Synergetics Constant

When you convert from one currency to another, say from US dollars to Canadian dollars (or vice versa), you need a conversion constant based on a ratio between the units of valuation in each currency. 

When computing volumes with respect to different units of volume, one needs the same thing: a ratio. 

In going from quarts to liters, we use a conversion constant of 1 quart = ~0.94635 liters.

Analogously, 1 tetravolume = ~0.94281 cube volumes (~ means "approximately").

How is this number derived?

Lets pack four balls of equal radius together such each touches the other three. Let's call a sphere's radius R, and its diameter D. Note that D = 2R.

Our unit volume tetrahedron has edges D, twice the length of our unit volume cube's edges R. 

Even though the tetrahedron's edges are twice as long as the cube's, the latter is more rounded and is therefore slightly more voluminous.

R-edged cube / D-edged tetrahedron = 1/0.94281 = 1.06066, the Synergetics Constant we seek, also known as S3 in Synergetics.

Another way to look at this ratio is in terms of two tetrahedrons: a right tetrahedron and a regular one.

In the "tetrabook" depicted below, the orange triangle (the "page") is hinge-bonded to the two yellow ones (the "book covers"), and is free to flap back and forth.  

Let the page and cover edges all be D, leaving variable length invisible edges from the page tip to each book cover tip.

In the vertical position, the page defines two complementary right tetrahedra of equal volume. This volume is equivalent to that of a unit volume cube of edges R.

When the page slants to form a regular tetrahedron on one side or the other (with a complement of equal volume), this is our unit of volume in Synergetics.  The ratio of the vertical page tetrahedron to the regular tetrahedron is S3 or ~1.06066.

X-REF:

S3 on Synergeo (2022)

Canonical Lesson Plan (2021)

Terminology and Scope (2017)

Another Introduction to Tetravolumes (2016)

New Views on RBF

Given Stanford University agreed to acquire the Buckminster Fuller archives in the end, metonymically dubbed the Dymaxion Chronofile, it stands to reason that the Stanford University Press would produce an anthology entitled New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller (2009) drawing upon the content of said archive.

I acquired a copy only recently and brought it along to Atlanta, for airplane reading and so on. I managed to get through the first two essays during the flight.

Here’s a paragraph worthy of comment, by Barry M. Katz, boldface added:

There is no issue to which Bucky was more sensitive than that he had somehow "failed" -- as if this charge rekindled the feelings of self-doubt that were burned into his psyche in 1927." Thus his constant recitation of his complishments and his continual reimagining of his story. But if he was not a failure, neither was he a success by any reasonable measure or even by his own unreasonable one! Bucky's lifelong campaign was not to invent a new kind of house, car, or map. It was to use his "anticipatory design science" to complete what might be called "the unfinished project of industrialism," and this he manifestly did not do." It is not enough to point to his collection of honorary doctorates or to three hundred thousand geodesic domes scattered about the globe, from the northern Greenland of NATO to the Moscow of Khrushchev and Nixon to the fairgrounds of Montreal's Expo 67 to the communes hidden away in the Santa Cruz mountains. An honest reckoning would have us ask why there are no domed communities in downtown Detroit or suburban Chicago; why Americans still drive to their neighborhood grocery stores in modified military assault vehicles rather than three-wheeled Dymaxion teardrops; and why "Synergetics," rather than such parochial disciplines as mechanical engineering and economics, is not taught in our universities.

Yes, I’m being selective with my boldfacing, emphasizing what I call the “Poor Slob Bucky” meme. 

He was purportedly not successful “by any reasonable measure” because humanity continued in its wasteful ways and the universities neglected his magnum opus.

On the contrary, I find it quite reasonable to conclude from his many achievements that he was one of the more successful human beings on record. Let’s not forget all the books and patents. He could sail and fly an airplane, He received many awards, including the Medal of Freedom.

Is it Bucky’s fault that universities have yet to find a way to accommodate his somewhat difficult philosophical writings? They’d rather whine about his language, while having no problem continuing to teach Heidegger’s.

