Slashdot Mirror
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]."
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"
You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
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.
Dymaxion car was actually w-a-y ahead of its time. It got 30 mpg in 1933.
When you look at only one invention of his, it's easy to tear apart... But when you study the breadth of his work, including his piercing insight in to globalization... I think scientists should be more like Fuller. Overspecialization has made our culture perfect, but very boring.
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.
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.
And you probably weren't even born when Fuller was inventing up a storm. He was a genius, period. WAY ahead of his time, and STILL ahead of his time. I had the good fortune to hear Fuller speak when I was in grad school; he was in his early 80's. He walked on to a stage with a small folding chair and weighed in on everything from physics to the environment, and everything in between for THREE HOURS! He didn't repeat one idea; he connected everything. To this day, I have NEVER been exposed to that kind of genius. He was otherworldly - a true Renaissance man.
Also I think the previous parent to which you were responding doesn't understand that as things become MORE complicated, we tend to remix and combine our past inventions with new ones, but the newer ones tend to be even more complex, which takes more time, this is offset somewhat by computers but right now we are OVERLOADED with information. There is so much potential for invention with the internet it's unreal, we're just too slow to realize it all.
I'm sure in the future inventions and much of science will be automated by computer AI, and scientists will have even less of a roll to play, if ray kurzweil is even moderately right.