City planning runs in the family, as does travel. We would take side trips to visit model cities my dad knew about. He was a connoisseur of city plans. We subscribed to The Futurist. A lot of this rubbed off.
What if instead of retiring to a mobile home in Florida, you could move into a dymaxion yurt in a city designed to help older people and younger families alike? We have a lot of donated used stuff and need shops to fix and repair, so you also have opportunities to learn fix and repair skills.
Here in Portland, we have Free Geek, which is about recycling and salvaging. I'm thinking of The Zabbaleen (I visited their place in Cairo, but not recently -- wrote some GST there and mailed it to Bucky, check the archives, early 1980s).
I haven't seen this many in our group together in a long time. Gus may have captured a few seconds in 360, with his new two-camera GoPro. He's on the cutting edge in VR, job related (fire inspections, recording the scene).
Stig, new in Portland, was our guest of honor. He not only looked Spanish, he's in love with Catalonia and Gaudi. We got right into it. New cities. How to mitigate trash through new lifestyles, advertised through media.
When FNB (I went to one tonight, before the potluck, and stuffed myself) set up the tent at Occupy Portland, that held the space. Then the less disciplined took over, using plastic utensils and paper plates. That grossed us out and we moved our smaller operation to a different area.
You'll remember I was focusing on the recruiting vehicles around the periphery, meaning I was sensitized to various vehicles, some of them bizmos. I was eyeing the camp with a recruiter's eye myself. We had some serious, committed individuals with good social skills, all concentrated in one place.
Anyway, we want to prepare people for a life as more nomadic tourists, if they're up for it (many are). That means traveling light and not leaving a trail of waste. Big junk piles, guarded by armed personnel, is not our idea of "not leaving a trail".
That doesn't mean a city the size of Old Man River is going to have no waste streams. I discussed sewer systems with a Friend at the FNB event. I'm putting some of the puzzle pieces together.
When you're not wasting a lot on packaging, you save a lot. Bringing your own bags to the store rooms is only the beginning. We're in no way wanting to duplicate the lifestyles of ranch style home commuter suburbians. The idea of media rooms still makes sense.
The refugee camps on the drawing boards pipe in audio and video services. The kids watch cartoons and play games. The parents have a wide range of options. We're not building a punishment park here. We have playgrounds, even roller coasters.
We would all like New Cities TV I think. But the old networks won't give it to us. They don't have sufficient movie-making ability perhaps. They fall back on the old standbys.
"So what about the whole number volumes already! They're not all whole number. What's the fuss?" That's my impatient viewer wondering why I harp on themes in literature.
The intersection of pragmatism and transcendentalism might put American philosophy on the map, but for that to happen, we might need to see Synergetics on more reading lists.
"Thanks but no thanks" say the philosophers. Unless they're using the Bucky stuff around the edges to thrill audiences at conferences. Something about free energy and maybe living forever? In that case the A & B modules are too mundane, too trite. Playing with blocks is for children. But then when do we share A & B modules with children?
In the meantime, for those taking The School of Tomorrow more seriously, we have a kind of fluency to offer, starting with the IVM (sphere packing matrix). We segue to architecture over here, to crystallography over there... to the morphology of the virus. A kind of liberal arts generic literacy -- some call "cultural literacy" -- pops into the foreground, like a duckrabbit.
True enough, they're not all whole number, nor all commensurable with each other. Incommensurability is real. See my Invisible Landscapes series?
However Fuller wasn't buying "the Real Numbers" lock, stock and barrel. What if we stick to shape?
Isn't energy at bottom approximate in the sense of quantized discretely? What if our mathematical concepts took their cues from reality for a change?
Where is the need for infinite precision, or "one over infinity" so to speak? What if we remove "infinity" in most contexts? If it wasn't really there to begin with, except in hand-waving... what of substance changes?
We're still free to compute pi a trillion of digits. No bubbles burst as a result (nor wait for the answer).
Fuller wasn't alone in questioning "real number" metaphysics. In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein elicits a new kind of skepticism regarding what these "foundations" might consist in. "Forms of life?" (On Certainty) "What does that mean?"
What I question is holding back the information that's known to check out, just because it comes mixed in with more speculative material, with a potentially shorter half-life.
The Concentric Hierarchy is purely Platonic, all angles without frequency (fixed scale) one might put it (i.e. "pre-frequency"). More accurately, I don't question the holding back so much as adamantly insist it's wrong, ill-advised, cowardly, unprofessional.
