Buckminster Fuller Calling

I recently composed and recorded this song using a small part of the beginning of a phone call that R. Buckminster Fuller was attempting to make. I think it is ironic that he has to repeat his name since everyone on Spaceship Earth should know of him and his work as a futurist, poet, engineer, educator, design scientist, and inventor.

But, maybe this song (?) will catch on.

The chimes are played by Anita Gayle.

Hoppy Holidays

Almost another year is coming to a close. 

Mostly I am elated that I made it through and am looking forward to life in the New Year.

As this year ends, I want to post this video holiday greeting that Anita and I made this year. Hope you enjoy it and 2013.

At the end of the video are shots that include a 3 frequency model of a greenhouse model with Frosty the Snowman. I bulit the model and set up the train while Anita set up Noel Town.  Then, I shot and edited the video and Anita created the music. Fun!

Modeling Nature's Design

A few weeks ago I hauled out all my old Bucky Books, and other reference materials in order to re-connect with the mathematical “ideas and integrities” that make up the body of intellectual works left to humanity by the late Bucky Fuller. In doing so I discovered that I had forgotten quite a bit of the specific construction breakdowns and formulas but had retained much of Bucky’s philosophy and comprehensive world view. While that realization made me a bit sad since the contemporary world, while evolving inexorably toward a more universal point-of-view, is still laboring under economic systems that are hundreds of years old and, frankly, are most of the problem more than the solution to world peace and prosperity for all humans in the future.

However, I was struck by the fact that, while Bucky’s predictions for a global computer generated and facilitated design science revolution is at least 20 years behind what he thought was likely, his basic discoveries about the physical laws that underly all of nature still hold true and can be operable and useful to even an individual such as myself.

So, as a firm believer in action speaking louder than words, and already supplied with a model construction kit given to me by one of my daughters years ago, I began putting together a 3 frequency dome, the use of which I will keep secret at the moment, but will be revealed in the coming weeks in a blog post as we close out 2012.

I chose to use this particular breakdown of an icosahedron because it was, and still is, a favored design for greenhouses and home domes since it is particularly suited to the strength needed to withstand natural elements and preferentially sized to fit prefab construction equipment used to manufacture and transport the triangles needed to make mass-produced domes of convenient size for use by human families.

Platonic solids, and there are five of them, have faces (the flat surfaces), vertices (where the points of the flat surfaces meet), and edges which are the place where two surfaces meet that we call lines (or struts in models or some dome designs),  or if you remember math class, chords connecting points on a circle.

So, in the case of this model I built, the plutonic solid configuration is based on the icosahedron, which has 20 equilateral triangular faces with each of the 12 vertices being a point on a great circle (a circle that describes the equator of a sphere dividing the sphere in half).  

Each of the 20 triangles can be broken down further to make each face appear more "curved" by dividing each edge into 2 sections, or 3 or more up to whatever number with each of the resulting new vertices (in my model connecting 5 or 6-holed hubs as labeled in the above drawing) still falling as points on the great circle. 

So, in the case of a three frequency geodesic icosahedron, each of the original 20 equilateral triangle faces would be divided into 9 smaller triangles, or 180 for a whole sphere. 

The above illustration shows the three frequency breakdown.  In the 3 frequency breakdown, there are three different edge length edges (A,B,C in my drawing), which are derived from chord factor formulas and assembled following the the pattern above.

Clear as mud, right?  

My high school math teachers would totally choke that I even care about this stuff. I just think that geodesic structures are beautiful in their symmetry and truly amazing since they represent the structure of nature's reality. I’m not sure you really want to know that much about all the details of my particular compulsive obsession, but here they are. 

Of course, part of the genius of Bucky Fuller is that he didn't invent these shapes, he just figured out practical applications for them, among his many talents.