The Standard Living Package

10 Gonzo Machines From Rogue Inventor Buckminster Fuller:

Bucky's interest in efficient design encompassed more than just external structure. Instead of assembling the comforts of home piece by piece, Fuller proposed a packaged set of everything necessary for comfortable human life, from toilets to tables, in one easy crate. Fuller envisioned such a Standard Living Package as being a family's simple starter pack.

via Great Map

Global Outlook: The Legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House Model, Third Version, 1929, mixed media. Photo: Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

Bucky Fuller is profiled in the November 2008 issue of Artforum.

via BFI

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Middle East Cockroaches Invade U.S. During the Iraq War American military personnel have unknowingly been bringing back Middle Eastern cockroaches in their belongings and equipment. One such globe-trotting insect, the Turkestan cockroach, is now settled in the southwestern part of the U.S....

Texas bans nibbling fish pedicures The US state of Texas has banned fish pedicures over health and safety concerns, denying salon customers the opportunity to enjoy the sensation of hundreds of small fish nibbling away the dead skin from their feet.

Mutant fish develops a taste for human flesh in India The enormous goonch, a type of catfish, is said to have developed a taste for human flesh after feeding on corpses thrown into the river after funeral ceremonies. Locals rumours have held for years that a mysterious monster lurks in the water. But they think it has moved on from scavenging to targeting live bathers who swim in the Great Kali, which flows along the India-Nepal border.

also:
Hummus Wars
On-tap Inspiration Online (for writers)
Dr. Dymaxion's Atomic Condos (Bucky stuff)
Projector for your phone
"Calamities of Genius"
Forest Whitaker to direct and star in Satchmo biopic

viddy:
Lab Created Diamonds
First live webcast of a lion hunt
Heavy Metal Farmer
Staubli Robot Dance Show
Hunter S. Thompson: The Crazy Never Die (via)

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'Intelligent' computers put to the test No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - "artificial conversational entities" - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised "thinking" machine.

Blake Pontchartrain on Zulu coconuts Everybody wanted a Zulu coconut, but when you shouted 'Hey, Mister, throw me something," and what you got was a coconut thrown at you, you ducked or suffered the consequences. Believe it or not, lawsuits resulted; lots of them. When Mardi Gras of 1987 rolled around, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was unable to get insurance, so it was a parade without coconuts. One year, back in the day, I had the honor of painting a dozen or so Zulu coconuts.

costume detail: Stripes "The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order - jugglers and prostitutes for example - and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." The Devil's Cloth by Michel Pastoreau (via)

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. (via)

also:
How to Photograph the Stars (via)
Original Locations of 15 Mega-Chains (via)
Death becomes him: Kevorkian’s artwork on display at Armenian Library (via)
Another rare Serra interview (via)
Best of History Web Sites (via)
Dickens' London Map (via)
Fight Spam With A Direct Message To Twitter (via)

viddy:
Buckminster Fuller profiled on PBS's SundayArts
Ladislaw Starewicz - Cameraman's Revenge (proto-stop-animation)
Scratching With Tape Decks (cassette and reel-to-reel)
Vinyl Record Manufacturing Explained
Smashing Glass To The Anvil Chorus (via)

R. Buckminster Fuller T-Shirt

available from Fat American

via Design You Trust

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Study: Large Earthquake Could Strike New York City The new study revealed a significant previously unknown active seismic zone running at least 25 miles from Stamford, Conn., to the Hudson Valley town of Peekskill, N.Y., where it passes less than a mile north of the Indian Point nuclear power plant. Several small quakes are clustered along its length. It is "probably capable of producing at least a magnitude-6 quake," the researchers said in a statement.

Could Robot Aliens Exist? The existence of a race of sentient alien robots might be not just possible, but inevitable. In fact, we might be living in a "postbiological universe" right now, in which intelligent extraterrestrials somewhere have exchanged organic brains for artificial ones.

What conductors are doing when they wave their hands around -- and what we get out of it Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared to me to be more dancing along with the music than actually leading the musicians in any meaningful way. It wasn't until I married an amateur musician that I actually learned that the conductor could have an important influence on the way an orchestra sounds.

also:
Interview: Brian Eno (via)
20 best: ambient records ever made (via)
Thought Control In Economics (via)
The Enigmatic Notebook Drawings of Nicolas Flamel (via)

viddy:
Buckminster Fuller on "Death"
Olivier Messiaen talks about birds
Robert Rauschenberg - Erased De Kooning
Tom Jones with Janis Joplin (via)
Jedi Knights - May the Funk Be With You

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Slow news day today, but we have a few items to mull.

