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smileydog

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Jan 11, 2009, 8:01:22 PM1/11/09

This stuff is only tangentially related to the CIA's history in that
"Ed" (second paragraph) was a former deputy inspector general,
mentioned in connection with Operation Mockingbird if you check open
sources.

He was also a close collaborator with R. Buckminster Fuller, Medal of
Freedom winner, which is more what this post is about (some of that
history).

This is me with a bevy of smart cookies (PhDs etc.) meeting at Linus
Pauling House in Portland, Oregon. Besides bickering, we're not
divulging any deep secrets, so sorry to disappoint.

Just wanted this archived so I could link from my blogs (I do that a
lot).

Kirby

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: kirby urner <kirby...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 6:31 PM
Subject: Re: [wwwanderers] Bucky & Engineering, Science, Praxis, and
Philosophy
To: wwwan...@yahoogroups.com

Note that Fuller didn't live to see the discovery of
buckminsterfullerene, which in some ways was a huge vindication, as
people were still pointing out that radiolaria weren't *exactly*
hexapents, the virus chapter being "beginner's luck" (Fuller's S =
10*F*F + 2 capsomere count formula got published in Herald Tribune in
connection with viruses looking like buckyballs (um, domes) -- until
SciAm managed to sweep that angle under the rug with some help from
Coxeter (there's a more generic way of modeling capsomeres, based on
Class I, II & III dome designs -- lots more at my website [1])).

Ed. however, saw the poetic justice in naming it after his friend and
did some good promoting for that cause, clearly documented in Chemical
Intelligencer, edited by Hargittai.[2] They tried to rope me in on a
valency discussion, Ed also stumping to get me a Guggenheim, but
everyone is afraid of Bucky in those days, "freaked out" as the
hippies would say. He fulminated about cowards, had to say he had a
point. People are much braver today, having proved they don't buy the
"big crunch" hypothesis (hard to find those "levers of fear" any more
-- guess that means Crichton wins then?).

Where most engineers get to Bucky is indeed through the radomes
project, as that's more of a NASA thing (Joe Clinton did the early
FORTRAN for that space agency, J. Baldwin smuggling the data out to
hippies in those Dome Handbooks, had some errors, resulting in leaks).
NASA has never lost interest in tensegrity (Snelson) and all that,
nor the Marines in geodesic domes, my friend Trevor Blake having just
come out with a re-issue of the military's 1954 classic on that
topic.[3] What's been missing is any "academic" grasp of these
basics, given weakness in our nation's philosophy departments (too
ingrown a meme-pool, as I document in my footnote to Bucky's bio
http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/bio.html ).

We've turned a corner by now though, to where I'm able to assure
people of Fuller's credentials as a bona fide 20th century
philosophical genius. It's not like I'm a lone voice in the
wilderness on this. He had so many laurels and endorsements it's not
funny. Now that D.W. Jacobs and Tompos have done such a great job of
helping Portlanders catch up on their heritage, it's really a lot
easier to get on with our open source (design science) revolution,
keep bringing people out of misery, keep ending those disaster zones.
Not saying the work is complete (very obviously), just that it's clear
what the job is, what the tools are. ISEPP is a trailblazer, in
bringing so many other smart cookies to Portland. We're very well
read in this town, ahead of WDC I'd hazard, where they read way more
baloney for a living (on average).

Kirby

[1] http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/virus.html (linked from On-Line
Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, can you find where?)

[2] http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2006/10/geometry-in-nature.html
(Hargittai & Hargittai)

[3] http://synchronofile.com/?page_id=21

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 4:53 PM, David DiNucci <da...@elepar.com>
wrote:
> On Jan 10, 2009, at 2:39 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
>
>> ...
>
>> This isn't what Bucky was about, however, this might be what the
>> academics do with him if they get to embalm his literary corpus
>> within their discipline. If there are connections reaching out
>> into other disciplines, especially physical ones, it will be a lot
>> harder to lock him in, and a lot easier for renegades to escape.
>
> This reminds me of Feynman's 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the
> Bottom" lecture. The nanotechnologists took it (well after his
> death) and ran with it, and of course Feynman's good name was not-so-
> mistakenly associated with the whole field as though he had invented
> and supported it.
>
> http://bst.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/1/21
> http://www.foresight.org/fi/2006Feynman.html
>
> In fact, Feynman had virtually nothing to do with that field, in
> spite of living 30 years after delivering that lecture.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_the_Bottom
>
> Some of us might even consider that the lecture was primarily just an
> interesting thought experiment.
>
> I was at NASA in the 90s, being a thorn in the side of those arguing
> for funding for their infeasible nanotech projects. Their answer was
> always that they'd address those pesky thermodynamic contradictions
> AFTER they had received funding for (and presumably tackled) the
> "lower hanging fruit":
>
> http://alglobus.net/NASAwork/papers/MGMS_EC1/program/paper.html
>
> And now, silly me, when I heard the acronym for ISEPP, I sort of
> considered that this is the sort of issue such an organization would
> be involved in, applying the best science and engineering to public
> policy. Now I glean that the priorities are more on doubting whether
> science as it's currently understood, and peer-reviewed scientists
> practicing that science, should be trusted at all when determining
> public policy.
>
> -Dave
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