Happy birthday, R. Buckminster Fuller!

Today is the 115th anniversary of the birth of the great American, R. Buckminster Fuller. Happy birthday to an inspirational and charming man.

Reading List: Counterculture Green by Andrew Kirk

The book is Andrew Kirk's Counterculture Green - The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Stewart Brand is the central personality in this exploration of politics and culture of the late 60s and forward. Brand has just published his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

I love it when a book makes connections between patches of understanding or familiarity that I already have. It's like getting to know and enjoy one neighborhood, and the same with another neighborhood, and then finding out that they are just a couple of blocks from each other.

For example: Further and Bucky Fuller, two favorite subjects. How favored? Well, I named my last electric three-wheeler microfurthur after Kesey's bus. It, too, is hand-painted (by my daughter and my wife), and I hope that it has even a little bit of the spirit of engagement, surprise and optimism as the original. And The Grateful Dead traveled on Further. And Neal Cassady was often the driver... "there was Cowboy Neal at the wheel/on the bus to never-never-land." And so forth. The bus is a literal and figurative vehicle for enlightening experience. (Note that I am not making an endorsement for drug use. Indeed, Kirk highlights, in many places in the book, the difference between people like Brand, for whom psychoactive substances were an occasionally-employed means to an end, and many other hangers-on to the counter-culture ride, for whom the drugs, and more general hedonism, were ends in themselves.)

And then, Fuller. Fuller! I went to Reno in the 90s expressly and only to visit the last surviving Dymaxion car at the National Auto Museum. I spent a few hours with the guy who prepped it for display; we went over it inch by inch. (It's being restored in the UK at the time of this writing. More to look forward to!) I built a 20' frequency-three geodesic with my students. I built a rear-wheel steering, front-wheel-drive vehicle of my own. I have a sheet of Fuller stamps. I don't know how many books, articles... you get the picture.

Anyway, I am fond of saying, alternately, "It always comes back to Fuller!" or "It always comes back to Furthur!" ("Furthur," with a second "u," is the name the bus got in a smirking re-christening to disguise its identity on a trip to Mexico.)

And here come Fuller and Further: In the early pages of the book, there's a grainy black-and-white photo of Stewart Brand, in a Knievel-y, Elvis-y white jump suit, hanging off the side of Further in San Francisco with Kesey and a few other influential characters of the epoch, around the time that Brand was devoting the first section of the Whole Earth Catalog to Fuller because, for Brand, Fuller had his head fully around the systems approach that was the key to... it all. In the broadest sense. Brand writes, at the start of the "Understanding Whole Systems" section, simply: "The insights of Fuller initiated this catalog."

I was not yet politically aware in the 60s and early 70s, and my understanding of the era was a sparse, lumpy aggregate of facts, but also of feelings, having been a kid back then. This book filled in many of the gaps in the matrix. For example, looking backward from the current polarization in national politics: My gosh, Grateful Dead lyricist and EFF founder John Perry Barlow palling around with Dick Cheney on his ranch! The confluences, the contradictions, and the divergence of hippies and Hawks, the Libertarian ethos of the time, the western identity, and Reagan in a cowboy hat... they make so much more sense! (And, alas, wouldn't it be great to reunite at least some of the electorate by not only appealing to American self-reliance and independence, but also legislating according to trust in American self-reliance and independence!)

I remember seeing the Whole Earth Catalog around at parents' friends' houses... it was concise shorthand for declaring your Yankee-ness and hipness all at once. Kirk summarizes the resourcefulness, thrift, stoicism and pragmatism that pervade its pages as characteristic of the settlers of the American West. Ok. But, to be sure, it is also the very core of the Yankee ethic.

I am fond of thinking that these characteristics describe me, and that's part of another reason I liked this book. Just as I felt when I got to know Buckminster Fuller, I felt connected to not a just a person or a couple of people, but to a community and to a history of like-minded people, however geographically sparse, however diluted in the present. (Living in a tidy suburb as I do, I'm not near such people. For instance, I am unusual, if not unique, in this town, keeping a treasure trove of reusable manufactured goods at hand. I hide it all behind a squared and leveled fence.)

Next I'm off to learn a little more about J. Baldwin who is a Whole Earth Catalog contributor, editor, Soft-Tech proponent, "baling-wire hippie," and friend of Brand's, and who is a Fuller disciple and collaborator, prominently featured in the Fuller documentary, "Thinking Out Loud." I bet he rode on The Bus. (It always comes back to Fuller and Further.)

For me, this book hits just right thematically and seasonally: Hints of spring and a good book are influencing a nice trajectory right about now. I will try to have my electric amphibian in the water this summer, complete with its pontoons-with-empty-soda-bottles-cast-within (an homage, and practical thank-you, to the dome of the Pantheon - there are empty amphorae embedded in there! It, also, always comes back to Rome... more on that another time). Built with recycled parts, old and reliable technology, in my basement, with my own tools... all I have to write is a worthy how-to pamphlet and maybe I will be featured in the the next edition of the Catalog.

When vaporware becomes real.

