======================================================================= Cybernetics in the 3rd Millennium (C3M) Volume 17 Number 2, July 2023 Alan B. Scrivener — people.well.com/user/abs — abs@well.com ======================================================================== In this issue: Stewart Brand 1976
( https://www.pinterest.com/pin/stewart-brand1976-by-warymeyers-blog-via-flickr--88735055130426695/ )
- Short Subjects
- The Parts Left Out of the Stewart Brand Documentary
- Playing With Geodesic Polyhedra
- Note Re: "If It's Just a Virtual Actor, Then Why Am I Feeling Real Emotions?"
Short Subjects
"Fractured Flickers" letterhead with Theda Bara (artofjayward.blogspot.com/2015/06/fractured-flickers.html)
- Contest Deadline Extended to September 29, 2023 Last time I announced a contest to find answers to four challenges in my article "A Glass Bead Game" in C3M v. 17 n. 1, March 2023. ( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_1701.html#sec_1 ) The prizes are $20 gift cards. I have gotten zero (that's a 0 followed by zero 0s) entries. Aw, come on, Play along! (Hint: one of the challenges can be solved merely by running one of the scripts I supplied and looking at the output.) The new deadline is 29 September 2023.
- More Fun With ChatGPT
The celebrity chatbot ChatGPT continues to make a stir.
- The Automation Problem
I will be writing more about this in a futre eZine, but on a lark I posed a question about
automation to ChatGPT (and posted the result to Facebook).
- Education and Reskilling: Emphasize the importance of education and encourage individuals to develop skills that are in high demand in the job market. Promote vocational training programs, apprenticeships, and lifelong learning opportunities to help people adapt to changing job requirements.
- Job Rotation and Redesign: Encourage businesses to implement job rotation programs, where employees are given the opportunity to learn multiple tasks and acquire a broader skill set. Redesigning jobs to focus on tasks that are less likely to be automated can also help in preserving employment opportunities.
- Entrepreneurship and Innovation: Encourage entrepreneurial initiatives and support the creation of startups. By fostering an environment that promotes innovation, new businesses can emerge and generate employment opportunities.
- Social Safety Nets: Strengthen social safety nets by providing unemployment benefits, healthcare, and other forms of support for those who are unemployed due to automation. This can help individuals during the transitional period as they seek new job opportunities.
- Universal Basic Income (UBI): Implementing a UBI system could provide a baseline income for every citizen, ensuring that their basic needs are met. This would provide a safety net for individuals whose jobs have been displaced by automation, allowing them to focus on retraining, education, or pursuing alternative career paths.
- Workforce Planning and Collaboration: Encourage collaboration between governments, businesses, and educational institutions to anticipate future job market needs. By analyzing employment trends and planning ahead, it becomes possible to align educational programs with the skills required in emerging industries.
- Flexible Work Arrangements: Promote flexible work arrangements such as remote work, part-time work, and job-sharing to accommodate the changing nature of work and facilitate the integration of automation technologies without complete displacement of workers.
Me: What is the solution to unemployment caused by automation? ChatGPT: The issue of unemployment caused by automation is a complex one, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, here are some potential approaches that can be considered to address this challenge:
- Writing Code
I've never been much of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) programmer, and I decided to learn the
rudiments in Python. I wondered if ChatGPT could help me. Here is how it went:
prompt: Write a program in Python 2.7 to create a GUI with a drawing canvas where the user can draw a polyline by clicking points in rubber band mode. ChatGPT: I'm sorry, but as a language model, I don't have the capability to create a GUI with a drawing canvas on my own. However, I can provide you with some guidance on how to create a GUI with a drawing canvas in Python 2.7. One way to create a GUI with a drawing canvas in Python 2.7 is to use the Tkinter module. Here's an example program that creates a canvas and allows the user to draw a polyline by clicking points in rubber band mode: [code]
- email correspendence betweek Donald Knuth and Stephen Wolfram about ChatGPT Fascinating. ( cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt )
- How to Use ChatGPT to Ruin Your Legal Career — June 2023 This vlog by the Legal Eagle tells the woeful tale of some lwayers who fracked up big time by using ChatGPT to write a legal document. ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqSYljRYDEM )
- The Automation Problem
I will be writing more about this in a futre eZine, but on a lark I posed a question about
automation to ChatGPT (and posted the result to Facebook).
- Wonderhussy Adventures I just recently found this gal, who loves the Mojave Desert as much as I do. There aren't many people who can teach me a thing or two about Cajon Pass, but she did! Mormon Rocks! Trains! Camp Cajon! Route 66! Pioneer Trail Monument! Pacific Crest Trail! Hill 582! "The Weird History and Hidden Secrets of Cajon Pass" — Apr 26, 2023 ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTgQG_EJ6hE )
- Split Log Stove - One Log Fire For Camp & Trail Cooking — Kusk Bushcraft — Sep. 2022 This guy soothes me. I need to get out into the bush more myself. ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG8T_MYJiO4 )
The Parts Left Out of the Stewart Brand Documentary
The Next Whole Earth Catalog (1981)
( www.amazon.com/Next-Whole-Earth-Catalog-Access/dp/0394707761 )
"PURPOSE We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."In December 2022 I announced the completion of the Stewart Brand documentary "We Are As Gods" (2022) which was not yet available to stream. Since then the movie has been released on Amazon and Apple. We watched it last March and I have some comments.— Stewart Brand, "Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools" (1968+)
STEWART BRAND AND ME
Kresge College campus where I first met Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, Judith Van Slooten and my wife
I first became aware of Stewart Brand's work in high school. I saw a blurb in
"Parade" (the Sunday newspaper supplement) about his "Whole Earth Catalog"
and asked for it for Christmas. I thing it was the Winter 1969 edition. I later acquired
"The Last Whole Earth Catalog" in 1971 and took it off to college. From these
resources I first learned about cybernetics, systems theory, and the work of Buckminster
"Bucky" Fuller, all featured in the first section, "Understanding Whole Sytems." There was
also a bunch of other great stuff; for example, "Teaching As a Subversive' Activity" (1971) by
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner.
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385290098/hip0bd )
I've described this in detail in other 'zines, especially the series on "Bateson and Me," parts
one,
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0310.html )
two
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0311.html )
and three.
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0401.html )
I made a few pilgrimages to the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park (near Kepler's Books)
and bought some of Brand's publication's and those he recommended, but I never saw him there.
In 1974 with the Whole Earth Epilog I learned about Gregory Bateson, who lived about 50 yards from me
at the time. I became his student at Kresge College and he sponsored me for a student-directed
seminar in 1975 called "Understanding Whole Systems." During this time Stewart Brand was
occasionally coming to Kresge to get ideas and writings from Bateson for his "CoEvolution
Quarterly" magazine. Like me, Brand buttered up Bateson's secretary, Judith Van Slooten, because
she was the gatekeeper most of the time. For my last class meeting I wanted to have Bateson and
Brand as guest speakers, and Judith made it happen. We had lunch together first (Bateson, Brand,
Judith, my girlfriend and college roommates, and me), and I think that was the first time I met
Stewart Brand.
except from my University of California at Santa Cruz transcript
I think the second and last time I saw him, after I left college and worked in the computer industry
for a few years, was after Bateson died in 1980, at the memorial service. (This is also described
in "Bateson and Me.")
