We were small in number, yet with interesting new people, invited guests. I took fewer pictures than I usually do, if present, at one of these Equinox or Solstice get-togethers.
We often meet at the boyhood home of Linus Pauling, where we used to hold weekly meetings, however sometimes we meet elsewhere, in retreat mode.
We had an iPad going for those wishing to drop in by house WiFi.
FB friend:
There seems to have been a dearth of beautiful and innovative tensegrity artwork for decades. Between his new biotensegrity models and these lighting models, Gerald has single handedly advanced tensegrity artwork into the 21st Century. [Facebook link] are photos from the first in-person rehearsal for a dance presentation at the Fascia Research Congress. Gerald shipped all those models in a single piece of checked luggage. I call his design architecture "turnbuckle tensegrity" -- except that all the threads in those struts are right-handed. Turnbuckles would be more elegant, but nobody makes cheap hardware with turnbuckle threading.
Kirby, do you know any good candidates for pitching a feature for Make: Magazine on how to design a geometry, acquire the parts, and assemble "tough tensegrity" models? This would really light the fuse to a massive number of load-bearing tensegrity models in the wild.
Me:
When I joined O'Reilly, Make: Magazine was still sharing the same Sebastopol building (we got the tour) but was morphing into its own standalone business.
The principal there at Maker had purchased a startup named Useractive of Champaign-Urbana (run by Trish and Scott Gray (Making Math), University of Illinois and Wolfram connections) when still a part of O'Reilly management. However by the time the merger happened, and Useractive became O'Reilly School of Technology (which is where I came in, as faculty), he'd opted out of the chain of command.
I therefore interfaced through OST to O'Reilly bosses without ever getting to make solid connections with Make: Magazine and its team. I've gone to Maker Fairs here in Portland, hosted by OMSI (industrial science museum) and friends, and finally got to 3D print an S module and a phi-down version, at a public library, with help from Sam Lanahan's chief CAD designer.
Regarding Tensegrity, I don't know if Maker Mag does write-ups or profiles of individual makers, but if it does, an article on Gerald De Jong, which includes his software contributions (critical to EIG), would most definitely be in order. Let Gerald share his process with readers.
Postscript: O'Reilly wanted to turn OST from a dot com into a dot edu, but that meant getting certified as an academic institution, which process is replete with bureaucracy ($$). The uphill battle to become a legit university in California proved a budget breaker and we dissolved, after a rather fun / wild ride. I met and stay in touch with some astounding people.
My impression is the meme of "races" (how many again?) is a top drawer tool for recruiters working to swell the ranks of the Social Darwinists.
One may be a fan of Darwin and his theorizing, without switching into "genetic Calvinism" i.e. some doctrine of preordained "fitness" based in having the better DNA. That ideology worked well for Royals too, as it perpetuated the myth of "blood" i.e. some coveted genetic plasma, divinely conferring special rights and special powers.
The race theory depends heavily on their being a "mixed race" category. People must be allowed to fall through the cracks so to speak. Without cracks, the categorization system would be too brittle and break down. One's racial makeup is allowed to be "fuzzy" and the prospect of entirely new races emerging is not actively contemplated in most racist science fiction ("super race" mythologies usually revolve around refining some prior race, even while pushing for its "world dominance" or "supremacy").
Were a race detectable in pure form, even in a mixed race person (thinking of superstitions around blood again, and powers-of-2 subdivision e.g. 1/32nd race X), we would have found it by now, but there's no reduction of "race" to canonical strings of chromosomal encoding.
Rather, we find ourselves defining "ancestry" which relates to "geography" based on the presence (or absence) of "genetic markers". Tracing a family tree means following world lines against the backdrop of Planet Earth, with its partially overlapping scenarios.
Animal husbandry has the same degree of precision (imprecision). In animal husbandry, one speaks of breeds, which one may consciously design and refine over the generations.
A Darwinist is able to see "breeds" within in the human family in that sense, a kind of family resemblance, but maybe through several filters, as there's no universal agreement on what any of these breeds really are. We just know we keep re-encountering the same types. Supermodels? Midgets? Midget supermodels?
Men and women create this first idea of a divide, orthogonal to Darwinistic evolution through speciation.
Homo Sapien is the current species, a Cro-Magnon with some Neanderthal mixed in.
An alternative view is of a very expressive human genome, able to manifest features in various ways, without distilling into an essential palette of racial archetypes. We don't need to discern "races" as the compass points for categorization, even if we're tracking ancestry. The ideology of racial purity and of a genetic competition amongst genetic "teams" (the races) is a layer of dogma that doesn't logically follow from biology. It's more an extended metaphor, with memes replacing genes in ways that pander to a sense of tribe and belonging. We like to rally around genetic features sometimes, e.g. a convention for gingers.
