4 ms·

Everything I Know: Buckminster Fuller (1975)

183 points by ColinWright 6y ago

dang 6y ago
If curious see also 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488872 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943883 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401967
- michael-ax 6y ago
  loved reading the old comments. ty! sp332 on Dec 20, 2013 "Well you won't know which people have good ideas until they tell you their ideas :)"
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
He was a pretty awesome chap.
zafka 6y ago
Does anyone know of an organization that is actively trying to Push Buckeye's ideas? Or are there a number of different ones? I strongly believe the premise that we could easily take care of everyone in the world with a minimum of effort if we worked together. And when I say "we", I mean the 10-20 percent of us who have been gifted with the ability to do science and engineering beyond the grade school level. Let the rest of the people play.
- sammalloy 6y ago
  https://www.bfi.org/ https://www.bfi.org/
- copperx 6y ago
  How are Buckeye's ideas different from Fuller's? Were they contemporaries?
  - lukifer 6y ago
    I'm guessing that was an autocompleter mangling "Bucky".
- sparkie 6y ago
  Could I suggest reading Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society, or at least, watch this short interview about his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok
- lukifer 6y ago
  I would say the Long Now Foundation [0] is influenced by Fuller and his ideas, carrying forward the values of planetary systems engineering and long-term thinking. It's a little farther afield (or crackpot depending who you ask), but The Venus Project [1] covers similar ground. And of course, while Fuller never explicitly advocated UBI, Yang and COVID have recently conspired to move the idea into the Overton Window. [0] http://longnow.org/ http://longnow.org/ [1] https://www.thevenusproject.com/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/
- lliamander 6y ago
  Worth noting that the time frame this was published (1975) was just at the point in history that some (such as Peter Thiel) argue was the end of the rapid technological progress of the 20th century. It might be easy to conceive of a society supported by a technocratic few when looking back at a period of uninterrupted innovation and growth, but I wonder if Fuller would feel the same today when looking back on roughly 50 years of (relative) scientific stagnation (at least in some fields).
sammalloy 6y ago
Back in the 1990s, I saw an old video of Buckminster Fuller talking about a hyperloop-like transit system that would connect the entire world using the ocean floor, amongst other things. To this day, I always thought Elon Musk got his idea from this video, yet I’ve never heard anyone mention it.
- chadcmulligan 6y ago
  It was a fairly common trope in "golden age" sci fi iirc, along with moving people roads, and people tubes (like the Futurama opening credits). Elon is straight out of a Robert Heinlein book - the crazy billionaire building rocket ships to mars, he's even made them stainless steel so they shine like on the old astounding adventures covers. Edit: here's the roads must roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll one of those ideas that sticks in your head
keville 6y ago
It is understood That if you know that I know How to say it "correctly" (The exact meaning of which I have not yet learned) Then I am entitled to say it All incorrectly Which, once in a rare while Will make you laugh. And I love when you so much Whenever you laugh. But I haven't learned yet What love may be But I love to love And love being loved And that is a whole lot Of unlearnedness.
splittingTimes 6y ago
I too got exposed to him via the Venus project and Robert Steele's "open source everything manifesto"[1]. Having read Jacque Fresco [2] and found it clear and easy to follow, I tried to read Bucky's book "ideas and integrities" [3], but his almost stream-of-conciousness kind of writing style is so opaque and non approachable (to me at least) that I had to give up. Can you recommend anything from him that is more readable? === [1]https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Robert-David-Steele/dp/1583944435 https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Robert-David-Steele/dp/1583944435 [2] https://www.amazon.de/Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy-ebook/dp/B0773TB3GX https://www.amazon.de/Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy-ebook/dp/B077... [3] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004WH04LM/ https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004WH04LM/
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  "Earth, Inc." is less than half an inch thick. Even though I'm a man of few words, I guess I've read a lot of material from various authors anyway. But I only retained three books I picked up in the 1970's, and this is one of them. Only read it once, and it's lasted my entire life.
jdblair 6y ago
For anybody else irritated by watching all of the short segments stitched together by the video player at the Internet Archive, I wrote this script to concatenate the mp4 segments and re-encode as a single mp4 file. #!/bin/sh DIR=$1 BASE=$(basename $DIR) echo copying from $DIR to create $BASE.mp4 # copy the files over mkdir $BASE cp -v $DIR/*.xml . cp -v $DIR/*.mp4 $BASE/ echo done copying echo convert segments to ts files # convert all the mp4 files to intermediate transport stream format for f in $BASE/?????.mp4; do echo "$f -> $f.ts" ffmpeg -i $f -c copy -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -f mpegts $f.ts > /dev/null 2>&1 done # concatenate all the ts files and then re-encode them to mp4 echo concatenate ts files and re-encode as mp4 (cd $BASE; ffmpeg -i $(echo -n "concat:"; for f in *.ts; do echo -n "$f|"; done) -c copy -bsf:a aa c_adtstoasc ../$BASE.mp4 ) # clean up echo clean up rm -rf $BASE echo done