From these interactions I sometimes wondered what Brand thought of me, teaching class based
on ideas in the first section of his Catalog, "Understanding Whole Sytems."
I ended up concluding that he likely saw me the same way as the protagonist Cox saw his disciple
Gary in the audio comedy album "Everything You Know Is Wrong" (1974) by the Firesign Theatre.
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00006BNDP/hip0bd )
Gary, the Seeker (far left)
In this transcript, an Art Bell-like character, "Happy" Harry Cox (middle left), is working with a
Uri Geller-like character, Nino "The Mindboggler" Savant (far right), playing back answer machine
messages searching for an alien contact.
Gary: [on answer machine] Mister Cox, this is the Seeker, the Truth-Speaker, you know, Gary. You were right all along but you know that, you know, we've proved it Look there's thirteen of us, you know what I mean -- Cox: Oh no, it's -- oh, Nino, I'm sorry, it's this kid. Nino: Hey, that's pretty strange. C: No it's just a kid, this kid is crazy, he calls me all the time. G: -- there's thirteen of us Seekers now and we're all coming out on the Heavenly Bus -- uh oh, Mom's listening, I gotta go. Speak Out, Seek Out! C: No, that's not it.Perhaps one day I'll get a chance to ask him. As the years rolled by I continued to track Brand, occasionally in magazine articles he wrote or was in, but mostly from books he wrote or contributed to:
- The New Games Book, 1976
- Whole Earth Software Catalog, 1984
- The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987
- How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, 1994
- The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999
- Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, 2009
- The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1980
- The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 1986
- The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, 1994 (edited by Howard Rheingold)
MOVIE REVIEW
"We Are As Gods" trailer card
The biopic was entertaining and informative. My wife and current roommates liked it. (For context:
she was there when I first met Stewart and has also followed his career; my roommates didn't know
much about him.)
I wish it had been more well-organized and comprehensive, and less focused on the recent
de-extinction stuff. I found myself enumerating in my mind all of the things they left out.
This criticism is what motivated me to write this essay.
TIMELINE
time scale diagram from "Clock of the Long Now"
Here is my list fo the career highlights of Stewart Brand. (Career as what? He once
suggested the term Peripheral Intelligence Agent. More recently he has said he likes to hack
civilization. I've suggested he was a "reality hacker" like Abbey Hoffman, Timothy Leary, the
Greenpeace founders, Andy Kaufman, Robert Anton Wilson, Steve Jobs and the Emperor Norton.)
I have listed the parts left out of the documentary in italic, and the parts included in gray.
I have used the Long Now Foundation's convention of five digit years, to avoid a Y10K problem.
- 01938 — born
- 01956? — attended Stanford University majored in biology; thesis advisor was "Population Bomb" author Paul Erlich
- 01960 — Army Wikipedia: "He was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing." He also sang the praises of Army training manuals and military architecture.
- 01965 — America Needs Indians Brand put together this traveling multimedia show arguing that Native Americans are important to our national consciousness
- 01967? — Alloy A number of young people in the western US especially were experimenting with alternative structures such as domes, inflatables, sail structures and variations. One commune that encouraged this (each new resident was required to build their own home) was Drop City, near Trinidad, Colorado, from 1965 to 1973. Inventor/architect Steve Baer was one of those involved. At some point a meet-up of like minded builders was held, called "Alloy." It was documented in "The Last Whole Earth Catalog" but mine is not at hand so I'm trusting hazy memory. I believe Brand was there and reported on it.
- 01965? — Pranksters/Kesey The movie does an adequate job of documenting Brand in Ken Kesey's "Further" bus of Merry Prankster, spreading Day-Glo, multimedia, and LSD (which was legal then) across America. I wish there'd been more on the meet-up between the Pranksters and another bus, the Hog Farm with Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney). He was the guy who said "There's always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area" over the public address system in the movie "Woodstock."
- 01966 — Trips Festival Brand's workmanlike job as the Audio/Visual guy at the trips festivals is covered. (As an A/V guy from grade school I can relate.)
- 019?? — Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?
one of Brand's buttons
The movie does document the origin and reach of Brand's campaign to get NASA to release a
photograph of the whole earth. When they did it was on the cover of LIFE Magazine and
seemed to trigger the ecology movement and founding of Earth Day.
- 01969 — Hunger Show
Brand and Gravy (and others) organized a bit of political theater they called
"The Hunger Show," aka "Life-Raft Earth." it was based on the ideas of Paul Erlich's
"Population Bomb" and Garrett Hardin's "Lifeboat Ethics," anticipating a future
of resource depletion and ecological "crash" resulting in widespread third world famines.
The believed there would be "those who starved, and those who watched." This educational
event was originally planned to be in a theater, where the people on stage would live without
food until they "died" (gave up and left), while the audience watched with snacks, free to come
and go. Later for logistical reasons it was moved to a mall parking lot surrounded by
inflatable tubes, which made it look like a life raft.
It is documented in the "Last Whole Earth Catalog," and also in a movie I haven't seen:
-
Life-Raft Earth
Running time 37 min. Director Robert Frank
Producer Stewart Brand, Wavy Gravy
Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand and his friend Hugh Romney
(Wavy Gravy) asked Robert Frank to document "The Hunger Show," a week-long
fast staged by the Portola Institute in California. This was a "happening"
designed to make the problem of world hunger and malnutrition a personal
matter for participants and observers. The film records the event, which
took place October 11-18, 1969, in a parking lot in Hayward, CA.
- 01968 — Whole Earth Catalog
Of course the movie covers the "Whole Earth Catalog," Brand's greatest claim to fame.
I do wish they'd gone into more detail about how he came to create it, as is told
in the Last Catalog:
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG got started in a plane over Nebraska in March 1968. I was returning to California from my father's long dying and funeral that morning in Illinois. The sun had set ahead of the plane while I read Spaceship Earth by Barbara Ward. Between chapters I gazed out the window into dark nothing and slid into a reverie about my friends who were starting their own civilization hither and yon in the sticks and how could I help. The L. L. Bean catalog of outdoor stuff came to mind and I pondered upon Mr. Bean's service to humanity over the years. So many of the problems I could identify came down to a matter of access. Where to buy a windmill. Where to get good information about bee-keeping. Where to lay hands on a computer without forfeiting freedom... Shortly I was fantasizing access service. A Truck Store, maybe, traveling around with information and samples of what was worth getting and information where to get it. A Catalog too, continuously updated, in part by the users. A Catalog that owed nothing to the suppliers and everything to the users. It would be something I could put some years into. Amid the fever I was in by this time, I remembered Fuller's admonition that you have about 10 minutes to act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland. I started writing on the end papers of Barbara Ward's book (never did finish reading it).
