Fuller at UMass

I recently came across my old 1977 copy of Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, originally written in 1969 and now long out of print. Not having read it in over twenty years, I found re-reading the book an interesting experience. 

Back when I was a student at the University of Massachusetts I was something of a Bucky Fuller fan, dating from the afternoon I accidentally met Dr. Fuller in the concourse of the Student Union. He was at a table with a bunch of his books and pamphlets on it, just standing there speaking to a group of students among the jewelry and clothes peddlers who routinely hawk their wares along the passageway between The Blue Wall and the Campus Store. The only difference was that Bucky, who was serving as scholar-in-residence at UMass that year, wasn't selling products, he was pushing design science revolution.

Fuller is best known as the creator of the Geodesic Dome, but he also had a hand in an incredibly wide range of other inventions, ideas and scientific and cultural activities. Originally regarded as a crackpot when he first appeared on the scientific scene in the 1930's, by the time I encountered him in the 70's he was an old man in his 80's who had been nominated for the Nobel Prize and was probably the most respected scientist alive at the time.

Listening to Bucky that day at UMass totally energized me to learn all I could about him and his ideas. I relied especially upon his book Synergetics: The Geometry of Thinking, which among other things attempted to explain the act of thinking and perceiving reality by relying upon mathematical relationships and geometric models. I even stole a notion from the Jesus freaks on campus, who used to memorize a bible verse everyday, only instead of the bible I would take a passage from Synergetics and spend odd moments throughout my day contemplating what that day's passage meant. I believe I benefited enormously from my period as a Buckyhead. The study of synergetics required the most rigorously logical kind of thinking, the discipline of which helped me to drift into the direction of embracing Ayn Rand and Objectivism's reliance on reason.

The book also had a profound effect on my approach to politics. Bucky had no use for politics or politicians. He believed it was science, not politics, that really moved the world and that it was foolish to try to change people by preaching to them. "Change people's environment," he said, "and then they will change their behavior spontaneously." 

Why tell hungry people that it is wrong to steal food? A starving person can't afford to be honest. Make it possible for them to get food on their own and they won't have to steal it. Politicians applied words to problems, where Fuller said you should apply only science-based solutions. When it comes to hunger, one invention increasing the yield of a farmer's field  is worth more that a hundred appeals to honesty, anti-hunger speeches or free food distribution programs.

After his death, Bucky's theories got hijacked by special interest groups, primarily socialists and environmental cultists, who took his teachings out of context to apply them to political goals in ways that Fuller would never have approved of when he was alive. Sadly, that has meant his legacy being less appreciated and respected than it should be, resulting in most of his books going out of print. 

A fierce Massachusetts bred individualist, Fuller had no use for collectivism of any kind, but his desire to use science to produce wealth for all was twisted by socialists to mean advocating massive wealth redistribution by a world government. In truth, Bucky never concerned himself with dividing up the pie in a more equal way, but advocated instead for coming up with scientific and technological recipes to make the pie bigger. 

 

I was surprised when re-reading Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth to see how much of it still holds up. The positive trends which Fuller identified are unfolding much as he predicted, but not, unfortunately, as quickly as the always optimistic Bucky hoped for. I was also pleased to realize how much of a Buckyhead I remain. I still have contempt for politicians and political solutions, I'm still devoted to logic as the primary problem solving tool and to science as the primary path to progress.

What makes me sad is that I don't know where young people today can get turned on to Buckminster Fuller in a way not tainted by political agendas. What is needed is for his books to become available again, so that people can encounter Fuller undistorted by ideological agendas. I don't know what will make that possible, but may the day come soon. 

A Thousand Words

This picture says it all. 

Amen Al



Memo to my remaining daily print colleagues and their nostalgia club: Get over it and get over yourselves. It’s not that the Internet is Mr. Wonderful. Much of it mimics the same bad qualities that drove the public away from daily newspapers. You lost the public to us because - there's no nice or sugar-coated way to say it - you guys really suck at what you do. 

In your arrogance, you established calcified “rules” of “journalism” and false “objectivity” that neutered and spayed all of your reporters, domesticated so they would never again afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted. When you took the honest advocacy out of reporting you emptied it of all passion and reason to exist. It was a nice ride on your profit ledger sheet during the recent decades when you turned your rags into propaganda arms for the wealthy and powerful, but a funny thing happened on the way to the ATM machine: You lost the trust of your readers.

- Former Valley Advocate reporter Al Giordano.

 

Homegrown

Northampton's The Green Bean has this chalkboard in front describing all the local places it gets its food from.

South River Miso - Conway Ma.
Gill Greenery - Gill Ma.
Real Pickles - Montague Ma.
El Jardin - Holyoke Ma.
Town Farm - Northampton
Country Hen Organic Eggs - Hubbardston Ma.
Bakery Normand - Northampton
Mapleline Farm - Hadley Ma.
Barrington Coffee Roasters - Lee Ma.
Tea Guys - Hatfield Ma.
Vermont Smoke n' Cure - South Barre Vt.
Snow Shoe Farm - Worthington Vt.
Chicoine Farm - Westhampton Ma.

