What's an Urner?

Insignia of Kanton Uri, Switzerland
(use permitted by GFDL)

The name Urus, plural Uri, with the Greek forms oupos ouot originally designated a species of wild mountain ox that was common among the higher Alps. So a free definition of the word Urner might be, "a dweller in the land of the mountain ox."*

* Geneology of the Urner Family by Isaac N. Urner, Clinton, Mississippi, 1893, revised and updated by Barbara Urner Johnson, Bakersfield CA, 1996, pg. 37 (I'm mentioned in a bio of my parents, pg. 242). Library of Congress Catalog Card Number : 96-78942.

BuckyWorks Ten Years Later

:: 1996 ::

In
Brainstorming on BuckyWorks
I dreamed of
high tech ecovillages,
relief bases, retreat centers,
alternatives to corporate cube farms.

My initial emphasis was on
high turnover scenarios,
such as we experience in:
timeshares,
hotels,
and
college campuses.

:: 2006 ::

Hypothesis:
instead of designing a bright future,
would-be futurists
are still fighting ghosts
of the last millenium.

In my view,
fighting the nightmares you fear
is far less effective
than dreaming up tomorrows
worth expending some energy to achieve.

The USA didn't get a superhighway system
simply by scaring itself silly.

Work for, not against,
or you risk wasting your opportunity
to make any real difference in this life.

That has the flavor
of a New Year's resolution,
doesn't it?

I plan to take my own advice.

In the News

The Dome Village folks need to move on, the rent on their patch (somewhere in LA) having gone sky high. I've been in touch with LEK recently, the company behind some of those domes. I'd think we could use similar high tech in the vicinity of Cape Town.

In addition to the FEMA trailers, several shelter-focused NGOs are working the tent and dome angle, which is all to the good, as more disasters are likely. Expanding the range of response options is what anticipatory design science is all about.

Grunch continues seeding the Math Forum with its preferred curriculum ideas. There's nothing to say private industry can't have a voice in shaping our shared future -- especially when it's a future that'd be of substantial benefit to the average human.

Commercial Break

A proud sponsor of this blog:
Global Data Corporation

King Kong (movie review)

King Kong is a venture into the skulletarium, as my friend Gene Fowler might put it. We're warned in advance that science / engineering (the other side of C.P. Snow's chasm) is not in control. Some discontinuities appear deliberate: swept away in the river, then dry?; where'd the natives go?; how'd they get the ape on the boat?

It's a film, see, inheriting from theater before it. So check your literal rational machine world mind at the door. This ain't no Jurassic Park. This is a feast for the unfettered imagination, supported with the best our high tech has to offer. Dino pile!

The injections of vaudeville and burlesque are likewise by design, as is the veneer of faux depth, atop the real depth of strong storytelling. I caught so many intentional Hollywood cliches: scenes of the boiler room; feral boy with mentor turns sharp shooter; pied-piper movie-maker loses his way, improvs a thin cheese, including a final line (no truer than anything else he's said).

So whose dream is this, whose skull are we in? Is our girl undergoing intensive regression therapy? Is our writer rescuing his feminine soul from the collective bug-infested Jungian unconscious? I had to admire Kong as technology, completely adapted to his world, winning a victory for mammal and ape consciousness, with whom we share a bond.

Arrogant city people, impressed with their machinery, their airplanes, don't really have their own economy together. There's this superficial consciousness here, so unsatisfyingly hollow compared to our primal one. Kong is the fitter species, in so many dimensions (no, I'm not jealous; hey, let's do a love triangle).

Our girl moves beyond fear with Kong, because he's so at home in Universe. Even when outside his private enclave, he follows his intuition and soon knows the score. He sets her down gently, knowing he's doomed -- and that he's found his friend again (she's real in both worlds).

Kong is no dummy.

So maybe the dream was his?

Solstice Party (Wanderers)

I'm sure I'll have more to say about this gathering, Sol Day, 2005, officially where the sun reaches its southernmost drift vis-a-vis my current private sky coordinates, or where we're at this extreme in orbit around Sol (the sun, one possible proper name for her), and have the northern pole maximally tilted away, creating a sunny, shining climate in places like Cape Town, where I've enjoyed some happy days.

