From My Outbox

Here's an exercise.  I'll do two exhibits (think of World Game Museum), one connecting Bucky into the Humanities, the other bridging to Sciences more, pursuant to your question. I'll try to keep it pithy.  Anyone might do this exercise, thereby strengthening the IVM Bridge.

The Humanities

Allegra liked The Pound Era, she told me.  I think in the early days we all thought what we needed was a next Hugh Kenner, someone of high literary caliber.  Ed expressed strong affinity for Kenner as well, and maybe tried to be the missing literary figure in writing Paradise Mislaid, tackling that biggest question: what is life exactly?

However, before closing the book on these connections, we should remember the circumstances of Pound's era:  he was repatriated in shackles having been caged by the US Army for his joining the Italian fascists and broadcasting their worldview on radio.  

He faced the death penalty, but so many of his friends were in high places and they managed to get him committed to a mental hospital instead.  For like twelve years.  After which he went back to Italy, from when we get that famous Bucky-Ezra picture, Noguchi there too.

I've speculated that one of "those in high places" who helped keep Ezra's living situation at St. Elizabeth's remain livable all those years, was cold warrior James Jesus Angleton.  Ezra was allowed to entertain, and did.  James in his younger days had traveled to Italy and met Ezra then, before Mussolini and all that rot. Angleton then published a poetry mag, named Furioso, with Ezra's input.

A lot in the Angleton file is still under wraps I gather, as an Intercept reporter discovered recently, hoping to score a story.  Georgetown University had the papers by then.  The article says they were originally curated by another CIA guy, by the name of Ed Applewhite.  

I uncovered and shared in my Youtube channel how the CIA has a document on file, with Buckminster Fuller in a footnote, for having recommended for service a British journalist.  Mission: contact Ho Chi Minh and secure his cooperation against the Japanese.  This was before the great betrayal, as some would see it, which made HCM public enemy number one.

“Fenn’s was the only name [Gordon] would agree to.” Charles Fenn, born in the United Kingdom, emigrated to the United States in his early twenties. He became a news photographer and journalist; joined the Associated Press in 1941; and covered the war in North Africa and Asia, including the Japanese invasion of Burma. In 1943, in New York, Buckminster Fuller, an advisor to OSS, recruited him. He was commissioned as a Marine lieutenant and sent to Burma to run MO operations, in which he excelled. In June 1944, he was sent to China, where his duties expanded to include intelligence collection operations under the cover of AGFRTS.   Source: Bartholomew-Feis, The OSS and Ho Chi Minh, 96

The Sciences

Why was C60 named "buckminsterfullerene"?  

Sir Harold Kroto, who shares a Nobel Prize for its discovery, tells the story in my blog.

[ blog post snipped ]

Orientation for New Recruits (School of Tomorrow)

Rules of the Road

In our day and age, it's push​-​button simple to ​"​hit record​"​ and, without anyone else on the call ​being notified, ​and ​the video meetup gets saved to storage media.  

I'm not necessarily talking about the host or moderator making a recording, in which case others might see a pulsing red dot or other signifier, reminding them a recording is happening.  On the contrary, when any random person on the call hits record, that person gets a copy of the screen action, without raising any flags.  What happens to the recording after that?

The Grateful Dead were well aware of this issue at their concerts.  Anyone could tape the event, with the new devices.  Their policy was "go ahead" rather than to try policing and even punishing those creating, and even selling, "bootleg" tapes.

We have the same situation with television.  I have the ability to record whatever is coming over the "telly" (UK) or "TV" (USA).  I still have older VHS equipment able to do this.  Nowadays more people use DVR.  

One motivation for recording TV shows is "time shifting" i.e. the programs get broadcast at time X, but you'd rather watch them at time Y.  You may also wish to watch them more than once.

​Another motivation is mashups.  With raw material from several sources, an editor might cobble together overview reviews of specific online conferences, each with multiple venues (channels, tracks).  

Perhaps the audio track is supplied by some narrator providing a personal view of the activities.  Videos from Burning Man have this flavor.​ A chief attraction of Burning Man, a major spectacle, is the opportunity to take and make videos.

The awkward approach is to let these new technological superpowers go unacknowledged and then, after the fact, invent rules and policies designed to rein them in.

Do others on the call have to promise not to record unofficially?  ​Must they sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement)?  

​Do we insist that only those with hosting privileges have the right to hit a record button?  

When do we grapple with such questions?

The hosting body might reserve the right to produce the "official" version of the content, perhaps later edited, yet explain to participants, including invited guests, the possibility of "unofficial" taping by anyone on the call.  

The same hosting body might decide to release no official recording whatsoever.

What if excerpts from unofficial recordings make it to public forums?  Is this a travesty, a transgression?  What were the rules ahead of time?

In this day and age of rapidly evolving technology, it's a mistake to assume we all share the same codes of conduct and that it's OK to take for granted specific practices​, as if we're all on the same page by default.​

The past is not a sufficient guide to create the future, which is why explicit discussion and hammering out of the rules ahead of time is essential for any organization planning to wade into th​is new​ set of realities I call Cyberia (cyberspace).

On My Radar

Yes, in claiming to have a "radar" (not really a claim, more semantic heritage, an allowed metaphor) I'm thinking of Krystal and Saager, whom have kept me company, unbeknownst to them of course, through a first chapter of Covid.  

North Americans called it "lockdown" and I thought that too extreme, as in most zip codes we were free to move about, albeit with fewer places to go.  More a "lockout" in that we were kept out of businesses (bars and restaurants, libraries, anywhere "inessential").  Paris was more heavy handed than New York City by a long shot, or so was my impression.  

