In the Euclidean belief system, it's not a problem to assert that two parallel trajectories might stay that way forever. What's to stop them? A Newtonian force? In the Platonic realm, as colonized by these true believers, these metaphysical lines have no mass or energy and will not be affected by the quanta of quantum mechanics. No "forces" to worry about in other words.
So do we still have the freedom to change channels and jump outside the jurisdiction of these Euclidean axiomatic truths? Sure we do. Non-Euclidean geometries abound, and where they beg to differ is likely right here, among other places, at this Fifth Postulate about parallelism (the dogma).
I'm going to switch topics, now that I've introduced non-Euclidean geometries. Let's talk about SNEC, the Synergetics Collaborative, a 501(c)(3) and another somewhat parallel "think tank" centered more on the Pacific coast, where BFI was headquartered at the time. Russ Chu convened a summit in WDC, where he'd moved from Seattle, with his family. Lots of us converged: Bob Gray, Ed Applewhite, Joe Clinton... That's when we booted the colab for real.
I'm thinking specifically of all the time we devoted to the question: should the BFI move to Smalltalk for its internal programming needs? Russ Chu purchased a motherboard to help make that happen. A guy named Hal was the chief promoter, not just of Smalltalk, but of object-oriented languages more generally. Bonnie Goldstein (BFI archivist) and Robert Orenstein were on the team (Robert favored a computer language named Dylan at the time). That's where I first met David Koski, then a denizen of Santa Monica, also J. Baldwin and Yasushi Kajikawa.
The west coast version of SNEC did not have a name per se and did not solidify as a specific nonprofit. Sam Lanahan hosted an event in Portland, at the Laurelwood Brewpub on Sandy, that included a lot of us, including Glenn Stockton (Global Matrix) and Trevor Blake (archivist, Synchronofile).
Sam would later, in 2019, co-produce Lattice Gallery, a popup in the art district behind the art school along West Broadway near the Pendleton building (Kenneth Snelson was from Pendleton). The gallery featured several versions of flextegrity, a term that both connects it with and distinguishes it from tensegrity (per Snelson's sculptures). I'd been Snelson's first webmaster by this time, as well as house guest and personal friend.
Once Zoom happened in a big way, with the concept of meetups more formalized thereby, it became easier to organize at the meetup level, which is where 52 Living Ideas came in, already anchored around CJ, a founder of SNEC. CJ helped run the Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society, which overlapped with Shrikant's New York based channel, in terms of geography and membership.
Before these events in Portland, we held a summit at the Kasman-Chu residence in Seattle, Russell Chu having overlapped with David Koski in those BFI-in-LA days. Now he had moved to Seattle, closer to me in Portland. He had married Deb Kasman and they had two kids.
Several of us converged for this event, including Ed Applewhite by phone, a liason with SNEC one might say given he was calling from Georgetown. Others attending in person: myself, Alan Ferguson, Karl Erickson, Gerald de Jong, John Braley. This same network had a life online and included faraway figures such as Peter Adderley in Australia.
This summit happened around the same time a different Applewhite was in the news over some cultic ritual suicide relating to the Hale-Bopp comet. Heaven's Gate they called it.
Another "think tank" I'll now introduce (again) to the scene is Wanderers, associated with the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy (ISEPP) here in Portland, and run by one Terry Bristol (with Dawn Wicca and Associates in an auditing / bookkeeping role back then, Dawn Wicca being my wife and running the other half of our business).
ISEPP helped get me a better rate at the First International Conference on Buckminsterfullerene in Santa Barbara, organized by Elsevier, where I met Harold Kroto. I rented a convertible and drove there in the company of on-the-road networking pro Nick Consoletti, an expert on both Bucky and Linus Pauling.
I started having Wanderers (a subset thereof) listen in on CJ's meetups based in Philadelphia, connecting through by backyard WiFi. I was also a member of TrimTab Book Club by this time (closely tied to BFI), as well as Field Structure Institute (FSI) so more overlapping there.
Tying this blog post together: once we allow trajectories to diverge from remaining parallel, we may find them criss-crossing all over the place, like so many intersecting great circles.
Not only do the think tanks co-orbit, but so do individuals and families. The Applewhites and Lanahans inter-wove in the District, leading to Sam's getting to be Bucky's sidekick on a trip to Manila, at the invitation of the Marcos family, and at around the same time I was in high school there (but we didn't know of each other yet). Later, the Applewhites visited the Wicca-Urners here in Oregon.
