme in the coming years in structures that need to be boosted out of the gravity well or simply transported at very low cost in absolutely minimal space.
Fuller's cardboard versions of his dome worked quite well as temporary structures during World War II. If we had any sense at all we'd be making them now out of modern materials.
Many of his designs failed in large part for lack of, basically, computing power and, to a lesser degree, modern materials. Done with modern resources they're practical as all get out. You may want to laugh at his two piece steel bathroom but the hundreds of thousands of blowmolded shower enclosures sold every year at places like Home Despot are direct descendents. His cooling approach in the Dymaxion Home was far more sophisticated and resource-savvy than most of the "eco-homes" being built even today. And trust me, I've reviewed the plans of hundreds.
I agree, Fuller was an obscurantist pain in the ass with some serious delusions. He also got a hell of a lot of useful work done that considerably advanced manufacturing technology, approaches in several branches of engineering, and topology. Where he focused his attention, things advanced. As for his stuff including make-do components, like the famed Ford suspension put on its side in the Dymaxion Car, he made it clear from day one that this was a proof of concept, a proof that, even with make-do parts, carried ten passengers, got over 30 mpg, and turned on its own radius. Go ahead, show me that the first proofs of concept by Burt Rutan or Armadillo Aerospace or OLPC work that well.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
From what I picked up, the "God" who doesn't like dice, is more of the deist personification of natural law, than a best friend in the sky. The same "God" who America's founding father's talked about, and that most Enlightenment philosopher/naturalists referred to. More akin to Aristotle's "unmoved mover", than to the modern Judeo-Christian gray haired old man.
A metaphorical god, rather than a literal one, would be the most succinct way of putting it, I suppose.
The Bohr/Einstein debate though, is probably the best anecdote for modern science, still. I took a philosophy of science class that used that as the scaffold to hold up the dynamics of the modern history of science (from Maxwell to the more theoretical modern ideas, like super symmetry and strings), it was truly enlightening, even if Bohr "won" in the end.
I'm getting sick of both atheists and the self-justifying religious trying to put Einstein on their side. Einstein is probably the most abused scientist ever, we keep remaking him into what we want him, instead of accepting him as who he was.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
A.) The crash you're talking about, as you would know if you'd RTFA, was determined not to be the fault of the car.
B.) Otoh, the thing was set up, for no sufficient reason, to steer "backwards". Like the rear seat of a fire truck, you steered left to turn right and vice-versa. Fuller liked boats, that's how tillers work, so he built it that way. This did make the car less safe, as drivers complained, but it in no way relates to the fundamental design.
C.) On yet a third hand, the whole beastie, since it was designed to "take off" at high enough speeds, had a dangerous tendency for the rear wheel to lose touch with the road once the car was moving at any kind of serious slip. This was bad design, no doubt, but again, easy enough to fix and would have been if more had been built.
D.) Being so lightweight, it tended to be pushed sideways by wind. This would be harder to address but seemed far worse to drivers of the time, used to big honkin' steel contraptions, than it would to, say, modern riders of enclosed bicycles, who have long since figured out ways to deal with this.
E.) Whatever its flaws, the thing was fantastically maneuverable. Its turning radius makes the average BMW look like a freight train. It was also, as I wrote above, built with cheap salvaged parts for many of the innards that would have been replaced with decent ones if it had ever gone into production. It's not reasonable to compare it to a production car in terms of things like the suspension, which was a total kluge.
F.) If you want to criticize the Dymaxion car, first read a book like Small Wonder on the creation of the Volkwagen bug. It took over ten frickin' years to get Professor Porsche's original chowderheaded version refined into the car that has now earned such reverence. But like the Dymaxion, his fundamental ideas were good, and those eventually made it great. The difference is that Porsche's team was able to keep going through years of rebuilding, prototyping, and redesign, up to and including inventing new kinds of steel since the unibody design and the suspension couldn't be made with the kinds that existed when Porsche first designed it.
Get the facts. Otherwise you're just wasting everybody's time.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Dymaxion house. . . had some bizarre space-saving tricks.
Such as?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Your user links don't work. Is there anywhere we can look to find out more about this house you live in? If not, please at least put some images on Flickr. I, for one, would certainly link to them.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
The subject really says it all.