- Bucky Fuller
- Norbert Wiener
- "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications" (1968) Ludwig von Bertalanffy
- Howard Odum
- Steve Baer
- Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner (mentioned above)
- "Nomadic Furniture" (1973) by Victor Papanek and James Hennessy
- "Shelter" (1973) by Lloyd Kahn
- 01968 — Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog
Difficult But Possible Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog
Originally the WEC was published 4 times a year, and the much thinner "Difficult But Possible
Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog" was published eight times, with updates, mail, and some
occasional bizarre stuff. Some of it made it into the next quarterly WEC, some didn't.
I don't own any copies of the Supplements, and I've searched in vain on eBay for them for years
and years.
- 01968 — Mother of All Demos Doug Engelbart ran a research project at the Stanford Research Institute with the goal of producing Intelligence Augmentation (IA), which he thought was a better idea than Artificial Intelligence (AI). He invented the Graphical User Interface (GUI), windows, pointing, the physical mouse, and a whole new paradigm of human-computer interface. Xerox used for the failed Alto system, and Apple licensed it for the Lisa and Mac. Microsoft ripped it off for Windows. In 1968, Brand helped design and participated in Doug Engelbart's demonstration of "Augmented Human Intellect" at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It has been described as "the mother of all demoes," The video Brand shot is on YouTube. ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rKUf9DWRI )
- 01969? — Whole Earth Truck Store Although the Whole Earth Truck Store was originally envisioned as in a truck, visiting communes, Brand quickly realized he should let the Post Office run the trucks and just do mail order. But he did have a physical store you could shop in. Going to college in nearby Santa Cruz I visited a number of times, and found some good stuff. Wish I'd bought the back-issue Supplements, though.
- 01971 — Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog
"Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog"
cover by underground cartoonist R. Crumb
In one of my 'zines I described this as one of the greatest works of western literature.
See "Remembrance of Things Proust"
Part One
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0207.html )
and Part Two
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0208.html )
- 01971 — Last Whole Earth Catalog The movie covers the decision to end the WEC, but skimps on interesting details, many of which are in the Last WEC.
- 01971 — Demise Party I'm glad the movie includes this strange event, where he ruined a party by giving the crowd $20,000 of the profits from the Last WEC and told them to decide what to do with it. Again, more interesting details were omitted.
- 01972 — Point Foundation Brand established the POINT Foundation with some of the Last WEC profits, and they funded future WECs and other interesting stuff. Wish the movie had shown some of that.
- 01973 — New Games Foundation
In C3M November 2003
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0211.html )
I wrote:
New Games "If life doesn't offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one." -- Anthony J. D'Angelo, 1997 "The College Blue Book" Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, decided in the 1970s that we need some new games. When I taught a student- directed-seminar at U.C. Santa Cruz on "Understanding Whole Systems" and Brand was a guest speaker he told the story. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were having a gathering and asked Brand to arrange some entertainment. He reasoned that these soldiers-turned-pacifists needed some stress release, so invented a very violent but not harmful game he called "Slaughter." I don't remember the exact rules but it involved players on their knees trying to lift opponents off the ground or drag them out of bounds in order to "kill" them, while trying to score goals with multiple balls. It was a big hit. Later, Brand created a foundation to create, collect and teach new games. The results of their work is available in "The New Games Book" (1976) by the New Games Foundation, ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038512516X/hip-20 ) and its sequel, "More New Games! And Playful Ideas from the New Games Foundation" (1981). ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385175140/hip-20 )
Earth Ball in use
These efforts also brought us the game "Infinity Ball," played with a huge Earth Ball, inflated with
enough helium to make it nearly weightless. Everyone is on the same team, playing against themselves
in the past, trying to extend the longest volley without having the ball touch the ground.
Space War display
The movie does show Brand's involvement with the computer pioneers, and discovery of Space War
games in computer labs. He wrote an article for Harper's Magazine called "Fanatic Life and
Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" that was included in the two-essay book,
II Cybernetic Frontiers (1974).
Of course these experimental games were the leading edge of the wedge of arcade video games,
home video console games and computer games, which surpassed movies in revenue in the 1990s.
I finally tracked down something I've been looking for for a long time: Stewart Brand's proposal for a "Peripheral Intelligence Agency" (PIA). This was an essay that greatly influenced the course of my life. It turns out it's in his "Destination-Crisis Paper for the POINT Board of Directors Submitted December 3, 1971" which is reprinted on page 128 of "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips (1974). ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0931425417/hip-20 ) The POINT foundation was created to give away the profits from the "Last Whole Earth Catalog" (which became a New York Times best-seller), hopefully in a way that accomplishes good things.I then quoted the report:
Among the storied heroes I can't recall one who studied up and carefully selected his crisis. Yet most of our real-life heroes do precisely this. To blurt out the "agency" scheme early on here, I wonder if we can nurture a demanding tradition for the subtle heroes. Imagine, please, that POINT sets in motion a, hm, Peripheral Intelligence Agency (PIA), which employs Free Agents at, say, $10,000/year with a $5,000 working budget. The Agents are hired for their resourcefulness at doing maximum good with minimum expenditure. That's minimum expenditure not only of money but of external influence generally — of personal pain, of entangling obligations, of extraneous meddling, of all the baggage that commonly clutters and defers good-doing. The Agents select their own missions and carry them out their own way. Besides gainful employment and a modest budget, PIA offers only evaluation and information. Evaluation, through the full-time Board of Review in the form of comment and satirically pompous awards. Information, about potential missions, nuances of Agent technique, and whatever else proves useful. What Agents owe the PIA is: to do elegant good (not suave or polished good, but spare good, f***ing austere good), and to report on everything they attempt.Since reading this I have self-identified as a Peripheral Intelligence Agent.
WELL logo
In 1985 Brand collaborated with Larry Brilliant to create the Whole Earth 'Lectron Link (WELL)
computer conferencing system. I was an early adopter of the WELL in the early 1990s;
I'm not exactly sure when. (I had a "file apocalypse" around 1995 when I deleted all my files
by mistake except "hidden" ones. My oldest hidden file is from 7/21/1992.) I am still proud,
in a hipster kind of way, that I have a three letter email address at the WELL: abs@well.com.