So far, I've invented this rule: a Wanderers solstice party should have nonhumans invited. I was thinking how David, Rick and I all have dogs, plus there're more pets out there. Not that we should turn the place into a menagerie. Just have one or more selected delegates or representatives from the nonhuman kingdom (which kingdom Wanderers forever respect, appreciate, hope to learn from).

In that sense, we'd be proud to be monkeys: as sisters and brothers to the great apes, because they, like we, have to survive here, on a wonderful planet. There's simply no shame in that. And no, I haven't seen King Kong yet, just read about him flipping through Willamette Week, in the East Broadway McMenamins.

We want to save it for them too (the so-called "beasts"); we respect that it's not just for us. This teaching is embedded in the Nativity Scene. Baby Jesus loved animals (including goats, yes), and never changed his mind. He pointed to them as examples to emulate sometimes.

Somehow, sin is for Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve to worry about (this tendency to blame snakes is symptomatic of the condition (Nietzsche: so resentful, these humans)). Maybe it's some Machine World thing. The denizens of Narnia can't know about it (never having "exited" the Wardrobe). The IQ merely defends against it (humanity might be disloyal to deep magic: let's test).[1]

Only Aslan seems to have been around the block a few times (he wanders on up the beach, maybe to enjoy a transit strike somewhere, make a movie).

God to humans: don't destroy my planet. Humans to God: mixed reaction, but mostly yes, sir! (as if God trained Marines for breakfast).

We're still here at least. That's something.

Must we say "sir!"? Not in my book. Some might salute a female icon. Yes, idolatry comes into it, pretty much inevitably. Idolotry: love of dolls -- a sin that defines us.

Part of our job: to make it safe for dogs to be dogs here (nothing more, nothing less). We lose some, but let's not plan on being too abusive, OK? Same goes for other cast members. No torture allowed.

And so: Sarah (our dog) got to prance around in the party space for a bit, just during setup (Jon Bunce showed up with musical instruments). Then she was gone. Our smiley dog exits, cheerful in disposition, glad to have had a moment on stage with the rest of us.

[1] IQ = Ice Queen, Narnia's counterintelligence chief. See my Narnia analyses of earlier this month for more info.

America Reboots

Well, it's the middle of the night; lots of people in tough service jobs hard at work.

I've realized the codebase is more corrupt than I'd thought. Overinstalling hasn't resolved the deeper problems, so over the next few days I'll be taking more radical measures (but not boring my blog readers with too much nitty gritty).

Of course the analogies with the bigger picture haven't escaped me. Overhauling democracy ain't easy, yet doing so is a necessary investment in our shared future. So it's a good thing we're in the land of the free, home of the brave, no?

Big Foot Strikes

I find it somewhat ironic hearing all these Capitol Hill lawyers screaming about the NSA's domestic spying, when they've looked the other way for years as Obnoxico pours spyware and malware into our computers. North Americans are the most spied upon people in the world I'll wager.

Like some 11 year old is going to read all the fine print before downloading a "free" copy of Yeti Bubbles -- gimme a break. Five minutes later, the computer is compromised, reporting back to HQ about pages visited, triggering popups and who knows what all.

How many happy campers, receiving a new PC this Christmas, are going to get bogged down in viral hell within days? Millions of trojan horses are chomping at the bit even now, eager to charge down the throats of those poorly protected, clueless "what's a firewall?" consumers. Merry Christmas, suckers!

We need more serious-minded protection against unscrupulous predators of all kinds in this country. While the politicians scare us with their "terrorist threat" jabber, they're in the meantime letting the sharks have their way with us (hey, whatever it takes to pay the bills, right? -- campaigning is very expensive).

On the other hand, it's a little sad to see the FBI thrust aside so unceremoniously, by some supposedly sexier eagle shield agency. Most of these domestic threats don't require heavy-duty code breaking, unless you count all those license agreements and other tiny print crapola the lawyers legally bury us with, and then offer to help shovel us out from under -- for only $300/hr (cheap).

OK, so I'm writing from a biased state. Against my better judgment, I downloaded Yeti Bubbles last night, wanting to play some games with my daughter (I should have just stuck with addictinggames.com). Now I'm in the throes of reinstalling Winsock on my main machine -- and blaming Congress for not protecting me from my own stupidity.