Since these essays in 2009, Alec Nevala-Lee has combed through the same archive to flesh out a more complete biography: Inventor of the Future, The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller (2023). 

“He seems to have spoken to everyone living who had a personal or professional association with Fuller” (Witold Rybczynski, New York Times) — not including me though, which is fine, as I thereby escape any guilt by association with this project. I gave it a positive review. I enjoyed the prescient connections to science fiction world, one in which Alec specializes.

I had more interactions with Applewhite than with Bucky, and know Ed was pleased about the Stanford solution. He was pretty upset about the disposition of the archive in the previous chapter, immediately following Fuller's passing, when the underfunded BFI (Buckminster Fuller Institute) was attempting to manage the collection all on its own. 

A lot of Applewhite's curated materials ended up in the Fuller archive as well. He was an assiduous filer and cross referencer himself per his CIA background, as is proved by his Synergetics Dictionary (1986).

What makes a big difference regarding our assessment of Bucky's success at predicting, which is what he claimed to be good at, is whether we connect the open source revolution (preceded by the PC revolution (PC = personal computer)) to his design science revolution. This is something CJ and I discussed quite a bit.

I think we should identify Fuller's anticipated design science revolution with the open source one, given both were about creating artifacts, potentially useful to almost any type of ideologue. We see the life-advantaging qualities of the internet today, in every aspect of life.

A next step would be to move into our new mass-assembled computerize dwelling machines as, in a sense, more smart devices (per Education Automation) and then to open source bioengineering in a more concerted way. Keep watching trends. Fuller's contention was akin to Teilhard de Chardin's: that our success is driven by teleological concerns larger than any one ego, corporate psyche or national will.

On Forming Future Feds

Per recent posts, I've been looking at pride in one's country as an individual's creation, integrating into the background yet always in some ways distinct. Bringing these distinctions into the foreground and having them catch on is one way of fighting for one's country. 

Distinctions may take the form of differences in curriculum.

Some private schools, given the makeup of staff and faculty, lineage and history, are like grooming grounds for future Feds. I'm not assigning any negative spin to the grooming or finishing, polishing aspect, nor to the end goal of turning out highly skilled future bureaucrats. Rather, I'm highlighting the power of some private schools to embody what public schools might wish to emulate. Curriculum distinctions thereby spread.

Let's take a concrete example: RSA, the algorithm. Mathematics for the Digital Age and Programming in Python has its roots at the Phillips Academy at Andover, where it was written by two faculty members, Maria and Gary Litvin. 

Although using a programming language, the book builds towards communicating public key cryptography, which underpins what I'm calling Supermarket Math (aka Commerce World). Familiarity with cryptography is one hallmark of a future Federale (federalist). The public schools now have Phillips to imitate, not that they really can or will given the grip of the private sector on schoolbook publishing.

I don't mean to sound defeatist however. In fighting for my country, I point out that schools on paper at least have the freedom to go electronic while customizing their learning and teaching materials. "One size fits all" is not competitive versus economies that understand how to optimize. 

Different schools exploring in different directions, running in parallel, are going to find and establish a stronger track record, just watch. The private schools I've worked with all get to RSA as a topic, somewhere in the curriculum.

Sunshine Elite Education (SEE) was one such client. I was given three outstanding students and a free hand to accelerate through a whirlwind tour of core topics they'd re-encounter at places like Jesuit and Central Catholic, other top schools in our area. Catlin Gabel. Oregon Episcopal. You know the ones (if you're in Greater Portland that is). These were 8th graders and already computer literate.

Yes, I'm aware the Elliptic Curve algorithms have superseded RSA in many contexts, but from a high school curriculum development viewpoint, we need the history and the number theory that RSA provides. Nothing bars deeper EC treatments going forward, but as a forewarning they're likely not coming from me i.e. you'll find only so much about a topic before I'll hand it off to a better positioned teacher or teaching. 

