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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]."
...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
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"
Sounds a bit like Tesla...Genius, no doubt, but likely to never be full understood.
I'd say that comparison is a little unfair to Tesla. Tesla seems nutty, but largely because he was exploring and defining the cutting edge of the science of electricity. Conversely, Fuller seems nutty simply because he was a freakin' nut.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
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).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity
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.
Given that his first model of a geodesic dome collapsed under its own weight, I'd say it's more likely the engineering "talent" behind its design was chance, in that he happened to discover an interesting 3D geometric pattern. He had no particular knack for engineering. After that first dome collapsed, he tried to claim he intentionally built it too weakly, in order to see where it would fail. No one present was convinced. He imagined his "dymaxion car" would be able to cross any terrain, climb any mountain, and eventually even fly. He had no idea how this would happen, nor did he seem to care--- because he was a "visionary", not an engineer. The guy invented his own map geometry that avoided the use of pi because he found the indeterminate nature of pi "unsatisfying". A distaste for the facts of mathematics is not a trait found in engineers. No, he wasn't an engineer by any stretch of the definition of the word. The guy was a salesman, and what he sold was enthusiasm. He made most of his money on the lecture circuit, which he then blew on his harebrained "Dymaxion" crap, which lost money but generated "buzz", which drew people to his lectures. Good work if you can get it, but he was no engineer.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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.
No we're not. They're just so commonplace now that we take them for granted.
In the 19th century, we got the internal combustion engine, radio, telephone, railroads, and cars, among other things. In the past 30 years alone, we've sequenced the entire human genome, can make computers pretty much any size you want, can predict weather accurately just about anywhere on the planet up to a week... the list kind of goes on like this. None of that would be possible without some serious inventiveness.
Keep in mind that there was so little that anybody knew about our world and the universe in 1800 that it really didn't take much to come up with inventions that took advantage of the new knowledge of the time, like electricity and radio waves. Nowadays, new knowledge involves quantum physics or genetic manipulation. I'm sure that, 100 years from now, anything we come up with will seem almost trivial, but keep in mind that it took over 50 years for someone to figure out how a battery worked and what to use one with. Turnaround time on using new discoveries is, for the most part, a little faster these days.