OK, sorry guys -- you can go back to enriching yourselves now, as this was just another pointless citizen outburst (maybe I should write a letter to the editor (snicker)). Ya'll can go back to whining about the NSA, which apparently cares more about the sorry state of our public education system than you do.

Later that same day:

So I reinstalled XP (twice = two activations), yet still had to hand enter a static IP (DHCP not working, why?) along with Qwest DNS servers.

I phoned Don to vent a bit (thanks guy, Meliptus rocks), posted an education-related comment to a Forum @ BFI, read Joe Clinton's Christmas letter about his intelligent grand kids, and the recent SNEC event in NYC.

We've sent out probably about fifty Xmas letters so far (not really counting) -- my parents used to do hundreds, likewise to a multinational cast.

Dawn and Tara went shopping, bought a lot of owl-related stuff (Dawn's leading a workshop in January, her group to focus on Owl Medicine).

I advocated seeing King Kong this afternoon, but Tara vetoed -- I shouldn't have warned her about the giant bugs.

Anyway, I need to download and install a bunch of patches from Microsoft, now that connectivity has been re-established, plus reinstall the driver for my Santa Cruz sound card, which I've been quite happy with. Done!

Wolf Medicine

(multiple sources)

More TV Talk

As made clear on the DVD (special features), Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now fair game for UCLA and Berkeley type schools, interested in exploring perennial themes via "TV literature" (which'd make sense in California, where high level TV literacy is greatly prized).

So here I am, a wannabee UCer, filing my PhD thesis in American Literature, about why I found the resolution so satisfying. Stop reading if you're anxious to keep the ending hidden (same with Huck Finn or any good yarn -- open source doesn't mean you have to know).

Buffy's chief source of suffering is her "one and only" status as The Slayer, which means it's up to her to show leadership in the face of trully daunting odds (lots of mirror imagery). But she intuits that her own Messiah-hood is a pitfall, a weakness that plays into the hands of her enemy (The First).

Buffy asks herself how this "one slayer at a time" bottleneck ever came about in the first place. With that question, she realizes she and her friends have the freedom and resources to spread the slayer function more widely, per a democratic model. Willow finds this a nifty exercise and deftly executes the maneuver. The charge goes to women, mostly. The First seemed rather deeply misogynistic, so that makes sense too (forewarned is forearmed).

Our little party is still on a magic school bus when it's all over (an eternal return to the beginning, another turn in the spiral); more adventures lie ahead (in Cleveland?). And yes, good people have died: Anya gets to explore her humanity more deeply (a privilege she seems curiously excited about, despite our obvious stupidity) and Spike goes out in a blaze of glory (literally), his soul saved just as surely.

Like I said, a satisfying ending. We watched it as a family on the upstairs Sony, renting from Netflix.

More Accounting

I reupped as grunch.net domain owner, having got it going in synch with Fuller School syllabus materials, i.e. Bucky's Grunch of Giants forecasts a potentially benign world livingry service industry. I added a little more science fact to his science fiction. A lot of us did, in various interesting ways. Dawn just got the confirmation back to her inbox @ Qwest.net.

Dawn is scheduling another bookkeeping appointment, where she goes to the client and operates client bookkeeping systems. I'd like to provide her with better VPN, to take some stress off the Subaru, but mainly to help us get more mobile. So much of our work involves telecommuting already.

Got a snailmail from Associated Oregon Industries (AOI) asking for a W-9 (they likely have it by now). AOI is one of my clients: membership is managed using a client-server VFP program, featuring a tabbed GUI with the member home page showing up in the rightmost tab, courtesy of a canned Microsoft ActiveX object. That's only if the member has supplied AOI with an URL for its database -- having a web presence is certainly not a requirement for membership AFAIK.

We have two memorial services to attend today: I'll be with the Martins, celebrating the life of Roberta, while Dawn will join Elise in celebrating Gordon, Elise's dad.

Charter School Approved

Per a story by Paige Parker in today's Metro section of The Oregonian, the board of directors for Portland Public Schools has approved the Koreducators proposal to create the Leadership and Entrepreneurship Charter High School in northeast Portland. Wanderer Don Wardwell and I attended the meeting, as did like a hundred other Koreducator supporters, many with children. The board had earlier denied this proposal, with some board members absent.