I was an active participant in a number of conferences on the WELL, including:
- vr: virtual reality — many participants were vr practitioners or tech journalists who covered vr
- dead media: a topic started by sci author Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com) to explore obsolete media tech, such as semaphore towers ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore )
- eros: investigations into the erotic life of humans (I assume my posts are still there and so I can never run for office)
Media Lab cover with hologram
"...information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other."This book looked cool because it had a white-light hologram on the cover, the kind that began appearing on credit cards. Among techies Brand's next book created quite a buzz. He spent some time hanging out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at a research laboratory called the Media Lab. there professors and students worked on predicting the future of media, mostly digital, largely using funding from corporations. Often the final reports were delivered only to those corporations. But Brand looked at a lot of stuff, usually transitory demos of emerging technology, and wrote down what he saw for future generations to appreciate, along with incisive commentary. One of my faves was "Put That There," a hybrid voice/gesture input system that let you move virtual objects around on a screen. In this book Brand refined his quote from the First Hackers Conference, paring it down to:— Stewart Brand (1984) at the First Hackers Conference
Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.' In 1988 people still watched analog TV over antenna or cable. They read books and newspapers on paper. The watched first run movies in theaters. Personal computers included IBM PCs and clones running Microsoft operating systems: DOS or Windows 2. Windows 3.1, which many considered the first usable version, was four years in the future. The Apple Macintosh ("Mac") was four years old. For networking most people used acoustic modems over phone lines to dial into "bulletin board systems" or commercial conferencing systems like AOL and Prodigy. Supercomputer users had access to the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), a precursor of the internet that had grown out of the military's ARPANET, but the public was not yet allowed. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were a year in the future, as was the first World Wide Web (WWW) prototype. The economy was starting to boom, and investors and innovators were desperate to figure out what the "next big thing" would be. Theories included bigger and better dial-up services, set-top digital cable TV boxes, CD-ROMs, and Computer Generated (CG) special effects for movies. Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte created the following diagram:
Negroponte's circles describing the MIT Media Lab's construct of convergence
to show all the disparate industries that would be gobbled up and "converged" by the
coming media revolution. Many members of the media "establishment" were astonished by this
prediction, and later shocked by how quickly and disruptively it happened.
Brand has had a long friendship with record producer Brian Eno, who has worked with
the Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Coldplay, Laurie Anderson and Grace Jones, among others.
He has also recorded his own albums, including the wonderful "Taking Tiger Mountain by
Strategy" (1974),
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00015TOCY/hip0bd )
and a series of "ambient music" albums starting with "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" (1978).
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002PZVH0/hip0bd )
Reportedly he and Brand have had many long conversations about a multitude of topics,
including the cybernetics of Stafford Beer, and ideas that lead to the Clock of the Long Now.
"Personal destiny ... is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth." "Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now... The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.In addition to his collaborations with Brian Eno, Brand became friends with Danny Hillis, a former Imagineer for Disney who developed a massively parallel computer called the Connection Machine.— Thomas Pynchon (1973) "Gravity's Rainbow"
Connection Machine
Out of conversations with these friends and others the Long Now Foundation was formed,
with the goal of creating an increased consciousness of long time periods.
I recall the first article I ever read by Gregory Bateson, in a weird newspaper devoted to
the then-new (and expensive) camcorder technology called "Radical Software" v. 1 n. 3, 1971.
Bateson's article, "Restructuring the Ecology of a Great City" suggested a goal of lasting
ten thousand years for a civilization to be considered sustainable.
One of the ideas developed by the foundation (their most famous) is a giant solar-powered clock
in a cave in the desert that chimes a certain way once every ten thousand years.
The idea is described in the book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999
One thing they realized was that a big danger to the clock would be people finding it,
wondering how it worked, and dismantling it to find out. Therefore they designed it to have
its mechanisms visible and decipherable. Solar power keeps the clock running. Its logic is
done in a binary code using physical gears. Visitors must use a hand crank to give the clock
the energy to chime. Of course Brian Eno wrote the chimes music.
Several models have been built and one was on display for a while at the foundation's facility
at Fort Mason, San Francisco. But once the facility was closed for some weeks, and the next
time I was in the area the model had been moved (to London I think).
But the Clock is only one of the foundation's projects. In text chopped from WIkipedia:
Rosetta Project
The Rosetta Project is an effort to preserve all languages that have a high likelihood
of extinction over the period from 2000 to 2100.
Long Bet Project
The Long Bet Project was created by The Long Now Foundation to propose and keep track
of bets on long-term events and stimulate discussion about the future.
Seminars about long-term thinking
In November 2003, The Long Now Foundation began a series of monthly seminars about
long-term thinking (SALT) with a lecture by Brian Eno.
The Interval bar in Fort Mason, San Francisco
Opened in June 2014, The Interval was designed as social space in the foundation's Fort
Mason facility in San Francisco. The purpose of The Interval is to have a public space
where people can come together to discuss ideas and topics related to long-term thinking,
as well as provide a venue for a variety of Long Now events.
PanLex
PanLex is a linguistic project whose stated mission is to overcome language barriers to
human rights, information, and opportunities.
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish." on the back of the Last WEC
The movie mentions that Steve Jobs quoted Stewart Brand in a Stanford commencement address:
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish," which was written on the back of the Last WEC.
( www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog )
... it ends with a moving tribute to Brand and what he calls "an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog", which he describes as "one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. "Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: 'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.' It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you."
Good Old Stuff Sucks In the '90s I was praising the remarkable grassroots success of the building preservation movement. Keep the fabric and continuity of the old buildings and neighborhoods alive! Revive those sash windows. As a landlocked youth in Illinois I mooned over the yacht sales pictures in the back of sailboat books. I knew what I wanted — a gaff-rigged ketch! Wood, of course. The Christmas mail order catalog people know what my age group wants (I'm 69). We want to give a child wooden blocks, Monopoly or Clue, a Lionel train. We want to give ourselves a bomber jacket, a fancy leather belt, a fine cotton shirt. We study the Restoration Hardware catalog. My own Whole Earth Catalog, back when, pushed no end of retro stuff in a back-to-basics agenda. Well, I bought a sequence of wooden sailboats. Their gaff rigs couldn't sail to windward. Their leaky wood hulls and decks were a maintenance nightmare. I learned that the fiberglass hulls we'd all sneered at were superior in every way to wood. Remodeling an old farmhouse two years ago and replacing its sash windows, I discovered the current state of window technology. A standard Andersen window, factory-made exactly to the dimensions you want, has superb insulation qualities; superb hinges, crank, and lock; a flick-in, flick-out screen; and it looks great. The same goes for the new kinds of doors, kitchen cabinetry, and even furniture feet that are available — all drastically improved. The message finally got through. Good old stuff sucks. Sticking with the fine old whatevers is like wearing 100% cotton in the mountains; it's just stupid. Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers' market, preferably), this-year's laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs. The Precautionary Principle tells me I should worry about everything new because it might have hidden dangers. The handwringers should worry more about the old stuff. It's mostly crap. (New stuff is mostly crap too, of course. But the best new stuff is invariably better than the best old stuff.)( www.edge.org/response-detail/10825 ) I wondered if I read this if he was just trying to alienate the few old friends he had left. But I also had to admire his honesty, and his willingness to change his mind in the face of new evidence.