Broken Record

In Pulaski Park.

Anti-Entropy

The Meaning of Life Explained.

Many things in our universe only co-exist. For example, when you pull on a rope, it gets longer and thinner. Tension and compression only co-exist. In other words, you can't have tension where compression does not occur.



Another example is convex and concave. You can't have one without the other. 

 

Concave and Convex by M.C. Escher

 

A third example is expansion and contraction. When a balloon expands, it causes the air outside of it to contract. Expansion and contraction only co-exist.



The yin-yang symbol is one way of symbolizing the world as a place where opposites always and only co-exist.

We live in an expanding universe. 

The process by which the universe expands and becomes less ordered and more random is called entropy.

If the world is a play on opposites, what is the contracting and order creating force that counterbalances the expanding entropic universe? What is playing the role of the anti-entropy? Since the universe is everywhere, we should be able to see it everywhere! Where is it?

Look in the mirror - It's You!

 



The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is antientropic, methodically marshalling energy. Life is antientropic. - R. Buckminster Fuller

In other words, it is lifeforms in general and the mind of man in particular that are the anti-entropic force in the universe. As humans we organize things both mental and physical, thereby contracting energy and creating order to counter-balance the expanding entropy of the universe. This is the supremely important purpose of intelligence and the reason why our minds exist.

Whenever we think, or act to create order in the physical world based upon whatever we think, we are performing the anti-entropic function without which the universe would not be in balance. In the broadest sense that is our purpose in life and why we exist - to think and thereby to create mental and physical order - because that is how we carry out our all important organizing function and essential contribution to the universe. It makes us the means by which the universe knows itself.

Therefore we are pretty damn important, we humans.

Our minds hold up the sky.  

Sleep

How to cutback.

Like most people who don't suffer from insomnia, I wish I could sleep less. It really does seem like a waste, all that time just laying there in an unconscious state, when you could be putting that time to more productive use. However, I always assumed that sleep was one of those biological necessities you just can't escape. Kind of like breathing, it's sort of a bore all that inhale-exhale stuff, but you better not try not doing it!

However, recently I came across this information about a sleep lifestyle that lowers your sleep needs to two or three hours per day. It was devised by the scientist, architect and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller. According to this old article in the archives of TIME Magazine :

Sleep is just a bad habit. So said Socrates and Samuel Johnson, and so for years has thought grey-haired Richard Buckminster Fuller, futurific inventor.... Fuller made a deliberate attempt to break the sleep habit, with excellent results. Last week he announced his Dymaxion system of sleeping. Two hours of sleep a day, he said firmly, is plenty.

Fuller reasoned that man has a primary store of energy, quickly replenished, and a secondary reserve (second wind) that takes longer to restore. Therefore, he thought, a man should be able to cut his rest periods shorter by relaxing as soon as he has used up his primary energy. Fuller trained himself to take a nap at the first sign of fatigue (Le., when his attention to his work began to wander). These intervals came about every six hours; after a half-hour's nap he was completely refreshed.

For two years Fuller thus averaged two hours of sleep in 24. Result: "The most vigorous and alert condition I have ever enjoyed." Life-insurance doctors who examined him found him sound as a nut. Eventually he had to quit because his schedule conflicted with that of his business associates, who insisted on sleeping like other men.

People all over the world have been experimenting with this sleep schedule, and not surprisingly some of them have been blogging about it. According to the Wikipedia:

In recent years, several people have experimented with alternative sleep patterns intended to reduce sleep time to 2–6 hours daily in order to get more wake time, and some of them have blogged their experiences. This is purportedly achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 15–45 minutes throughout the day, and in some variants, a core sleep period of a few hours at night. The systematic napping patterns are, by the online proponents, called variously polynapping, polyphasic sleep, Everyman sleep schedule and Uberman's sleep schedule.

Some bloggers believe that it takes roughly one week to convert to a polyphasic sleep cycle. During the first few days, they claim, the body will experience controlled sleep deprivation and can be expected to enter REM and deep sleep stages more quickly during each nap. After the first week, some bloggers mention vivid dreams occurring during each nap and a refreshed feeling of awareness shortly after each nap.

I'm intrigued by this. Can you imagine having over thirty hours a week of extra time that you used to waste sleeping? I may experiment with this lifestyle change, and if so of course I will tell you the results.

The computer world was dismayed by the news this week that Steve Jobs (above) is taking a leave of absense from his company APPLE for undisclosed health reasons. The announcement comes after a shocking deterioration in his appearance in recent months. Although only 53, he now looks like a man in his seventies with speculation on the cause ranging from cancer to AIDS. Whatever is wrong, Jobs is one of our era's foremost computer geniuses, so let's hope he recovers.