Nirel almost came, as she's back to doing her big budget video documentary on the future of public education, but her batteries were low, plus we'd been unable to produce a tripod. So we left her and Jules at Jake's Grill, where we'd enjoyed the crowded happy hour (1/2 lb. cheeseburgers for only $1.95!). But we needn't have rushed. The board had many hours of business to attend to before it got around to taking a second look at the charter school proposals.

Jules, just old enough to legally drink beer, is a big Neal Stephenson fan and is close to finishing the Baroque Cycle. He's also a fan of Ricky Gervais (The Office, Extras) and Ali G (Sacha Baron Cohen). He encouraged us to catch the latter's interview with Pat Buchanan (clip).

I've flagged the new Koreducator school as a potential asset on in-house company maps (as has Coca-Cola). The emphasis on entrepreneurship might dovetail well with Portland's growing reputation as an open source capital. New talent has to come from somewhere. Why not from northeast Portland?

IQ Test

"relative volumes"
(Python + POV-Ray)

• Tetrahedron: fills space with octahedron; inscribes in the cube as face diagonals; self-dual; 24 A mods; same volume as coupler = 8 MITEs (MITE = 2 A mods + 1 B mod).
  


• Cube: space-filler; inscribes in the rhombic dodecahedron as short face diagonals; dual of octahedron; same volume as six half-couplers (24 MITEs).
  
  
• Octahedron: fills space with tetrahedron; inscribes in the rhombic dodecahedron as long face diagonals; dual of cube; 48 A mods + 48 B mods.
  
  
• Rhombic Dodecahedron: space-filler; the domain of each ball in the closest-packing arrangement below (CCP); dual of the cuboctahedron; volume of twelve half-couplers (six couplers).
  

3-frequency cuboctahedral packing
(92 + 42 + 12 + 1 = 147 balls)

Followup:
Kirby's address to alumni (Math Forum, Dec 16, 2005)

More About Narnia

The four Pevensie children, destined to rule Narnia from four thrones, might be construed as a tetrahedron, a minimal system of six two-way relationships (we get dialog along every edge).

Whereas the Ice Queen had many opportunities to kill Edmund, thereby spoiling the prophecy, her job is to test the competence and readiness of the whole system, which is why she's so keen to net the other three and to engage all in battle.

No child vertex is as yet a whole adult, though as a system they're already internalizing parental functions and beginning to assume adult powers. They're in full retreat from a nightmare world, a city under bombardment wherein the grownups have clearly failed at some deep level. The kids are thrown back on their own devices, to cocoon and transmogrify within a fabulously optimized pre-machine scenario. The wardrobe is an alchemist's crucible.

To be frozen is to be paralyzed, stopped in one's tracks along one's inward path. The IQ presides over a world in stasis. However, the minute the children show up, her ruthless / heartless dominion begins melting (shades of Oz). Aslan and Father Christmas befriend humanity, urging him/her to take heart and keep growing.

Meanwhile, the IQ prosecutes the case that humans are unworthy and destined to fail. Edmund provides some evidence the Queen will win, as do the disloyals wielding outward weapons -- bombers etc. -- running amok in Machine World outside, endangering it, betraying the trust of future generations.

Narnia provides enough mythic grist for the mill to enable swift computation, and the children munch through a lifetime of testing in a hurry, emerging in the relative blink of an eye, having trully sampled young adulthood and proved to themselves (the ones most in need of proof) that they're indeed ready for prime time (or will be when the time comes).

Anyway, that's all this particular wardrobe / simulator was designed to provide. This first Narnia fantasy was a dead end eventually, as our foursome had no human otherness to bounce off. Susan is cut out to do more than chase stags for a living. Game over, we've won.

In the process of forging themselves into a true pattern integrity, the humans developed an awareness of synergy (Aslan: wild, surprising, unpredictable), but how this new awareness will unfold is for stories to come.

At any rate, the professor's job is done. The children have been healed.

Chronicles of Narnia, LWW (movie review)

The Narnia books were important to me as a kid. I was hooked on this first one by my teacher at the Junior English School in Rome -- she read it aloud to our class. This movie refreshed (and replaced) a lot of boyhood fantasies. I credit C.S. Lewis for piquing my curiousity about Turkish Delight (not a bad treat as it turns out).