I'm more a transit lounge than a final destination for a lot of students, with connecting flights (I'm getting more metaphorical on you).

My USA is into Martian Math, meaning future Feds from my province, Cascadia, might not even call themselves Feds. They'll be Pythonista Federales or something more Hispanic sounding. We're keen to brand differentiate from the overly Anglo. We're a lot more Asian-Latino here in Portlandia. 

Those are my years of AFSC background talking, per my community service resume: Latin America Asia Pacific Program (LAAP). I wasn't a staffer so much as supervising Quaker.

Our Stark Street meeting was originally a dual purpose building: Religious Society of Friends and American Friends Service Committee both had their facilities there, with many doorways and staircases connecting them. AFSC later outgrew the small office and took over a whole house on E Burnside, which is when I was around and LAAP happened. 

I also served at the Yearly Meeting level, as a Quaker delegate to the corporation (AFSC), bolstering the latter's legitimacy as a Quaker-backed nonprofit staffed by mostly not-Quakers.

Our regional AFSC programming was not centrally focused on Mesopotamia, which is more an Atlanticist thing. During my tenure, wearing various hats, the focus was (a) youth leadership training and (b) tapping into Asian and Hispanic subcultures through after school extra curricular activities. Does this all sound subversive? To me it sounds like church work, kinda mainstreamy.

However, Portland has quite a few expat Palestinians from the early diaspora, families who migrated to Kuwait, Jordan and elsewhere the first time an expulsion happened. They had to take up statehood outside of Palestine and some of them ended up around Portland. 

But that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our Arabic speaking communities. I like to think my ties to the Free Open Source movement tied me to Arab speakers, more than my AFSC work in this town. Dr. Tag an I overlapped through CUE and her having roots in Ramallah (site of Ramallah Friends School).

I see the USA as acting responsibly in the Refugee business, but more from the point of view of a Diaspora nation, a global dispersion that includes a lot of expats, as well as base dwellers. We cannot easily turn our backs on our heritage, Statue of Liberty and so forth. 

A lot of Anglo-Euros who came here were more interested in being imperial (versus the locals at first, later more globally), or setting up some "government in exile" or what have you. 

I'm more focused on keeping travel circuits opened up and available, including people falling through the cracks per the United Nations, the so-called stateless or undocumented, and among the most oppressed.

People don't talk about the Tibetans nearly as much as they do about Palestinians, when it comes to examples of recent diasporas. However, as I was saying above about Portland, and more especially here in the "Buddhist ghetto" (term of endearment) in which I live, we do have that more Asian focus.

Along those lines, my Uncle Sam is allowed to operate in that spookier space of the has beens, as a past tense entity, given the nation-state system as a whole has been superseded, we see all the signs. There's a chthonic quality to governance, sending more energy to mythos, that dream world where virtual nations get born in the first place, in glimpses and glimmers.

National Pride Day

A question is what we want from our nations. Job security? A marked grave? A criminal record?  As a first approximation, lets ask what we might get from somewhere else. In what aspects of life do nations have any competition?

A religious order is the chief analog of the state it would seem, in having the power to assign rank to members, assign them tasks, insure their well-being in various dimensions, and mark their graves. 

If we claim Israel is an apartheid state, then is the Vatican any less so? It’s walled-around after all. 

One question is whether rank has a basis in immutable physiognomic characteristics, such as skin color. Does an apartheid state have to be racist by definition? Might the barriers be entirely class based while blind to physiognomy?

The Vatican does not espouse dogmas regarding racially based ranking to my knowledge, but did it ever? I’ve not done much digging into whether white supremacy, for example, found much foothold in the daily sermons and catechisms shared with noobs. I’ll need to explore in the Museum of PR some more if I want to find out.

What I do know something about (if not a lot) is how organized religion provided ammo for supremacists of various stripes.

Lets remember how “supremacist” is close to “chauvinist” in meaning, and to be “chauvinist regarding X” is to “take pride in one’s Xness”. However no transitive law insists on equivalence here. One may take pride in X without claiming X is best. X and Y might be equally good, but what’s considered virtuous and natural is to be proud of what one is. Root for the home team: that’s your job and your mission.