It just goes to show that no amount of money and success can guarantee you good health. I was inspired to reflect on my own mortality recently when Jeff Ziff sent me some scans of Pine Point's Duggan Junior High School Yearbook from 1973.

I recognised many people in it, including my neighbor Brian Giamarino, whose friend Michael Spagnuolo drowned in Five Mile Pond on Boston Road. Yearbooks are all about the future, but for Michael he only had a short time left to live. 

Enjoy your life while you can, because tomorrow is promised to no one. 

To read the entire Duggan yearbook click here.

Moving quickly from the profound to the vapid, actress Miley Cyrus has apparently dumped her underwear model boyfriend Justin Gaston, perhaps in part because photos surfaced of him partying in Hollywood nearly nude with another woman. 

Last week paparazzi caught the teen queen out riding her bicycle all alone, innocence restored and lessons learned. 

This morning I woke up to see a scene out my window of virgin snow.

Although pretty to look at, after a weekend of record shattering cold it would have been nice to be spared more snow. In the window of downtown Northampton's Skera Gallery this dog delivers some much-needed warm socks.

With the students at UMass not due to come back until the 24th, the campus today was a silent world of white.

At least I didn't have to listen to UMass biophysics majors trying to sing. 

I'm Queer but I'm not a Fag

There's a difference.

 



In the early years of the last century one of the best ways for black performers to fit into white society and make some serious money was to put white make-up around their mouths, sing and dance and tell jokes. The jokes mostly made fun of black people themselves, with humorous plays on the notion that the black people of those times got drunk on moonshine, stole chickens and were obsessed with sex. White people loved that kind of entertainment because it played up to their worst opinions about black people but in a funny, reassuring way. It made black people and their stereotypical foibles seem safe and even endearing. It made racism seem okay, because after all, black entertainers themselves appeared to be accepting and profiting from these negative stereotypes.

Of course the more times change the more they stay the same. Only now it's gin and blunts instead of moonshine, and dope dealing instead of chicken stealing. There's still singing and dancing and the preoccupation with sex, and it still makes white people feel justified in looking down on black folks, because after all, isn't it black people themselves perpetuating these stereotypes? That playing these roles for white people's entertainment is one of the few ways for blacks to make big money is overlooked even by many blacks themselves, who look with envy as the performers laugh all the way to the bank.

 



A similarly stereotypical and destructive image has arisen around gay people. Stripped of its societal imposed preconceptions, homosexuality is just a biological circuit breaker nature uses to control population growth. It was the American scientist and philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller, who first descr8bed this phenomenon in nature. When a large number of a given species of plants are destroyed for one reason or another, the surviving plants will dramatically increase their seed production. Conversely, when the population of a plant species becomes too crowded, then per plant seed production drops.

The same thing has been observed in mammals. When caged laboratory mice are allowed to reproduce at will, the more overcrowded the environment becomes the more homosexual behavior will increase between the mice living in the cage. Dr. Fuller concluded that it was foolish to think that plants and our fellow mammals have these built in homosexual tendencies to control their populations, but that somehow humans do not. When he made these observations way back in the 1930's, he predicted that as the human population increased, so would the prevalence of homosexuality as a natural biological safeguard against overpopulation.

The passage of time has proven Fuller's theory correct. As the human population has increased, there has been a corresponding increase in the prevalence of homosexuality, exactly as you would expect based on the behavior of all other living things when their population gets too high. To put it in non-scientific terms, God made gay people in order to save the world from uncontrolled population growth.

Not that we get much thanks for it. Instead we are forced to endure all kinds of stereotypes designed to make us endearing to the straight people who will only accept us if we fit certain characteristics they feel safe about. We're supposed to be funny. We're supposed to be good at fashion. We're supposed to be feminine and talk with a lisp so as to easily distinguish us from "real men." We're supposed to have good taste. Our purpose on Earth is to make straight people more fashionable. Instead of blackface, it's pinkface. We're born queer, but society wants to turn us into fags.

Just because I was born biologically programmed to prefer non-reproductive sexual activities as a natural result of the Earth approaching its maximum sustainable human population; does not mean I automatically have these stereotypical traits that straight people have decided I should have to keep me safely distant and distinct from them. I prefer Grace Slick to Cher, the Grateful Dead to the Village People. I dress kinda like a slob and I don't know a damn thing about interior decorating. I can't help you with your bad taste. I'm not swishy and I don't have a lisp. Please don't associate me with priests who chase altar boys. They are called pedophiles. Please don't associate me with perverts who hang around public toilets. They are called United States Senators.

In other words, I've got a dick and I act like it. My, what a surprise! When you try to put me in a box you've labeled "gay" and then demand I conform to your stereotypical expectations, I have a simple statement to make in reply:

FUCK YOU I DO WHAT I WANT!