Now that I'm older, it's the Ice Queen herself I went gaga over -- brilliantly cast. Paradoxically, her DNA seemed the closest to human of any in Narnia. I confess I was sorry to see her taken out.

The IQ's general, a bovine, I took as symbolic of the ancient cults of a more Minoan flavor, the ones that worshipped, danced, fought, and traded with bulls (like some still do in Spain). I agree that lions and big predatory cats in general are prettier and probably more worthy as religious idols (although they're less convenient as food).

I was glad to see the forces of good included fauns and centaurs. Lots of Christians want to purge the ranks of any goat-like or even horse-like creatures, given some effective Church propaganda of ages past. Humans have come a long way overcoming their racism, but still harbor beaucoups bigotry against so many in the animal kingdom.

Mr. Tumnus, who looks very Pan-like and plays a mean set of pipes, only flirts with being evil out of fear of the secret police. Edmund is likewise more clueless and mean than outright bad. The IQ gets both amateur disloyals in her dungeon per job description. She didn't write the deep magic, just knows the code really well (Aslan didn't write it either, but is an even deeper reader).

The wolves seemed the most evil, what with their snarly American accents and all (not that the entire dog family was implicated). Maybe the chief wolf was someone the IQ could snuggle with. She had a tough and lonely job and now that I'm older, I can more empathize with that.

Science Fair

Tara won third place for her popcorn experiment. Her hypothesis proved incorrect, but that's not a bad thing in science. Finding and fixing errors in thinking is the name of the game.

A goal, and a skill, is to propose testable ideas, such that experiment brings one closer to an answer, perhaps by suggesting additional experiments.

Science is also about dreaming up streamlining heuristics which organize what's known into mnemonic devices (e.g. search engines), facilitating faster lookup and application. Or maybe that's more the job of engineering?

In any case, knowledge is more valuable when it's retrievable when and where you need it. A lot of good science gets buried and/or ignored, only to be rediscovered much later. That's wasteful.

Science also gets locked away by those hoping to use it to private advantage -- or maybe just to keep competitors from using it.

One reason Bucky was such a control freak regarding his intellectual property was to frustrate bureaucracies, public or private, that might wish to keep it secret.

By retaining the freedoms and privileges of ownership, Fuller was able to pioneer an open source strategy on behalf of omnihumanity.

Incomprehensible?

A & B modules by Richard Hawkins
(SGI workstation, early 1990s)

Through 2005, Americans were still complaining that USA Medal of Freedom winner R. Buckminster Fuller wrote "indecipherable" poetry and prose.

Academics ridiculed his propensity to invent new shoptalk, even as specialists continued to multiply the number of technical terms within their respective disciplines. For some reason these A and B modules (each 1/24th the volume of the reference tetrahedron) were just too arcane, too esoteric, to merit further mention.

A simple approach to polyhedra, using lots of wholesome whole numbers, embedding them within a lattice well-known to scientists (crystallographers especially), got shelved by the math and science educators, as either too difficult or too trivial, depending on which audience was hearing the excuse.

This all seemed pretty lame to me. I called for a Math Makeover and suggested students might want to exercise some civil disobedience or employ other non-violent tactics, given their heritage as Americans was being denied them (like many of my generation, I was inspired by the civil rights movement).

On Tuesday, December 6, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) recycled an old video about fractals (a good one, starring Arthur C. Clarke) as a part of its fundraising campaign. I didn't send any money. I felt my patriotic duty was to keep advocating for a more intelligent, less recycled, public discourse.

From my point of view, Americans couldn't really understand their own history (and didn't) minus at least some passing familiarity with the contributions of this great 20th century American philosopher. Our TV-intensive culture hadn't yet devised an effective way of sharing the info, not even on Sesame Street. I used this blog, other venues, to brainstorm possible remedies, investing most of my hopes in a new kind of Reality TV, one in which the stars actually did something useful for a change.

Entering middle age (I'm 47), I was aghast at the level of intellectual squalor my peers seemed to find tolerable. But then, I'd never pretended Bucky was too hard to understand, at least not the easy parts. I didn't go to Princeton for nuthin I guess. At Princeton, we'd read Hegel for breakfast -- and maybe get Kantstipated (Walter Kaufmann's pun, funny).