woolly mammoth (Wikipedia)
"Under a spreading chestnut-tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands, And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong as iron bands.""Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree."— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Village Blacksmith" (1842)
- — George Orwell, "1984" (1948)
LINKS
- Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (book, 2022) by John Markoff ( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735223947/hip0bd )
- Bio... STEWART BRAND (web page 02013) Long Now Foundation ( sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Bio.html )
- Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world (interview, 2013) by Carole Cadwalladr ( www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/05/stewart-brand-whole-earth-catalog )
- 'We Are as Gods and Might as Well Get Good at It' Commemorating the Whole Earth Catalog 50 years later (article, 2018) by Nick Gillespie ( https://reason.com/2018/11/04/we-are-as-gods-and-might-as-we/ )
- (Sub)Culture — The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth — A counterculture catalog's demise (article, 1971) by Thomas Albright, Charles Perry ( https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-last-twelve-hours-of-the-whole-earth-119822/ )
- A Brief Biographical Chronology of Gregory Bateson, from "Upside-Down Gods" (book, 2016) by Peter Harries-Jones ( www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780823270378-001/html?lang=en )
Playing With Geodesic Polyhedra
models by the author
( people.well.com/user/abs/swdev/w3d/geodesics.html )
WHAT IS A GEODESIC POLYHEDRON?
"Geodesic polyhedra are constructed by subdividing faces of simpler polyhedra, and then projecting the new vertices onto the surface of a sphere."( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron )— Wikipedia
some results from a Google Image search for "polyhedra"
Polyhedron (plural polyhedra) is Greek for "many faces." Polygon is Greek
for "many sides." A polyhedron is a 3D space-enclosing shape made of polygons. For example,
a cube (or hexahedron = "six faces") is a polyhedron made from six square shaped
(four sided) polygons.
A regular polygon has identical angles between the sides, and identical side lengths. If you
combine a bunch of regular polygons of a single type into a polyhedron with identical corners, you
get a regular polyhedron, of which their are five — the famous Platonic Solids. Anyone
familiar with Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) will recognize the D-4, -D-6, D-8, D-12 and D-20 dice.
(More on them later.)
Platonic Solids
The word geodesic comes through English and Latin from Greek roots meaning "dividing
the Earth." It has the same roots as Gaia, the Earth Goddess. Originally it referred to arcs of
"great circles" on a globe. In this context it refers to the shortest route between two points
that follows the curvature of the globe.
geodesic segment (solid red), part
of a great circle (dashed red) on a sphere
You can see these shapes by stretching a string between two points of a globe of the Earth.
Because most of the map projections we use distort the shapes of our Earth's spherical features,
a geodesic "straight line" (shortest route) between London and Los Angeles usually looks curved
on maps.
Los Angeles to London great circle air route from ResearchGate
( www.researchgate.net/figure/The-great-circle-between-
Los-Angeles-California-and-London-England-The-great-circle
_fig3_318473903 )
When you combine these words you get the phrase geodesic polyhedron, which has come to mean
a special family of polyhedra formed by starting with simpler ones and adding triangles and then
moving the points a little outward to lie on a sphere (explained soon).
I think originally it meant shapes which had the added step of bending all the edges to be
geodesics on the sphere enclosing the shape. Technically at that point it's not a polyhedron any
more since the edges aren't straight line segments. Now we call them spherical polyhedra.
a spherical polyhedron made from
an icosahedron, having geodesic edges
from Wikipedia
In the modern vernacular a geodesic polyhedron has edges made of straight line segments.
The projections of these edges onto the enclosing sphere (their shadows, if you will, cast
by a light at the center) are the actual geodesics.
some results from a Google Image search for "geodesic polyhedron"
You're seen them before, in the designs of playground climbing domes, military radar domes,
hippie homes, exposition halls, and science fiction movie backgrounds.
playground dome
MORE BUCKY LATER
These structures are, of course, based on the works of R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (1895 - 1983). ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller ) I've been meaning to write a whole introduction to Fuller's geometries, so I'm just going to focus narrowly on the geodesics here. Look for the bigger ideas piece soon.
R. Fuller's octet truss diagram
(from a tattoo design on Pinterest)
GEODESICS IN THE NEWS
Buckminster Fuller on the coverof Time Magazine, Jan. 10, 1964. I think the first time I became vaguely aware of Fuller and his domes was in middle school in the mid-1960s when I saw his 1964 Time Magazine cover on a classroom room wall. I had no idea what I was looking at. The next exposure was through the "Whole Earth Catalog in high school in the late '60s. There were articles on Bucky and domes, and a listing for a book, large format like the catalog itself, called "Domebook 2."
page from Domebook 2
By my freshman year of college I had my own copy and was studying it intently.
(While researching this article I found that Domebook 2 is on-line as a PDF.
Re-reading it has been blowing my mind, especially the community dynamics
stuff at Pacific High School.)
( www.scribd.com/document/215395077/DomeBook-2-pdf )
Meanwhile, a sort of World's Fair in Montreal, Canada called "Expo '67" featured a USA pavilion
which was a 250 foot diameter three-quarters geodesic dome designed by Bucky Fuller.
geodesic dome at EXPO '67
In 1975 the National Science Foundation (U.S.) and the U.S. Naval Support Force Antarctica built a
164 foot wide geodesic dome directly over the over the south pole of the Earth's rotational axis, at
the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The dome design was chosen because of the extreme strength
needed for the structure.
In February of 1988 I went to a conference in San Diego put on by the U.S. Navy concerning
Computer Aided Design (CAD). One of the talks was about the South Pole Dome. The speaker
was a structural engineer, hired to analyze the strength of the dome. Because the ice sheet is over
a mile thick there, the dome was anchored by long stakes in the ice. The ice was slowly moving,
stressing the dome. There was also severe snow and wind loads. The engineer used commercial
software which worked by taking a Finite Element Mesh (FEM) of the structure and stressing it until
a simulated strut began to buckle. That never happened; instead the software broke. It gave an
error that said it was operating outside of its valid parameters. The engineer was unable to
determine how much stress the dome could endure, but it was clearly a lot.
I think I still have the conference proceedings somewhere, but other than that I'm unaware of this
information ever being published.
geodesic dome over the South Pole
( www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/livingsouthpole/station75.jsp )
In 1982 EPCOT Center opened at Walt Disney World in Florida, with its iconic landmark (what
Walt Disney called the "big weenie") being a 160 foot diameter geodesic dome called Spaceship Earth,
also designed by Bucky Fuller.
I've joked that it is likely that if it got loose from its base and rolled away, the contents (a
dark ride) would be trashed but the dome just might survive.
Spaceship Earth geodesic dome at EPCOT
In 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake was a 6.9 trembler with its epicenter in the Santa Cruz Mountains
in Northern California. Many people remember the live televison coverage during a Wolrd Series game
at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, and the city did have bridge and building collapses, but the
destructive center was away from the television cameras, about 80 miles South/Southeast in the forest
of the Nicene Marks. (This state park full of giant coastal redwoods is most famous for being the
filming location of the forest moon of Endor in the 1983 Star Wars movie "Return of the Jedi.")
