Individual Initiative - according to Bucky

Sunsight - photo taken along E1 (North bound, after Bukit Beruntung) on August 1, 2009 about 8.00 a.m.

I said, What can a little man effect toward such realizations in the face of the formidable power of great corporations, great states, and all their know-how, guns, monies, armies, tools and information? Then, self-answering: The individual can take initiatives without anybody’s permission. Only individuals can think, and can look for the principles manifest in their experiences that others may be overlooking because they are too preoccupied with how to please some boss or with how to earn money, how to take care of today’s bills. Only the individual disregards his fears and commits himself exclusively to reforming the human environment by developing tools that deal more effectively and economically with evolutionary challenges. Humans can participate -consciously and competently – in fundamental ways, to changes that are more favorable to human life. It became evident that the individual was the only one that could deliberately find the time to think in a cosmically adequate manner.

Excerpt from
The Buckminster Fuller Annual Memorial Lecture – 1997.
View the full article here www.moneyandyoublog.com

Mars - the red planet

The Bucky Group is ever evolving, creating a space for anyone interested in Life-long LEARNING and DOING and SHARING their experiences and IDEAS. The Group aims to be a source of inspiration, an idea brewery for everyone to Re-invent themselves, Design their Future, Recycle their Lives.

Come join us every Saturday at Hairfair, The Adelphi #B1-10, and Sunday at MacRitchie Reservoir Park in Singapore, we meet physically in the mornings.

You may also join The Bucky Group on Facebook, created as a virtual Platform where we can meet virtually and share on creating a more sustainable global community.

(The above is courtesy of Joo Hock who heads the Bucky group in Singapore.)

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

facsimile of the 1969 edition

(from books.google.com)

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (OMSE) is a work of synthesis for Fuller. His editorial goal was to provide an accessible, digestible chunk of his extraordinary World for us, the ordinary reader, to savor. And, oh! What an exciting tale he tells... and so timely for the birth of the New Millennium. How we wish he and Leonardo could be here for it... you know their websites would be Way Cool Places.

Fuller paints a Human history-long framework for how physical wealth, (the wealth of exclusive resource ownership), is eclipsed by information wealth (a valuation on know-how) when it comes to survival of our species on the fragile, closed system he called "Spaceship Earth."

Well before our time, Fuller lamented "the ever-acceleratingly dangerous impasse of world-opposed politicians and ideological dogmas." By then, he had seen a host of them -- the 'great war', the Macarthy 'commie' hunts in the US, the Korean and Vietnam 'conflicts' - but he didn't give up on our species. He did not join others with their doomsday, apocalyptic vision of the fall of human kind.

Instead he identified the solution, the resolution to world-wide clashes of ideological dogmas -- the computer! The computer and access to information would push human kind to evolve to a higher order of being. How timely a message as we enter this new millenium!

If you have never read it, we encourage you to do it now. If you read it some time ago and are considering the nanocorp and small business revolutionary perspective, we strongly encourage you to grab a copy and re-read it from your new mindset.

From sohodojo.com

{Sohodojo is an independent, non-profit (U.S. 501(C)(3)) applied research and development laboratory with an associated education mission to support solo and family-based microenterprise and small business entrepreneurs in rural and distressed urban communities.}

Call me Trimtab

(Above photo from www.tedbullock.com)

Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary -- the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trim Tab.

Bucky quoted in the February 1972 issue of Playboy.

Mechanical Jellyfish

Young Bucky loved spending his summers at the family owned Bear Island. There he learned a reverence for and appreciation of nature. Many of his inventions mirrored what he later designated as 'Natural Technology' i.e. employing the extremely efficient techniques he perceived within Nature.

One of his early inventions was a mechanical oar patterned after the motion of jellyfish. "It consisted of a tepee-like cone mounted on the end of a pole and resembled an inside-out umbrella. Standing at the rear of his boat, Fuller would pull the pole toward him through a large iron ring attached to the rear of the boat. As the peak of the umbrella-like invention pointed toward the boat, it displayed little resistance. However, when it pushed backward into the water, the cone opened, propelling the boat forward."

After this "Bucky also discovered that his boar trips were much safer and more enjoyable because he could see any hazardous or interesting events developing in front of him much more sooner than if he were rowing facing the rear."

I wonder why this simple and practical idea has not taken hold on the boating community.

(from BUCKMINSTER FULLER'S UNIVERSE - HIS LIFE AND WORK by Lloyd Steven Sieden)

Octet Truss

This morning some of us met at KL Sentral's food court to discuss Bucky. After the session I went on my walk-about of KL for photos to update my KL blog. Of course, I didn't have my brolly with me and I had to take shelter from the rain along Bukit Bintang. I looked up and noticed that the place I was sheltering under was made up of a number of tringular structures joined together.

In "Buckminster Fuller's Universe; His Life and Work" by Lloyd Steven Sieden, Sieden mentioned that when Bucky was in kindergarten, he was given dried peas and toothpicks (the traditional toy building material of the day). '... the other children immediately began reproducing structures which mirrored the buildings they observed in daily life. Naturally, their frameworks were rectangular, supported by right angle corners held firm by the dried peas. However, with no accurate visual experiance to rely upon, young Bucky began creating a structure which satisfied his sense of touch rather than imitated adult construction. Accordingly, his framework was composed of stable triangles and was, in fact, a rudimentary model of the octet truss, which he would invent and patent in 1961. .... Even today, few people who are not involved in the construction industry appreciate the importance of the octet truss. ...'

So the next time you see such a structure, you know that its Bucky's idea.

Generalized Principle

In Money & You, we always hear about generalized principles.

"The word 'generalization' as used in the literary sense means 'very broad'. It suggests trying to cover too much territory - too thinly - to be useful. The literary men say 'this is too general'. In the mathematical sense, however, the meaning of generalization is quite different.

The mathematician or the physicist looks for principles which are persistently operative in nature, which hold true in every specific case. If you can find principles that hold true in every case, then you have discovered what the scientist calls a 'generalized principle'."

(from Utopia or Oblivion)