Which brings us back to nations, “patriotic” being close to both “chauvinistic” and “proud of”. In Achieving Our Country, author Rorty takes “hating one’s country” as a kind of “self hate” which as such is pathological, where “achieving our country” might mean healing or overcoming this complex.  How might one “fight for one’s country” without any sense of cognitive dissonance?  I’ll get back to that.

My closing question for this entry (not really) is: what other institutions might we imagine that could provide us what nations provide, outside of organized religion? Consider the university for example. Imagine a global university consisting of a network of campuses, with students and faculty free to transit from campus to campus without bothering the nation-states i.e. these movements would not concern them.

Before you reflexively express skepticism regarding this alien idea, ask yourself whether every troop deployed by the Pentagon has a visa i.e. permission from the bureaucracy claiming jurisdiction over the territory. Do US troops in Guantanamo have “red cards” from the Cuban government, permitting open-ended stay on the island?

Lots of times, a corporation will ensure job security (a playable role) and creature comforts (including the necessary minimums: privacy, sanitation, opportunities to stay healthy, mentally and physically). Through your employment, you get a gym membership, health insurance (guaranteed access), a cubicle, pod, and dorm, cafeteria, meeting rooms, a travel budget. Do you need a state at all? How do rich people achieve statelessness to the point of paying zero taxes? Do corporations own graveyards? They certainly memorialize their dead.

I was looking at the Las Vegas football stadium from the Goodyear blimp a couple nights ago, watching from an Asylum District sports bar, as the Oregon Ducks lost out to the Washington Huskies. That looks like a scale model of an Old Man River city (OMR) I was thinking. The new MSG Sphere aka “EyeBall” was visible in the distance as well.

What if Boeing or the like could do an aerospace version for delivery on demand? A spanking new campus, with terraced apartments, transportation, and with rail to an airstrip. The stadium-shaped city would be big enough to host a stadium.

We don’t build on that scale now, unless you count whole cities as singular projects, which we’re free to. NYC is a campus, with ancient infrastructure. So is Portland. One of our main bridges is sitting on wood pylons in hard mud subject to liquefaction under earthquake conditions. We’ll be closing that bridge and replacing those pylons with metal ones that go deep enough to hit bedrock.

Might a city have “a fuselage”? Not in today’s city planning yet and likely never. However I do expect more interpenetration of these shoptalks:  land-based construction and spacey-maritime. 

Shall we test one (an OMR) near Yakutsk? That’s a big city in Siberia. I spent much of my morning on YouTube following travel vloggers to that area, just to remind myself of the challenges of permafrost.

What would it take for a Stadium Campus City (SCC) or any city, to feed itself without over-plundering its surroundings, to the point of becoming untenable? I’m not sure the Mayans ever mastered these equations. 

A big part of the plan involves planning for recycling, of the skeleton itself, should the city become unneeded, or simply in need of a remodel.

In fighting for my country, I’m somewhat careful with my “we”. I’m not too quick to ally myself with those having nuclear weapons for example, on the basis of shared citizenship alone. We the people of the United States do not necessarily own or claim to sponsor those nuclear inventories, and some of us fight to make sure we necessarily do not, unless in the capacity of safe disposers thereof, and recycling perhaps, but not in the form of WMDs. ‘

I’m free, as a patriot, to explicitly disown properties I do not consider legitimately a part of my country’s inventory. “Who ordered these?” Not us. 

But then others operate their virtual worlds differently, and maybe in their namespace, the USA is some last/only superpower. That position is then taken for granted by an ego (eggo) and becomes a symptom of what we call the “military-industrial complex” a deep-seated psycho-pathology president Eisenhower warned us about. Fighting to restore sanity to these poor citizens is part of the good fight. Obviously, my country contains its share of drug addicts and crazies. I’m proud of it anyway, the metaphysics.