I read an account in "Dome" magazine of a rural street of houses in the forest very near the
epicenter. All of them were traditional wood frame box-shaped houses except for one custom dome.
All of the houses collapsed except for the dome, and the neighborhood all moved in to the dome
temporarily as recovery efforts began.
I never saw this published anywhere else. Shouldn't the banks and insurance companies, which share
risk of property loss, care about this kind of thing?
And that reminds me, stories abound of metal-strut domes being demolished and having them turn out
to be practically impervious to wrecking balls, which just bounce off. Typically if they're welded
together they must be cut apart with blow torches.
A 40 YEAR OLD CHALLENGE
Fuller's Dymaxion map based on an unfolded icosahedron
In 1983 I was working for a company making a 3D graphics system called the Poly 2000.
The original product cost about $100K and could display 2000 polygons at 30 frames per second.
They were flat shaded, had no texture, and no shading flexibility, but it was a usable system.
We were working with space shuttle animations and wanted to have an Earth model. I recalled
Bucky's "Dymaxion Map" (above) and decided to use it to create the model.
I blew up the map on a copier and created a triangular grid over each face of the icosahedron.
Then I just recorded whether each region was mostly land (brown) or water (blue). But I
still needed the X, Y and Z values for each point in the model, which was a geodesic icosahedron.
I didn't know how to figure them out. Another programmer generated the coordinates for me.
The Earth model turned out nice. The company included it with the software for the system.
Though chunky, it looked pretty good when it was small, and a number of our customers used it.
Earth model on POLY 2000, early 1980s
Earth model on POLY 2000, early 1980s
But it always bothered me that I couldn't figure out the coordinate values.
MARSHMALLOW MODELS
marshmallow and toothpick models of the tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron
excerpt from Pacific High School section of "Domebook 2" (op. cit.)
To make a geodesic polyhedron you must start with a polyhedron that I call "the seed." The
most obvious ones to use are the Platonic Solids.
Platonic Solids illustration
I have found that the best way to deeply understand these shapes is create physical models of them
using toothpicks and marshmallows. I'm reminded of a story Bucky liked to tell about when he
first went to school, and they hadn't figured out how badly he needed glasses yet. The children
were given toothpicks and dried beans to make models, and most of them built cubes like the buildings
they had seen, which turned out wobbly without triangular struts. But Bucky only saw blurs so he
proceeded by feel, and built his first model tetrahedron (Greek for "four faces") because it felt solid.
If you start out systematically, working on the types of faces and corners possible, you begin with
triangular faces, combined into a corner. If there is only one triangle per corner you've built a
triangle (3 marshmallows and 3 toothpicks) and are done, but this is not a 3D polyhedron, it's a 2D
polygon. Even if you allow 2 triangles per corner, you just double up on the toothpicks (3
marshmallows and 6 toothpicks) and you still have essentially a 2D polygon. But when you allow
three triangles per corner, suddenly you are building a tetrahedron (4 marshmallows and 6 toothpicks),
also called the triangular based pyramid. It's a fascinating feeling, because it almost seems to
build itself, and you can feel how stable it is when the last toothpick snaps into place.
Next you put four triangles around each corner and build the octahedron (6 marshmallows and 12
toothpicks), Greek for "eight faces," which I sometimes call a "pyramid on a mirror."
When you put five triangles around each corner you build the icosahedron (12 marshmallows and 30
toothpicks), Greek for "twenty faces." This one is a little trickier, but very satisfying when
you get it right.
If you try to put six triangles around a corner you get a triangular array with a hexagon pattern,
kind of like the honeycombs of bees, and it's a flat, planar surface that won't curve into a
polyhedron. So that's the end of that.
Next we start with the four-sided regular polygon, the square. We can dispense with the idea
of having 1 or 2 squares meet at each corner, as argued above for triangles, and go to 3 squares
around each corner. This results in building a cube (8 marshmallows and 12 toothpicks).
(Cube not shown in marshmallow models above.)
If there's someone you want to annoy, give them this task. Because there are no triangles,
the structure isn't stable, and wiggly-wobblies all over the place. Triangular braces would
be required to stiffen it up.
This exercise helps us understand why our buildings are so prone to collapse. A cube or other
rectilinear "box" shape will always need triangles to brace it. The way we build wood frame
buildings in my state there are vertical 2x4s every 16 inches that provide support for roof
beams that are larger. But the walls are usually braced with 1x6s and only along one diagonal.
When thee braces fail a building will "rack," turning into a parallelogram.
partially collapsed building "racking," from "Washington County Heritage Online"
( heritage.lib.pacificu.edu/s/wcho/item/35923 )
it's even more annoying to build the dodecahedron (20 marshmallows and 30 toothpicks), Greek for
"twelve faces." It has three pentagons at every corner, which is the only way to put pentagons
around a corner. Since the internal angles of a regular pentagon are 108 degrees, four of them
would come to 432 degrees, which is more than 360 degrees, a full circle, so they can't fit
together in a plane, let alone in a corner. But even though this shape is inevitable, it is
tough to build because the pentagons are even more wiggly-wobbly than squares, and the thing
doesn't give you any support while you're working on it. Triangulating the faces takes 12 more
marshmallows and 60 more toothpicks, so it's no fun either. (Dodecahedron not shown in marshmallow
models above.)
I have found that this exercise, building the marshsmallow models, can be enjoyed by people of
all ages with no prior knowledge of 3D geometry. Children love it. You can also build other shapes
including octet trusses.
( www.grunch.net/synergetics/octet.html )
I have had especially positive results when I worked with engineers doing 3D computer graphics
(hardware and software) who had spouses, significant others or just friends who seemed puzzled by
their work. Having them build these models seemed to be enjoyable and illuminating.
HOW TO MAKE A GEODESIC POLYHEDRON
"An icosahedron and related symmetry polyhedra can be used to define a high geodesic polyhedron by dividing triangular faces into smaller triangles, and projecting all the new vertices onto a sphere. Higher order polygonal faces can be divided into triangles by adding new vertices centered on each face. The new faces on the sphere are not equilateral triangles, but they are approximately equal edge length."— Wikipedia article on Geodesic polyhedron
| Start with a polyhedron (e.g. a cube and dodecahedron shown). | Triangulate all polygons having more than 3 sides by adding a central point (if needed). |
Pick a frequency f > 1 (here 2). Divide each edge into f segments by adding points; add interior points as needed. Turn each original triangle into a mesh of f2 triangles. |
"Puff" the shape out to a set of points on a unit sphere, by moving each point towards or away from the origin until its distance from the origin is one. |
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EXAMPLES (IN PROGRESS)
interactive octahedral geodesic polyhedra by the author
Spoiler alert: I figured out how to create the coordinates for geodesic structures in late spring.