183 points by ColinWright 6y ago

dang 6y ago

If curious see also 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20488872 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943883 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4401967

michael-ax 6y ago
loved reading the old comments. ty! sp332 on Dec 20, 2013 "Well you won't know which people have good ideas until they tell you their ideas :)"

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

He was a pretty awesome chap.

zafka 6y ago

Does anyone know of an organization that is actively trying to Push Buckeye's ideas? Or are there a number of different ones? I strongly believe the premise that we could easily take care of everyone in the world with a minimum of effort if we worked together. And when I say "we", I mean the 10-20 percent of us who have been gifted with the ability to do science and engineering beyond the grade school level. Let the rest of the people play.

sammalloy 6y ago
https://www.bfi.org/ https://www.bfi.org/
copperx 6y ago
How are Buckeye's ideas different from Fuller's? Were they contemporaries?
- lukifer 6y ago
  I'm guessing that was an autocompleter mangling "Bucky".
sparkie 6y ago
Could I suggest reading Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society, or at least, watch this short interview about his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERj3QeGw9Ok
lukifer 6y ago
I would say the Long Now Foundation [0] is influenced by Fuller and his ideas, carrying forward the values of planetary systems engineering and long-term thinking. It's a little farther afield (or crackpot depending who you ask), but The Venus Project [1] covers similar ground. And of course, while Fuller never explicitly advocated UBI, Yang and COVID have recently conspired to move the idea into the Overton Window. [0] http://longnow.org/ http://longnow.org/ [1] https://www.thevenusproject.com/ https://www.thevenusproject.com/
lliamander 6y ago
Worth noting that the time frame this was published (1975) was just at the point in history that some (such as Peter Thiel) argue was the end of the rapid technological progress of the 20th century. It might be easy to conceive of a society supported by a technocratic few when looking back at a period of uninterrupted innovation and growth, but I wonder if Fuller would feel the same today when looking back on roughly 50 years of (relative) scientific stagnation (at least in some fields).

sammalloy 6y ago

Back in the 1990s, I saw an old video of Buckminster Fuller talking about a hyperloop-like transit system that would connect the entire world using the ocean floor, amongst other things. To this day, I always thought Elon Musk got his idea from this video, yet I’ve never heard anyone mention it.

chadcmulligan 6y ago
It was a fairly common trope in "golden age" sci fi iirc, along with moving people roads, and people tubes (like the Futurama opening credits). Elon is straight out of a Robert Heinlein book - the crazy billionaire building rocket ships to mars, he's even made them stainless steel so they shine like on the old astounding adventures covers. Edit: here's the roads must roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll one of those ideas that sticks in your head

keville 6y ago

It is understood That if you know that I know How to say it "correctly" (The exact meaning of which I have not yet learned) Then I am entitled to say it All incorrectly Which, once in a rare while Will make you laugh. And I love when you so much Whenever you laugh. But I haven't learned yet What love may be But I love to love And love being loved And that is a whole lot Of unlearnedness.

splittingTimes 6y ago

I too got exposed to him via the Venus project and Robert Steele's "open source everything manifesto"[1]. Having read Jacque Fresco [2] and found it clear and easy to follow, I tried to read Bucky's book "ideas and integrities" [3], but his almost stream-of-conciousness kind of writing style is so opaque and non approachable (to me at least) that I had to give up. Can you recommend anything from him that is more readable? === [1]https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Robert-David-Steele/dp/1583944435 https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Robert-David-Steele/dp/1583944435 [2] https://www.amazon.de/Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy-ebook/dp/B0773TB3GX https://www.amazon.de/Best-That-Money-Cant-Buy-ebook/dp/B077... [3] https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004WH04LM/ https://www.amazon.de/dp/B004WH04LM/

fuzzfactor 6y ago
"Earth, Inc." is less than half an inch thick. Even though I'm a man of few words, I guess I've read a lot of material from various authors anyway. But I only retained three books I picked up in the 1970's, and this is one of them. Only read it once, and it's lasted my entire life.

jdblair 6y ago

For anybody else irritated by watching all of the short segments stitched together by the video player at the Internet Archive, I wrote this script to concatenate the mp4 segments and re-encode as a single mp4 file. #!/bin/sh DIR=$1 BASE=$(basename $DIR) echo copying from $DIR to create $BASE.mp4 # copy the files over mkdir $BASE cp -v $DIR/*.xml . cp -v $DIR/*.mp4 $BASE/ echo done copying echo convert segments to ts files # convert all the mp4 files to intermediate transport stream format for f in $BASE/?????.mp4; do echo "$f -> $f.ts" ffmpeg -i $f -c copy -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -f mpegts $f.ts > /dev/null 2>&1 done # concatenate all the ts files and then re-encode them to mp4 echo concatenate ts files and re-encode as mp4 (cd $BASE; ffmpeg -i $(echo -n "concat:"; for f in *.ts; do echo -n "$f|"; done) -c copy -bsf:a aa c_adtstoasc ../$BASE.mp4 ) # clean up echo clean up rm -rf $BASE echo done