The dual-slit single photon experiment shows an interference pattern on the "wall" behind the two slits (when the "hits" of many photons, one at a time, are summed). The emitter sits in front of the two slits. The place on the wall that any given photon hits is random (with a fixed probability distribution, resulting in the aforementioned interference pattern).
A waste of space as a scientist, but a cocky self-publicist, and an American.
We have very few real scientists, and a strong tendency to lie to ourselves about how good we are, probably due to Hollywood. Which other country could have invented 'SuperMan', a mythical magic being who defeats America's enemies?
So we pretend that any American scientist is amazing, and are then surprised when they turn out not to be...?
Bucky Bollocks, even.
Wrong. Either you're ignorant or you're altering the facts to support your own worldview.If I wasn't an athiest before, reading the bullshit shovelled by people like you make Athiesm seem to be the only sensible option for the sane and intelligent.
I really like his ideas about living in a house which can be moved within a transportation network.
Finally, anyone with a stamp like this had to be a genius.
So is your obsession with twitter. Get some help.
Even if the Tacoma Dome were a true "geodesic dome", which it isn't, using the spherical shape for a dome had been in use for at least 1500 years before Buckminster Fuller was born.
i think people in financial straights did care about fuel economy...anyone remember the mobilgas economy runs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobil_Economy_Run
it was abandoned when the buying public stopped caring about fuel economy
^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^^H^H^H^H^H^H^H*
the evil oil companies manipulated our brains with advertising & made us all buy gas-guzzling edsels...
* this realignment of thought brought to you by greenThink, a division of alGoreAphobia.org;-)
Yep. Sounds like ol' Bucky lost a ball or two along the way. *Ducks*
Maybe Bucky designed the Thunderdome
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
The article is wrong.
There is a full-scale Dymaxion House: in Dearborn, Michigan at the Henry Ford Museum. That a New Yorker writer couldn't turn that fact up with a quick Google search is disappointing.Two prototypes were built, and one was modified and lived in for several years by the Graham family. The rebuilt house is made from parts cobbled together from the other two, and some parts that had to be re-manufactured from the original plans. Tours are given through the Dymaxion House in the museum, and I've been several times.
Get off my lawn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Stupid_Johnson
no, really
Which other country could have invented 'SuperMan', a mythical magic being who defeats America's enemies?
Superman mostly fought domestic crime. I think you're thinking of Captain America, or maybe Mallory's King Arthur... whoops, he's not an American, is he?
Just looked at the people posting slanderous comments against Buckminster Fuller. Surprise, surprise, conservatives hat a man who spoke out against the status quo and against corporatism.
If you want to understand why certain people seem to hate Bucky with an unreasonable passion, read Critical Path.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Penis size and sense of humor must be related, with one problem compounding the other. Redmond is one frustrated place.
I remember the "Farm Exhibit" in the Museum of Science and Industry, in Chicago, used to have a dome that, if I recall correctly, was identified as being his. Inside was a continuous running movie of the origin and future of farming. They took it out sometime in the mid-90s, I guess, as last time I was at the museum the dome was gone. Since all it was used for was to show a movie, it wasn't ever really clear to me why the dome was there in the first place.
As I recall it was a great place to (potentially) make out if your SO didn't mind having their hearing destroyed by the unbelievably loud movie audio.
I grew up in a dome. I agree that it is practical to seal, but you do have to take care of it just like any other roof.
The modern ferrocement seems to be the best method, though the one I lived in used spray foam and that combined with a good coating of the roof worked well.
We also had a few different levels in the dome, with part of the space fully open. While it's true that you lose some space against the wall the thing that's nice is that any flat surface against a curved wall always has space for cables or plugs...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is a full-scale Dymaxion House: in Dearborn, Michigan at the Henry Ford Museum. That a New Yorker writer couldn't turn that fact up with a quick Google search is disappointing.
I believe that what the writer meant was that no full-sized reproduction could be built at that time (1929). If I recall correctly it was at least ten years before a full sized model was built.
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
>Whoever modded the above "flamebait"
Not that anyone will ever read this commment, but...
Ha ha, there are a few who have good reason to mod me flamebait after my last troll comment on another story.
I was very entranced with Mr. Fuller as a kid and young adult. He was very concerned about energy efficiency, back when few others gave a hoot. But today, looking back at his design for a huge, pyramidized donut shaped, concrete city...