More below. But first, let's look at the pretty pictures!
I've produced a bunch of interactive models of geodesic polyhedra which you can play with using any
modern browser.
( people.well.com/user/abs/swdev/w3d/geodesics.html )
They are a work in progress. I've also been experimenting with using sliders to change some of the
model parameters.
( people.well.com/user/abs/swdev/w3d/experiment.html )
GEEKING OUT HERE
building a truncated icosahedron
"The only secret of magic is that I'm willing to work harder on it than you think it's worth."— Penn Jilette
-
facet
4
0.57735 0.57735 0.57735
0.57735 -0.57735 -0.57735
-0.57735 0.57735 -0.57735
-0.57735 -0.57735 0.57735
3
1 2 3
3
1 4 2
3
1 3 4
3
3 2 4
tetrahedron
(The format is thus: line one is a keyword, facet or smooth. Line two is the number of
coordinate points, in this case 4. The next four lines then are the X, Y and Z values of the 4
coordinates. The remaining line pairs describe polygon connectivity, the number of sides —
always 3— and then the three point numbers that form the triangle. Points are numbered
starting with 1, and listed in clockwise order seen from the front.)
Take this file and tesselate each triangle with sub-triangles, such as when the frequency
is 2, 2^2 = 4 triangles. Then "puff" the points out to lie on a sphere. The result would be:
-
facet
10
0.577350 0.577350 0.577350
0.577350 -0.577350 -0.577350
-0.577350 0.577350 -0.577350
-0.577350 -0.577350 0.577350
0.000000 1.000000 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 -1.000000
1.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 -1.000000 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 1.000000
-1.000000 0.000000 0.000000
3
1 7 5
3
7 6 5
3
7 2 6
3
5 6 3
3
1 9 7
3
9 8 7
3
9 4 8
3
7 8 2
3
1 5 9
3
5 10 9
3
5 3 10
3
9 10 4
3
3 6 10
3
6 8 10
3
6 2 8
3
10 8 4
2-frequency geodesic tetrahedron
The way I tried to figure this out was to do it manually, and then "watch over my own shoulder" and
see what I was doing. I do this a lot when I program. But I was stymied even by doing it manually.
I'd start out saying, okay, I have 4 points already I need a point halfway between points 1 and 2.
Let's call it point 5. I'm going to use point 5 in six new triangles I create, so I need to remember
to re-use it, and not create it again. I already realized I knew how to do this in my brain, but
not in a program. Well, I thought, I can just create new points every time I need one and then
combine them later. But that seemed really complicated. Also, I was going to calculate the points
by interpolating, and there might be different rounding errors depending on how I did it, so all the
decimal places might not match. Thus would make detecting duplicates tricky. I would need some
"slop" to allow close points to be considered equivalent. But how far was "close" anyway? There
was no general answer. I was stumped.
Forty years passed. I found out that my friend Wayne Holder was doing some exploratory graphics
for a video game and wanted use geodesics to display planets, and so he had to solve a very
similar problem. I was motivated to look at the problem again. I still felt stumped.
But then the light bulb came on!
Gyro Gearloose the goose inventor's Little Helper
I was actually in the shower when I realized that the way I think about point 5 is that it's 1/2
of the way from point 1 to point 2. I should have that be its "name" in the code. The four whole
numbers {start,end,numerator,denominator} = {1,2,1,2} can refer to point 5. If I store them as
integers they will be exact and there won't be any need for "slop." If I already have the
coordinates for 1 and 2 I can compute 5's by taking the fraction 1/2 as my interpolation factor.
I coded in C for reasons, and created a function called "attemptToCreateVertex" to do the magic.
I created a data structure to hold the data for one vertex, seen below. (Side note: after decades
of C coding I think this is the first time I ever created a "struct" data structure.)
-
struct Vertex {
int min_vertex;
int max_vertex;
int numerator;
int denominator;
double coordinates[3];
int elder_flag;
};
-
/*
* attemptToCreateVertex() - attempt to create a vertex structure
*/
int
attemptToCreateVertex(v_array, e_flag, min_v, max_v, nu, de, x, y, z, p_created_flag)
struct Vertex v_array[MAX_VERTS];
int e_flag; /* "elder point" flag */
int min_v; /* minimum (starting) vertex */
int max_v; /* maximum (ending) vertex */
int nu; /* numerator */
int de; /* denominator */
double x; /* X coordinate */
double y; /* Y coordinate */
double z; /* Z coordinate */
int* p_created_flag; /* pointer to "created" flag */
{
int result;
int findVertex();
if (min_v < 0 || max_v < 0) {
fprintf(stderr, "%s: ERROR: attemptToCreateVertex() called with negative vertex number\n",
ProgName);
exit(0);
}
if (min_v > max_v) {
* * * * * *
-
/*------------------------------------
* 0,0
|\
*-* 0,1 1,1
|\|\
*-*-* 0,2 1,2 2,2
|\|\|\
*-*-*-* 0,3 1,3 2,3 3,3
|\|\|\|\
*-*-*-*-* 0,4 1,4 2,4 3,4 4,4
|\|\|\|\|\
*-*-*-*-*-* 0,5 1,5 2,5 3,5 4,5 5,5
------------------------------------*/
points in the icosahedron "cap" (sketch by author)
It's actually a pentagonal pyramid, but of unknown height. This put the five points of the base on
a unit circle around the origin. Then I realized I needed to use trigonometry to get their values.
But this is the only trig I needed. I drew another view, looking up from below with the Y axis
going into the page, X to the right and Z up. I knew each identical triangle was 1/5 of a 360
degree circle, or 72 degrees. (2*Pi/5 radians, if you care.) Remembering my old mnemonic, "synopsis,"
I confirmed that if you have angle in a right triangle with unit hypotenuse (long side), the sine
is the length of the opposite side. sin-opposite sounds like "synopsis." Therefore cosine is the
adjacent side. This gave me the coordinates of the first two points in the base, which was all I
needed at this phase. Listing out my knowledge thus far, I realized that y0 was what I needed to
solve for.