More Miss Marple than 007: the true face of British espionage Like 007, they were licensed to kill, but they would never have dreamt of carrying a gun. “Obviously if your back was to the wall you would have done what was necessary,” Lady Ramsay says. “But we weren't like Rosa Klebb, we didn't have special shoes with poisoned daggers.” Her own firearms training was not a success. “The instructor told me, ‘You're not supposed to close your eyes every time you pull the trigger'.” Lady Park kept her gun in the safe. “In the Congo, I frightened an unwanted visitor away by pretending I was a witch. I shouted out of the window, ‘If you do not go away, your feet will fall off'. That was far more effective than a gun.” Much cooler than the mythology.

also:
Mark Twain's travels in India (via)
New Milky Way Map Reveals A Complicated Outer Galaxy
Canada seeks historic shipwrecks
The Fauxmaxion Map an interactive interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion World Map. (read more) (via)
How To Hot Wire Your Car

viddy:
Phillip Glass composition for Sesame Street
Sesame Street - How Crayons Are Made
The Daredevils Who Chase One of the Sky's Greatest Mysteries
Romanian Gypsies (photomontage)

Bill Evans was born on this day in 1929. Bela Lugosi died on this day in 1956.

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The Girl in the window Three years ago the Plant City police found a girl lying in her roach-infested room, naked except for an overflowing diaper. The child was pale and skeletal, communicated only through grunts. She was almost seven years old. The authorities had discovered the rarest of creatures: a feral child, deprived of her humanity by a lack of nurturing. Audio, video and slideshow tell the strange, sad and ultimately hopeful story of Danielle. (via)

Is that keyboard toxic? Warning: Your keyboard could be a danger to you and the environment. Sound preposterous? Then consider this: Some keyboards contain nanosilver, which, because of its antimicrobial properties, is increasingly incorporated into everyday items even though studies have questioned its health and environmental safety.

Superbugs In August, 2000, Dr. Roger Wetherbee, an infectious-disease expert at New York University’s Tisch Hospital, received a disturbing call from the hospital’s microbiology laboratory. At the time, Wetherbee was in charge of handling outbreaks of dangerous microbes in the hospital, and the laboratory had isolated a bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae from a patient in an intensive-care unit. “It was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had,” Wetherbee recalled recently. The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the kidneys. “So we had this report, and I looked at it and said to myself, ‘My God, this is an organism that basically we can’t treat.’ ”

Microsoft 'degrees of separation' study interpretation challenged "Researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances," a Washington Post article stated. However, one publication, eFluxMedia, suggested the study was "heavily misinterpreted" by the media.

Mother Earth Naked: A Modern Masterpiece Have you ever wondered what our world would look like stripped bare of all plants, soils, water and man-made structures? Well wonder no longer; images of the Earth as never seen before have been unveiled in what is the world’s biggest geological mapping project ever.

An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley: In Conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) We have all these knee-jerk phrases that in the sixties sounded like communist revolution, and now are just corpses in the mouths of real estate developers. "Sustainable development"—that means very expensive houses for vaguely ecologically conscious idiots from New York. It has nothing to do with a sustainable economy or permaculture. They talk about agriculture, they get all weepy about it, but they won’t do anything for the family farms because family farms use pesticides and fertilizers, which is a terrible sin in the minds of these people. So they’re perfectly happy to see the old farms close down and build McMansions, as long as they’re green McMansions, of course, with maybe a little solar power so they can boast about how they are almost off the grid. This is just yuppie poseurism. It’s fashionable to be green, but it’s not at all fashionable to wonder about the actual working class and farming people and families that you’re dispossessing. This is a class war situation, and the artists are unfortunately not on the right side of the battle. If we would just honestly look at what function we’re serving in this economy, I’m afraid we would see that we’re basically shills for real estate developers. (via)

also:
Why Does RCMP Refer to Flesh Eating Murderer as “Badger”?
FBI takes library computers without a warrant
On the brains of the assassins of Presidents
Fairy Tale Geometry: Unfolding Buckminster Fuller's Tetrascroll (more) (via)
Meeting with a Remarkable Man: A Talk with Robert Anton Wilson (2003 interview)
When Computers Meld With Our Minds (brief Vernor Vinge interview)
Defining Female Chauvinism (Rethinking feminism, as it is. I'm no expert, but I think she nails it.) (via)
Queen's Guitarist Publishes Astrophysics Thesis The founder of the legendary rock band Queen has completed his doctoral thesis in astrophysics after taking a 30-year break to play some guitar.
MIT students on quest to build $12 computer (no, not $120) (via)
Saturday Night Lost Long-time SNL set builders Stiegelbauer Associates had the treasure trove of pop-Americana that’s been stashed away for years in Building 280, literally jackhammered to bits last month. (Bummer. Did they even try to find a way to preserve it?) (via)
The Mystery of the Bloodied Room A woman is found lying dead on her bed in a house with walls covered in blood. However, she doesn't have a mark on her and neither she, nor the bed, have any blood on them. The cause of her death is still unknown.
My buddy's art car Alan Evil makes the papers. (more art cars)

viddy:
Britain seen from above A new BBC series makes use of satellite technology to create stunning images of Britain from above. Can't wait to see this. They even track phone chatter. (via)
Anthropologist explores heavy metal in Asia, South America and the Middle East
Magnetic stripe card spoofer (using an iPod!)
Bob Godfrey Documentary A short but delightful BBC special (in two parts) about British animation legend Bob Godfrey.

