I’ve been struggling over something for around seven years. The light bulb just turned on. My wife was out with her friend picking up some Thai food and I’m sitting at the house with apple juice and silver rum relaxing and reading PDF’s and scouring Amazon. Updates later!
but this is impressive!
Link.
The ability of this man to speak is amazing. His message seems to be very good. I think this may be our next president.
I’m a conservative registered as a republican but won’t be voting for McCain. If Obama wins the nomination, I will be voting for him.
So the spinach has sprouted. It is about one and a half inches. I think the rain has caused one fatality as the gutters poured it all out into one pot.
The crazy sunflowers… well I think I have killed the majority. The liquid plant food either was too much or I mixed it wrong but it fried all but four or five of the plants. There was no time wasted. They were gone quick.
I have also started an experiment with egg cartons. My mother called me and said she read somewhere that you can use them for seeds and once they outgrow the egg cartons you transplant them. Right now I have 12 spinach seeds in an egg carton under the grow light. We will see how long it takes to catch up with the twelve pots outside. Hopefully the LED lighting will be a better source of spectrum for the plants.
Lifted from Wikipedia
Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller and Caroline Wolcott Andrews, and also the grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. He attended Froebelian Kindergarten. Spending his youth on Bear Island off the coast of Maine, he was a boy with a natural propensity for design and for making things. He often made things from materials he brought home from the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. Years later he decided that this sort of experience had provided him not only an interest in design, but a habit of being fully familiar and knowledgeable about the materials that his later projects would require. Fuller earned a machinist’s certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade.
Fuller was sent to Milton Academy, in Massachusetts. Afterwards, he began studying at Harvard but was expelled from the university twice: first, for entertaining an entire dance troupe; and second, for his “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment. (Many years later, Fuller received a Sc.D. from Bates College.)
Between his sessions at Harvard, he worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer in the meat packing industry. He married Anne Hewlett in 1917, and also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he again worked in meat packing, where he acquired management experience. In the early 1920s he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing light weight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing — though ultimately the company failed.
In 1927 at the age of 32, bankrupt and jobless, living in inferior housing in Chicago, Illinois, Fuller lost his young daughter Alexandra to complications from polio and spinal meningitis. He felt responsible, and this drove him to drink and to the verge of suicide. At the last moment he decided instead to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”
Fuller accepted a position at a small college in North Carolina, Black Mountain College. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began work on the project that would make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering, the geodesic dome. One of the early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he frequently lectured. In 1949, he erected the world’s first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter and constructed of aluminum aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of a tetrahedron. To prove his design, Bucky and several students who helped build it hung from the structure’s framework to awe non-believers. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.
For the next half-century Fuller contributed a wide range of ideas, designs and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy and ideas scrupulously in a daily diary (later called the Dymaxion Chronofile) and in twenty-eight publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited funds, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion Car project.
International recognition came with the success of his huge geodesic domes in the 1950s. Fuller taught at Washington University in St. Louis in 1955 where he met James Fitzgibbon a close friend and colleague. Fuller taught from 1959 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale as an assistant professor, receiving full professorship in 1968 in the School of Art and Design through 1970. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, for many years he lectured around the world on design. Fuller collaborated at SIU with the designer John McHale. In 1965 Fuller inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris, that was in his own words devoted to “applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity.”
Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of “omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity.”
Fuller was awarded 28 US patents and many honorary doctorates. On January 16, 1970, Fuller received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects and also received numerous other awards.
He died on July 1, 1983, at the age of 87, a guru of the design, architecture, and ‘alternative’ communities such as Drop City, the experimental artists community to whom he awarded the 1966 “Dymaxion Award” for “poetically economic” domed living structures. His wife was comatose and dying of cancer and while visiting her in the hospital he exclaimed at one point: “She is squeezing my hand!” He then stood up, suffered a heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours later. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Lemonade eh?
I woke up at 7:35AM. I ate scrambled eggs. I spent some time with my wife. I am now listening to some old album from Seedpod records by a producer called Craig Russo. I am drinking apple juice. I am happy.