-
point p0
x0 = 0
y0 = ?
z0 = 0
point p1
x1 = 1
y1 = 0
z1 = 0
point p2
x2 = cos(72d) = 0.309 (phi/2) !!!
y2 = 0
z2 = sin(72d) = 0.951
-
distance p0 to p1 = sqrt((x1-x0)^2 + (y1-y0)^2 + (z1-z0)^2)
= sqrt((1-0)^2 + (0-y0)^2 + (0-0)^2)
= sqrt(1 + y0^2)
distance p1 to p2 = sqrt((x2-x1)^2 + (y2-y1)^2 + (z2-z1)^2)
= sqrt((0.309-1)^2 + (0-0)^2 + (0.951-0)^2)
= sqrt(0.691^2 + 0.951^2)
= sqrt(0.4775 + 0.9044)
= sqrt(1.3819)
sqrt(1 + y0^2) = sqrt(1.3819)
1 + y0^2 = 1.3819
y0^2 = 0.3819
y0 = 0.6180
-
new origin
xn = 0
yn = ?
zn = 0
distance n to p0 = sqrt((x0 - xn)^2 + (y0 - yn)^2 + (z0 - zn)^2)
= sqrt((0-0)^2 + (0.6180 - yn)^2 + (0-0)^2)
= sqrt((0.6180 - yn)^2))
distance n to p1 = sqrt((x1 - xn)^2 + (y1 - yn)^2 + (z1 - zn)^2)
= sqrt((1-0)^2 + (0-yn)^2 + (0-0)^2)
= sqrt(1 + yn^2)
distance n to p2 = sqrt((x2 - xn)^2 + (y2 - yn)^2 + (z2 - zn)^2)
= sqrt((0.309-0)^2 + (0-yn)^2 + (0.951-0)^2)
= sqrt(0.0955 + yn^2 + 0.9044)
sqrt((0.6180 - yn)^2)) =sqrt(1 + yn^2)
(0.6180 - yn)^2 = 1 + yn^2
0.6180^2 -2*0.6180*yn + yn^2 = 1 + yn^2
0.3819 - 1.2360*yn = 1
-1.2360*yn = 1-0.3819 = 0.6181
yn = -0.6181/1.2360
yn = -0.5
shifted new origin
sxn = 0
syn = 0
szn = 0
shifted points
sx0 = 0
sy0 = 1.1180
sz0 = 0
sx1 = 1
sy1 = 0.5
sz1 = 0
sx2 = 0.309
sy2 = 0.5
sz2 = 0.951
-
normalized (r = 1) points
rx0 = 0
ry0 = 1.1180/1.1180 = 1
rz0 = 0
rx1 = 1/1.1180 = 0.894454
ry1 = 0.5/1.1180 = 0.4447227
rz1 = 0
rx2 = 0.309/1.1180 = 0.276386
ry2 = 0.5/1.1180 = 0.4447227
rz2 = 0.951/1.1180 = 0.850626
LESSONS LEARNED
a beautiful bug
"I have learned more from my mistakes than my successes."— Humphry Davy
- verbal description
You may recall that I said above:
"...a cube (or hexahedron = "six faces") is a polyhedron made from six square shaped (four sided) polygons."
- black and white line drawings on paper or screen The illustrations in most geometry books suffer from making it hard to tell near from far.
- shaded color illustrations on paper or screen Shading and color coding can help.
- video of a physical model or 3D computer animation
A video sequence of a 3D solid moving (usually rotating around the Y axis) helps provide the
parallax needed to tell near from far.
an animated dodecahedron
- 3D interaction The interactive Web3D apps that I've linked to above provide one of the best ways to learn about theses shapes, in my humble opinion. They have the advantage of being universally deployable and too cheap to meter. (When I first was playing with models like these, it took several hundred thousand dollars worth of hardware.)
- climbing around As a youngster I climbed around on a few geodesic playground equipment, and learned a lot. That's when I noticed that an icosahedron-based dome has two different kinds of hubs, having five struts and six struts.
- building physical models Building marshmallow models as shown above, or models from kits, or assembling patterns printed on paper (stiff paper is best) gives you an intimate knowledge of these shapes.
- building the apps Honestly, I can't imagine anything as educational as the process I went through to build these apps. I wish I could share the experience with everyone. It's sort of like when a mechanic does a tear-down and rebuild of an engine. I end up knowing them inside out. (This also helps explain why virtually no one is as excited about them as I am. The exceptions are the few people I know who have done similar programming.)
FUTURE WORK
I find that building the 3D models of the seed polyhedra is kind of fun, in a soothing sort of way, maybe like knitting. I'd like to do some more Archimedean solids and some other shapes of interest.
"A Fuller Explanation" (1987) by Amy C. Edmondson
The book "A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller" (1987) by
Amy C. Edmondson is an extremely lucid and understandable guide to the geometry of Buckminster Fuller.
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B010WFKD7C/hip0bd )
It has some very evocative illustrations, but they suffer from being in black and white on a flat,
static page.
sphere packing (not from "A Fuller Explanation" but similar)
( www.researchgate.net/figure/Two-forms-of-building-the-cubic-closest-packing-of-spheres-and-the-elementary-cube_fig1_255744800 )
I've mentioned before that I would love to turn them intro 3D interactive apps.
Steve Baer and others developed a similar polyhedral building system to geodesics, called the
Zome System. I am baffled by it but I would like to learn more and use visualizations to boost my
understanding. My friend Will Ackel did something similar when he used ray tracing to produce
illustrations for a zome-based model kit and toy called "Zometool."
Zometool manual illustration by Will Ackel
( www.zometool.com/ )
I find myself wondering about the significance of Phi, the Golden Ratio, popping up in the
icosahedron coordinates. Is there a hidden Golden Rectangle in there? Did I use to know this
and forget? Is it in "Donald in Mathmagic Land" (cartoon, 1959)?
( www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BqnN72OlqA )
Donald Duck with a golden rectangle
When I worked at Rockwell International in Downey in the mid-1980s, I got involved with a
group promoting a space station design based on the octet truss and similar shapes that
Bucky worked with. Rockwell engineer Oliver "Ollie" Harwood designed what he called the "Protean
space station" because of its flexibility. I produced some video of 3D computer graphics
illustrating some of the concepts. I'd love to do Web3D versions. I also wrote about this
in previous issues of C3M:
Goof Gas ~ or ~ Holding the Dream Hostage (Part One) v. 3 n. 6 July 2004
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0306.html )
Goof Gas ~ or ~ Holding the Dream Hostage (Part Two) v. 3 n. 7 August 2004
( people.well.com/user/abs/Cyb/archive/c3m_0307.html )
Protean space station (sketch by the author)
In grade school in La Mesa, CA we used to occasionally have assemblies where we were entertained by
a magic show by a man who used the stage name "Flash Gordon." I later found out he was L. Gordon
Plummer, a friend of the family of some folks I met in high school. He was a Theosophist,
and authored a book on the relationship between polyhedra and consciousness, along with other mystical
topics, called "The Mathematics of the Cosmic Mind: A Study in Mathematical Symbolism"
( www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0835600300/hip0bd )
I acquired a copy a while back. It has marvelous illustrations. I'm not sure the mystical stuff
makes sense, but I'd love to model the shapes.
Mathematics of the Cosmic Mind illustration
I've read that some scientists and philosphers, including Kepler and Newton, also believed in a
relationship between polyhedra and conscousness, along with other mystical topics. I'd also love
to model their mental imaginings.
evocative image from an abandoned blog
Note Re:
"If It's Just a Virtual Actor, Then Why Am I Feeling Real Emotions?"
