Sunday, July 01, 2007

Call Me Trimtab


R. Buckminster Fuller died on this day 24 years ago but we still have a lot to learn from his work. Bucky is undoubtedly the undisputed Father of the Sustainability movement. Jerome pointed to an excellent essay Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth which highlights (back in 1963) the need for a sustainable future.

This vessel we call Earth contains a finite amount of resources... thankfully he left behind a few of his own resouces

He was a quirky cat from a quirky family notably creating neologims such as sunsight and sunclipse "replacing sunrise and sunset in order to overturn the geocentric bias of most pre-Copernican celestial mechanics" Bucky was well known for creating long run-on sentences and wrote a single unpuncuated sentence approximately 3000 words long titled "What I Am Trying to Do" He also used awesome and unusual compond words like omniwell-informed and intertransformative Other notable Bucky-isms include Livingry and Debunked.

His lesser known influences on Hip Hop cultures Bling-bling movement and Public Enemy's Flavor Flav included some fresh styles rocking three watches when travelling across time zones.

Bucky was also booted from Harvard (twice!) for his seeming lack of interest and crazy antics entertaining dance troupes. Wild.

more: stanford library collection, buckminster fuller institute