Saager and Krystal were the stars of The Hill channel's Rising, and then moved on, rather recently, to start their own channel.

Youtubers are the new rock stars, joining together and splitting up, just like the bands of old, and making music together, in duets, trios, perhaps in solo.  Hey, I'm one of them, way off in the weeds somewhere and barely looked at, given the esoteric content of what's on my shelf.

I spent the morning gawking at the floods in Belgium-Austria-Germany along those major river basins, all swollen with torrential rains.  I'm also following societal meltdowns (ostensibly state failures) in South Africa (Durban especially), Cuba, Lebanon and of course Haiti, where a foreign mercenary force murdered a president.

I'm watching Boomers and Millennials debate about who's to blame for the falling living standards, if that's what's in the cards.  I'm tracking TYT breaking away from anti-imperialist channels (Jimmy Dore's a flagship), in the ongoing oligarch-funded think tank wars.  I catch excerpts of Joe Rogan from time to time.  I tune in debates about Critical Race Theory.

For my day job, I continue hammering away at my example high school curriculum.  The feedback I got on NCTM Math Forum, at least from some corners, was the work that I do is terrible.  My detractors do not necessarily admire Jupyter Notebooks regardless of who is authoring them.  

But they also may have a beef about my content.  I keep hearkening back to a specific "Zen garden sculpture" (one of my names for it), a set of nested polyhedrons, almost a logo for a School of Thought (invisible college), with its own relationship to the various think tanks.

Back in the day, I used to express worry about the "cannibalization" of Synergetics.  The cookbook Synergetic Stew had been disturbing on that score.  However as time went on, I came to see this sculpture (with moving mechanisms) as akin to a beating heart, which could be surgically disentangled from the rest of Synergetics and held aloft by an accomplished doctor.  I would try my hand in that role.

I'd tell the Millennials that Boomers were too quick to dismiss the Bucky stuff, nor are most Millennials passing that torch to the GenZers.  How many does it take, to pass it on?  

Anthropologists know the pattern:  grandparents (an older generation) bond with the grandkids (a younger generation) while working parents, the middle generation, stay focussed on their careers.  

Boomers are looking back, GenZers ahead, with Millennials mired in their own fleeting now moment, on the treadmill (referring to the gym or to work), racing in the maze (the "rat race" we've called it).

Celebrating Allegra

Since the heatwave, which took Portland, Oregon to Las Vegas level temperatures, we've had pleasant summer weather. This morning I was able to do outdoor chores even in late morning, mowing, weeding and the like.

We live without air conditioning, although it's been offered. Power fans do the job. I'm still using oil heat in the winter as this house came with a muscular model and we're not hooked up to municipal gas lines.

Last night I shared about Allegra's passing with her friends and admirers on Curt McNamara's Trim Tab Book Club listserv. "Call me Trim Tab" it says on her dad's gravestone, a fitting epitaph.

I sat outside in the backyard with Glenn, as twilight spread, reminiscing about my several encounters with Allegra and her family over the decades.

I was lucky to be a contemporary, with a partially overlapping scenario.

D.W. Jacobs writes today on Facebook:

Today, is Bucky Fuller's birthday. Bucky was born July 12, 1895. Yesterday morning, his daughter, Allegra, passed away. I met her in early July, 1995, in San Diego at the Centennial celebration of Bucky's birthday. She was a major force in the world of dance. She danced in Balanchine's company, but then moved into dance ethnology. She was Chair of the UCLA dance department for 25 years, where she founded the Center for World Arts and Culture. 💖She was the best of friends and a mentor and guide for so many people all over the world. http://allegrafullersnyder.com/

Canonical Lesson Plan

Sometimes I get a request for a canonical lesson plan, one that will capture the flavor and style of Synergetics, by which they mean the Bucky stuff.

What I'm coming to on that score is the four random walkers starting from the same lamp post in the CCP (=IVM), and wandering for t time cycles.  

The four randomly arrived at balls define the corners of a tetrahedron which, upon having its six edge lengths get run through our volume computer, will turn out to always have a whole number volume.  In tetravolumes, that is. Four CCP balls define our D-for-diameter-edged tetrahedron of volume one.

In order to calculate the random walks, we use Quadrays as syntactic sugar.  The IVM ball packing is their sweet spot, which is why they're "IVM coordinates" by some accounts (including mine), in contrast to XYZ.

In order to calculate the sixth edge lengths, we simply perform vector subtraction between adjacent corners. Quadrays have essentially the same vector algebra as XYZ when it comes to adding, subtracting, and scaling.

Finally, in order to calculate the tetrahedron's volume, we use Gerald de Jong's formula, even though he has lost his derivation.  There's no denying it works well.  

Six edge lengths go in, fanning out from any apex and circuiting the opposite base, and the tetravolume comes out, natively, with no need for a modifying constant.  

The corresponding XYZ volume is computed accordingly, as IVM volume times 1/S3 (S3 being the Synergetics Constant for converting volumes).

In sum, we needed to learn what the IVM was, and to visualize movement within it as a process of hopping in one of twelve directions, by distance D, at each turn to play.  Then we needed to absorb the concept of tetravolumes.  

Getting whole number tetravolumes for the tetrahedra helps shock us into a mindset that might be open to the concentric hierarchy, wherein those rhombic dodecahedral cells around each sphere, each have a volume of six.

All of the above, along with figurate and polyhedral numbers more generally, including kissing point counts, form our IVM-XYZ bridge over troubled waters, the C.P. Snow chasm.