Others have pointed out that he was very egotistical. After reading his works, I must agree.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
I doubt you could name a single valid line of inquiry in the field of chemistry that hasn't been experimented to death and published about to within an inch of its life that doesn't involve any piece of equipment more complex than glassware and burners. i find it unbelievable that im saying this, but we dont know what we dont know yet. remember that american patent office was commenting that 'everything to be discovered has already been discovered' in 1890s. we know what happened after then.
exactly this 'new fields opening up' thing is what im talking about. if we put it in your words, new fields are not opening up because science and knowledge has become too institutionalized in the last 100 years. thats what im saying. also i would like to remind you that most of the pioneers of new fields havent been funded by any institution, organization, or had cutting edge 'technologies' under their command. take the example of faraday for example. Basically, you just don't know what you're talking about because you have no grasp of the history of science and technology. bold, absurd, broad sweeping statements. you are being too conservative and rather scientifically arrogant in my opinion.
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Just open your eyes. Geodesic radar domes are used everywhere. They work!
His Dymaxion map significantly reduces the projective distortions found in common projections (Huge Greenland...)
He's a big idea man. His mind travel in different directions compared to most of us.
We NEED visionaries like him. We already have many practical engineers. In this aspect, he is similar to Tesla.
Being a physics graduate student doesn't give you a privileged position of perception, I don't believe.
The problem is that this is not a falsifiable statment.
If I show you a phenomenon that appears to be random, you can always say that there are as yet unobserved variables accounting for it. There would be no way to convince you since you have 'faith'.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The big one I helped work on with the cable suspended rooms and lofts was just beautiful. It had a huge central woodstove with the stack going straight up and kept that place toasty warm all winter. I only stayed there for awhile but friends were building it so I helped some, learned a lot too.
You are welcome of course. Good luck with whichever technique you wind up using. Will you be building it yourself? Sweat equity is a great way to pay for a home. My (recently deceased) sis and ex brother in law built a house on a pay as you build idea, the entire thing was paid off free and clear in a few years that way, zero mortgage. The two largest immediate expenses were land purchase outright, around three acres, and the well and septic, they saved for that initial expense then the bro in laws folks chipped in a little as a wedding present. After that it was just whatever they could afford on a weekend by weekend deal. They rented nearby, had two jobs, one job paid the day to day bills, the other income went 100% to the new house and building supplies, etc. As soon as it was up and roughed in enough to live in they moved in, then finished it over the next year or so, including finishing the second story into rooms, at rough in stage is was just a partial floor with a ladder going to it for sleeping.. I helped a lot on that one as well, it was stilts on one side going right to the ground on the other, built on a hillside. Stick frame but I insisted and we used a ton of large woodscrews and tubes of industrial adhesive on the joints and flooring when we built it, along with the regular nails. It had a regular tin roof, I was lucky mountain climber to put that on.. We did every single bit of the work, wiring, plumbing, siding, framing, foundation, all of it except the waterwell and septic and the original grading that they hired out to some guy with a dozer, being a cheap to buy wooded hillside it needed some terraforming for parking spaces, small yard and garden area.. One hint, never store onsite that which you can't use up building that weekend, dang roving thieves will steal it every time.
That in essence is what science is. It finds patterns and generalities that allow for accurate predictions. This does mean that previously random things, such as the weather eventually stop being random. Someone might say "Oh well weather was never really random it just seemed that way", but they're missing the point. There's no way to know if something currently unpredictable will become predictable in the future, and that's why the best understanding of random is "Something that can't [currently] be predicted."
If someone takes the position that randomness is "Something that can never be predicted" then anytime they say something is random they are making a statement of faith, as they are ignoring the evidience of previously unpredictable things that are now predictable. The only decent conclusion someone could make using this analysis is that nothing is random. Clearly this interpretation is wrong as people often communicate with the word random. So anyone who takes this stance is speaking their own private language, and is not speaking english.
As far as this relates to RNGs, I'd say a RNG is no longer random, once given any sequence of N numbers the rest of the sequence can be determined. While this can be done to some weak RNGs, I find it unlikely that this can be done to every RNG, especially without knowing the implementation. Until a generic attack against RNGs is found they are literally random.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
Fuller was my hero when I was a kid/young adult. Now... I don't think so much of him. Some nifty ideas, but the problem is not that he was "egotistical", it's that he had zero grasp of the scientific method, and so could not separate wild conjecture from testable fact.
Part of the Second American Revolution!