Related f/u threads:
[1][2] @ math-teach, Math Forum
Postmortem (Bridges submission)

Omnitriangulating

I've joined a book group reading Peter Watson's new book Ideas: a history of thought and invention, from fire to freud (assignment: first 200 pages by Friday).

His discussion of the Bronze Age led me back to the Ban Chiang thread: Southeast Asia gets new respect for its early tin-copper metallurgy (starting 3000 BCE?). Fuller brought this up in Critical Path, in connection with the evolution of seafaring and ship building.

That thread took me back to cross-checking his submarine aircraft carrier claims, about which more has surfaced in the last few years: OK, so the Japanese had 'em in WWII. See my Sept 17, 1997 review of Critical Path at Amazon.com for more context.

Woah, a guy just walked off with Ideas! -- said he planned to use it for a mouse pad, thought it was community property, apologized. It's now back in my possession, no harm done. Time for lunch with Don and Nick.

New Bucky Book!

I finally got my own copy of Michael John Gorman's Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility from Amazon.com this morning. I'd previewed it at Trevor's (mostly looking at pictures), but today was my first in depth read.

Per opening credits and acknowledgments, I wasn't in the loop on this one, although I know many of the people Gorman interviewed for this work. Maybe I'd have influenced him to focus more on the whole numbered volumes business, the so-called concentric hierarchy, which is how Synergetics fits so many standard polyhedra into the isomatrix or IVM (octet truss), which Gorman does discuss.

Russ Chu's toothpick IVM is depicted on page 92 -- I opened straight too it upon extracting the book from its packaging (Derek is my witness).

But hey, no one book needs to cover every angle, and I think this book has a lot going for it minus whatever complementary material it leaves out. The writing is engaging, the story well told, and I've picked up several tidbits (about the DDUs & DDMs, the radomes, the teardrop car). Lots of great pictures.

Best of all, Gorman proves there's still lots of relevant unrealized potential packed into these Fuller projects. That keeps me hoping we'll get some more interesting Reality TV in the not too distant future, provided our networks show some courage and imagination (they've shown these before, so I'm not too worried about our prospects).

Toyz!

This marks the first time I've uploaded a picture to my blog directly from my camera's memory card, via the Mozilla FireFox browser and USB (looking foward to WUSB). These are some of the toys in my personal collection:

• The cubocta (lower left) with magnetic edges around a foam sphere is by Kenneth Snelson.
• The plastic hinge-bonded cube (upper right) is from Polymorf.
• The larger glow-in-the-dark buckyball (top center) is from DaMert, based on an earlier design by Roger Gilbertson of Mondo-tronics (with supporting notes by me).
  
• The wooden puzzles are from Design Science Toys in Tivoli, New York.
• I forget who did the smaller buckyball executive toy in the middle (uses magnets)
  
• I don't currently own any Zome.
• The coffee coasters are from Lesotho.
  

Related Reading:
What about puzzles and games? (Math Forum, Dec 2, 2005)
More toyz! (from Summer Memories 2005)

Radical Evolution (ISEPP lecture)

Joel Garreau is typing as fast as he can to bring possible futures into everyday thinking.

He writes for a lay audience, women mostly, as they're the big readers and book buyers around this holiday season.

He's a layman himself, a reporter with The Washington Post on his resume, not a techie, not some heavily degreed guy.

Joel frames his story in earthy terms he hopes will reach into truck stops and blue collar diners where people of good sense and imagination will ponder his core question: what does it mean to be human, and how will we retain what we value even while altering what it means?

The new human-altering technologies he's looking at comprise his GRIN (Grunch's smile?): Genetics, Robotics, Infotech, Nanotech.

From behind the camera after dinner, I asked if human nature wasn't itself a continuing surprise and revelation, already many times transformed.

And I recommended the science fiction museum in Seattle; we exhibit our fears and longings in distopian and utopian scifi. Neal Stephenson's works (Diamond Age etc.) had already come up in discussion, so I thought this commercial appropriate.

I was pleased my friend Dave Fabik was able to join me. He'll make a great Wanderer (plus he was aboard Meliptus yesterday which makes it official).

I was also pleased by Nancy's continuing enthusiasm for my blog.