TrimTabers are plowing through Fuller's Earth these days. "TrimTabers" is not really an English word, although "trimtab" is, at least according to Collins English Dictionary.
I find many dictionaries have "trim tab" as two words. Either way, the meaning traces to maritime origins (but has aeronautical applications as well), as "the rudder that steers the rudder" (or smaller plane that acts on a bigger plane -- with "plane" meaning "piece of the wing" and not short for "airplane"). The trimtab steers the wing or rudder in which it is embedded.
Cybernetics was likewise linked to the verb "to steer" i.e. ""kubernetika" referred to "steering as a skill".
To some extent, Buckminster Fuller (aka RBF) likely helped "trim" and "tab" stick together in a single string, as that was his usage, with "Call Me Trimtab" his famous epitaph.
But even with TrimTab a brewery in Alabama (I have some souvenir empty cans, shared on Youtube), we don't say "TrimTaber" a lot (and should it have two "bs" as in Tabber and Tabby Cat?).
By TrimTabers I mean participants in Curt's TrimTab Book Club. I'm tempted to write BookClub in camelCase, to allude to TrimTab in camelCase. At least Simple English Wikipedia writes camelCase in camel case (not all sources do).
The other week we had Siobhan Roberts as our guest, author of two biographies connected to our own readings.
John H. Conway was her most recent subject and she had some interesting anecdotes about him.
Donald Coxeter (also known as "H.S.M. Coxeter"), based at the University of Toronto (Conway was at Princeton in his final days) is the late great geometer to whom Synergetics was dedicated, speaking there of RBF's magnum opus.
These days we're plowing through Fuller's Earth, as I mention in my opening. That's a book wherein RBF gets together with a few kids, with a tape recorder and a camera going, operated by a small crew. Their plan was to turn the voice recordings and photographs, along with Fuller's hand drawings into an easy to read book. The one we're now reading, almost forty years later.
We'll take our time with this book, but it's pretty short and I've been reading ahead. The kids he's hanging out with know he has a reputation as a futurist, which is akin to a prophet or soothsayer, but with strong grounding in science. Fuller stresses has faithfulness to science, but in a way that would dismay many teachers: as a source of skepticism versus axiomatically accepted mathematics.
We may be used to pitting science versus religion, but not science versus math.
He encourages his young proteges to get good grades by pleasing their teachers (what he did ultimately), by giving them the sought for answers ("when in Rome...") but in the mean time, they had the inherent right to exercise freedom of thought, which could mean harboring and cultivating a counter-narrative.
Fuller sets an example by exercising his own freedom to diverge from convention, by converging to something else: to the tetrahedron, his central construct for conceptuality itself, and his unit of volume.
How esoteric is this history and will it be taught in American high schools? Not in all of them certainly, but then propagating curriculum ideas is relatively easy these days, so lets expect a few to take it up, perhaps under Lit. American colleges too, will in some places be picking up the slack.
In the Google Group archives, not public at this time, we intertwine our various threads. There's a Zoom meetup and a publishing / prototyping aspect. Some of us are Canadian, as was Coxeter.
Fuller isn't giving spooky Greek metaphysics a free pass, even though it masquerades as beyond questionable. The infinitely long lines of mono-dimensional thinness come in for some scrutiny. Why don't we reject the Cube World as a world of phoniness and fake news? Obviously such questioning of the dominant paradigm is enough to perturb the authoritarians, especially given he's passing this torch to kids, in the open.
