The dog and I retired for the night amidst first reports of another salvo in a tit for tat that’s been mostly tat, talking about Mesopotamia again. We got up early and came to Sam’s farm. Sam has been studying the history of Mesopotamia, which apparently hosted a culture that, for some three thousand years, got by with no discernible government, at least in terms of royalty, lineage and like that. I’ll have to ask him the name of this civilization at dinner.
The field work today was unloading lots of three inch pipe segments from the irrigation pipe trailer, pulled by the all purpose Gator, so we could fill it again, from pipes still amidst the flowers. Acres and acres of beautiful flowers. We took a couple breaks, one for me to go get my boots on. We may do some more pipe line dismantling tomorrow, depending on weather. Josh came by and he and Sam spoke casually but in earnest regarding the rest of this year and next year’s first growing season.
University of Oregon was playing Illinois today, here in Eugene. I say “here” because the farm is near the adjacent community of Springfield, home of Homer Simpson per local lore.
My cohort, the group I’m guiding through the foothills of Python, switched over to studying Git for a couple days, letting me off the hook.I packed the car and took off. By the time the sun was coming into view, lighting up the sky, we were already south of Salem on I-5. The rest stop was all about me, not Sydney. I wanted a thermos cup of coffee and a couple plain donuts. The drive is about two hours.
The meetup hosted by BFI, featuring D.W. Jacobs, was still giving me some ideas about how we might take it from here with the BEAST modules, now BASKET. David Koski is tackling the icosidodecahedron (ID), the RT’s dual, sizing it in a specific way vis-a-vis the 2F Cube of volume 24. I’m behind having an ID to play with in my flextegrity.py sandbox. For outputting to POV-Ray.
For those of y’all new to these blogs, Flextegrity is a trademark given by this farm’s owner to his lattice-based inventions, within which branded category one has sub-brands, such as C6XTY. We did a whole museum on C6XTY in December of 2019, in downtown Portland. Lattice Gallery we called it. As a contracted 3D graphics guy, I developed my Python around this same lattice, hence the module name is no coincidence. My GIFs and PNGs have featured prominently in the Flextegrity corpus.
In terms of overlapping scenarios, Sam knew Bucky Fuller through the Applewhites from back in the DC metro area. He went with Bucky to the Philippines as a guest of the Marcos family, around the same time my dad was there working for UNDP, UP, USAID and maybe some others. I was in high school at the time, at ISM, which just had a reunion in Dallas, which I attended vicariously through Facebook.
Sam’s grandparents were the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald of Great Gatsby fame (an American novelist), and Zelda, a southern belle from Alabama or something along those lines. However it’s not like having famous grandparents entitles one to a farm in the Willamette Valley, some of the best farming country in the world. Sam’s entrepreneurial ventures encompass way more than just the Flextegrity chapter. I’m not the expert, more just a beneficiary with a shared interest in Lattice Graphics and other matters lattice related.
I’m sure that sounds cryptic to outsiders (the lattice stuff) so it helps to know that Bucky Fuller, the American inventor and futurist mentioned above, had a fondness for a uniform distribution of points in space known to science by several names, and to architects as the octet truss. NASA uses it a lot, for space frames, but so do ordinary Earth-focused construction companies. Alexander Graham Bell famously dove into the same scaffolding. If your high school failed to connect the dots for you here, that might be symptomatic of the dark ages we’ve been enjoying. Keep bouncing around in these journals if you wish to bone up on what you’ve been missing.