There is a thrill and a buzz I get when the CGI video of some really cool idea is supplanted by a real video of the idea realized. And that feeling is especially strong when the idea had the combination of extremity and coolth. (Yeah, "coolth." I typed that.)

A recent example is kite-assisted ship propulsion. I remember the first time I saw it... I don't know if it was on the cover of Popular Mechanics, but that's how I picture it. An "artist's rendition" in the style familiar all the way back to proposals for flying cars. The vision was appealing: One of the oldest transportation ideas (using the wind to move heavy loads on water) updated to meet economic challenges (increasing fuel costs) and environmental challenges (Global Warming -- although, to be sure, a shipping magnate wouldn't have to care about, or even believe in, anthropogenic climate change to be motivated toward this idea). The update includes technological leverage: computer control and flying the "sail" up to 300m above the water, where the winds are steadier and stronger than the captains of the Age of Sail ever knew. But it seemed fatuous, and I thought that, like flying cars, it would remain in sci-fi-styled book-cover art only.

But here's my buzz: Reuters has a report on the launch of a proof-of-concept freighter flying a robotically-deployed, computer-controlled, high-flying, propulsion-assisting kite. I'm savoring the thrill.

Cooperating with the Trade Winds (consider the etymology) rather than fighting hull drag with combustion... an idea with a lot of coolth. Bucky Fuller would be all over this.

Human ingenuity - THE resource

Pearl Harbor Day, 2007.

Here's the quickest of entries just to retain a path to a piece of video from Discovery Channel Canada's 2003 piece about an American in the Midwest who, in his retirement, has been moving massive pieces around with only muscle, wood, and rope... and, as he put it, his "favorite tool," gravity. As he builds a version of Stonehenge in his own back yard, he makes it look more like quotidian labor and less like a miracle.

And, he makes me want to shove some stuff around, too.

People with purpose produce surprising and wonderful results, again and again.

What if you captured some of that exercising energy?

My brother, a cool guy and a road cyclist by avocation, sent me an email yesterday:

Ok, here's an idea. I want to get a trainer bike for the basement. Can you devise a way of taking my effort and storing the energy in a battery so I can reduce some of my household elec consumption off the grid. I see a future - kind of like Tina Turner running Bordertown in Return To Thunderdome on sheep s**t or whaterver.

Always thinkin,
yer brudda.

I had thought about things like this a little myself. I wrote back:

Yes, I can, Tina!

I'm working on one for myself. Despite that human effort isn't much next to the grid. But wait...

The good news is that in winter time, it's a done thing. EVERY CALORIE EXPENDED cycling indoors goes to heating your house. No kidding, no exaggeration. Even if you're not using your mechanical output as stored or delivered electrical energy, it, and your metabolic energy expenditure, are reducing heating demand in your house; you need to burn less gas in the furnace to maintain the indoor temperature! Indeed, if road cycling really takes 700 Calories/hr, or 700,000 calories, which is almost 3 MJ, that's a big help to your furnace; the rough equivalent of burning a 1000W lamp for the whole hour.

Back to the bad news: Imagine that you could capture what you can of the mechanical output from your exertions. (You still get to keep metabolic output as home heating, by the way; indeed, "waste heat" is really hard to capture for re-use for anything but heating.) A fit cycling demon like yourself can sustain about 1/3 hp, or 250W, of mechanical output for your, say, hour-long workout. Thus, assuming perfect conversion to storage, and then perfect energy conversion from storage back to electrical, you will have captured about .25 kW-hr of energy. At 7.3 cents/kW-hr, you will have saved yourself... TWO CENTS! (Almost two cents. Not quite.) You could run your toaster for about 10 minutes with that kind of effort! Neat.

Of course, that's assuming no losses. It's really about half that, because of losses converting from mechanical to electrical to chemical and back to electrical. So you could save about a penny's worth of electricity from the grid with an hour of exercise; maybe get something worth spreading butter and jam on.

But then, back to good news: the waste heat from the inefficient conversions STILL goes to heating your house. Thank goodness. Otherwise this would be really depressing, instead of just mildly depressing.

As I said, I am still going to build an energy storage device for an exercise bike because that's cool, and I am still going to heat my house partly with exercise; "being" a 1000W bulb for an hour every now and then is good support for the home-heating plant.

Hey! You just caused me to write an awesome blog entry! What a brother. Thanks!

...and I wasn't kidding.

You! Go blog!

Slim told me, "blog!" And when Slim says "blog," I ask "how high?!"

And so I blog.

The picture in my profile is of me sitting in the driver's seat of R. Buckminster Fuller's second, and only surviving, Dymaxion Car. A front-wheel drive, one-rear-wheel-steering vehicle with a Ford V8 engine. Fuller got better than 35 mpg and speeds over 120 mph... in the early 1930s. Fuller is a hero of mine, so a trip from Boston to Reno to spend time with the last Dymaxion was a pilgrimage.

In this web log, I look forward to sharing, with comment, some of the things important to me. The beautiful thing is that if you, dear reader, don't find it interesting, you don't have to read it. You can go elsewhere, and buon viaggio to you!

Here's to the information age.