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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.
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!
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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That's because by the time you've encountered it, it's in the past and so it's determined. Chaos does deceptively look like randomness. The difference is subtle. It's in the moving present instant that the randomness becomes determined from our point of view. It may be that the determination defines our perspective, you might say. To say that the outcome is predetermined and so there is only one world line requires faith in Fate. That's not scientific, but it's a very old argument that's on point for this discussion. BTW, Everett-Wheeler does not contradict your view. In that theory every possible outcome has a predetermined world-line in which that outcome was Fate. It's just that with Everett-Wheeler all possibilities happen, spawning near-infinite worldlines. To the observer the universe with and without Everett-Wheeler look the same because it is not possible to observe events that have not occurred, yet. Perhaps after we measure the quantum unit of probability this will be possible, but I believe we will just be able to select views of the outcomes we desire and we'll wind up with the Delphi Oracle.
Personally I'm not a big believer in chaos. Misunderstood order, yes. Chaos not so much. In a multiverse where every outcome is preordained for its particular worldline, chaos goes undefined. Chaos theory, maybe. Is that weird? It's important that Everett-Wheeler be correct for a number of reasons, and certainly I believe it plausible -- but I'm not an anonymous physics grad.
For some really out-there metaphysics, consider the possibility that observers get to select their worldlines by believing in a particular outcome. A consensus vote of faith might select some outcome for a particular group of observers. This doesn't contradict Everett-Wheeler because for each possible outcome some subset of observers select the resultant worldline. In this philosophy, all things are possible through faith. Which brings us back to the topic of the thread. Perhaps BF wasn't so wacky after all.
Where in the multiverse is John Titor?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
An example I came across is that of a random number generator. A decent one will spit out numbers that are indistinguishable from a random sequence. If the RNG is started twice with the same seed it will produce the same sequence, proving that the numbers aren't really random at all. They have a definite order, but it is one that is so convoluted that without more information (such as the source code for the RNG) the order is nearly impossible to discern.
I'm afraid I haven't explained the idea very well. It's all in Bohm's book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which also happens to be the foundation of the Holographic Universe theory set. Parts of it are very good, other parts are very dry, and still other parts contain maths that were impenetrable to me but should be transparent (or at least somewhat translucent) to someone with a background in Quantum Mechanics.
I like Bohm's ideas, but I don't have the intellectual tools to make any sort of claim on their veracity. I do know this: the theory hasn't gained much traction because it's off the wall, but to my knowledge there haven't been any problems pointed out with it either. Consider this a failed exposition on order turned into a shameless plea for more informed people to check out Bohm's ideas =)
Your brain is not a computer.