Press on the Play

OK, Willamette Week (WW) was clever in calling Bucky a "lunatic" as that gets decoded in the play itself, as more preaching to the choir. Good issue overall, focusing on performance pay in education, something of a moot point in gnu math teacher circles, as we're mostly self-employed entrepreneurs in this cycle, not payrolled rank 'n file types.

Performance and staying on the job somewhat amount to the same thing for us, some more successful than others at bringing home the bacon (or tofu, as the case may be). Not everyone thinks gnu math should be taught, as it steals brain cycles from other more established curricula, such as the standard ETS-approved precalculus, adds more trigonometry (including spherical).

In the meantime, architectural bloggists are ruminating about what to say about Fuller's legacy, whether the domes were "a failure" or not. Before rendering a judgment though, it pays to check out where to find them in Portland: in the NW industrial port area, a warehouse and stockpiling district. Lots of the fuel tanks are using 'em for covers.

However, and this will be a focus of my presentation on election night: geodesic domes do not encompass Fuller's legacy, as he shared Alexander Graham Bell's fascination with space frames, with lots in the play on these (goes back to the dried peas episode). So in Portland, that means our World Trade Center most notably.

Likewise he championed more use of tension (Golden Gate Bridge), i.e. suspending from without more than pushing out from within (GrecoRoman). But of course one can't take or give personal credit for megatrends of this nature. That being said, PDX (the airport) is a good example of what Fuller had in mind when writing Synergetics.