Life is a chair of bullies - Soupy Sales (prev)

Buckminster Fuller and his many models

"Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship." -- R. Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969


















With Dymaxion car and Fly's Eye Dome.

Interview with Anne and Bucky Fuller
images from Kiel Bryant's photostream
seen on FFFFOUND!

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America's Dreamtowns the small towns that offer the best quality of life without metropolitan hassles. 140 towns rated (via)

Snooping into a co-worker's e-mail? You could be arrested News anchor charged with e-mail break-ins shines light on line between a prank and a crime.

also:
Today is Stockhausen Day at the BBC Proms (via)
A Field Guide to Surreal Botany an anthology of fictional plant species that exist beyond the realm of the real... (via)
The (Next) 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time good one: “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.” – Alfred North Whitehead
Miskatonic University (apply now) (via)

viddy:
Buckminster Fuller World Game Interview (It gets better after the first few annoying minutes.)
"Don't Talk to the Police" by Professor James Duane (via)
The Real News (for real, no sponsors, not for profit)
3 Minute Wonders are commissioned as a series of four shorts from budding new directors who haven't yet had the opportunity to make a film for broadcast TV.

Futility Closet: Plying the Blue - Phantom ships, as they have been called, have repeatedly been seen by various observers. Mr. Scoresby, in his voyage to Greenland, in 1822, saw an inverted image of a ship in the air, so well defined that he could distinguish by a telescope every sail, the peculiar rig of the ship, and its whole general character, insomuch that he confidently pronounced it to be his father's ship, the Fame, which it afterwards proved to be. – Charles Kingsley, The Boys' and Girls' Book of Science, 1881

Phantom ships, ghost ships, even derelict vessels sailing the oceans rudderless and without a soul aboard have always intrigued and creeped me out to the highest degree.

Ghost Ships
Ghost Ships on Wikipedia

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A good night's sleep really does improve the brain Sleep appears to strengthen connections between communicating nerve cells in the brain - a process thought to form the basis of learning and memory. I know from experience that my brain functions better on more sleep. If I could chart it, you'd see a correlation between how well rested I am and how many typos and mistakes you'll find on this weblog. (via)

I've lost my key. Can you pass me that banana? Lock-picking enthusiasts are cracking the 'uncrackable' in increasingly creative ways. And locksmiths aren't happy about it. (via)

Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index Launched The BFI has launched an interactive, searchable database of entries to the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. There are some great ideas in there. Loads of them, actually. I'm still getting through them.

also:
An Interview With Alan Moore
Can you assemble a superteam of real human wonders?
Amon Tobin's website is amazing (some of those things that look like debris flying by are zoomable and explorable critters)

Bucky Fuller notes

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via DTYBYWL

Buckminster Fuller in the News
A Pair of Flying Slippers: Phil Patton reviews the Buckminster Fuller exhibition at the Whitney
25 Years After His Death, Visionary R. Buckminster Fuller Continues to Inspire Efforts for a More Sustainable Planet
The birth of the geodesic dome; how Bucky did it
R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes
R. Buckminster Fuller's Grand Strategy
R. Buckminster Fuller Digital Collection
Buckminster Fuller Institute Online Resources
bucky fuller in Uncertain Times
hat tip

Happy Birthday, Bucky

Wish you were here...

Bucky Fuller notes

The Whitney has a few items on their YouTube page from their current exhibition Buckminster Fuller - Starting with the Universe. Nothing earth-shattering, but fun for fanatics.

Bucky Fuller

Buckminster Fuller's 15 Great Circles

The Buckminster Fuller Institute
R. Buckminster Fuller Digital Collection
from In the final analysis... even blogs must die!
via ***/*

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Engaging and Understanding the Egyptian Street Links to some interesting articles on the real Arab street. Well worth exploring. You know we rarely get the real story from mainstream or agenda-driven media.

Guizhou riots: an overview Chinese state-owned media, journalists, bloggers, and forum posters have all written about the riots that took place in Weng'an, Guizhou Province a week ago. The story, and how it has played out in official and unofficial media, illuminates several aspects of Chinese society and media, ranging from Internet pop culture and censorship, press freedom, the government's attempts to encourage but somehow control 'information openness' corruption of local officials and popular resentment against it, and what happens when crowds get out of control.

New and Not Improved The lustre of The New Hope is starting to wear off. This is happening a lot quicker than I thought. I wonder how long it will take for bandwagon Obama-ites to realize that they were projecting their distressed, war weary, post 9-11 hopes for a better world on a professional politician that really doesn't give a crap about what they think or want. It's nothing to be ashamed of, really. It's a logical reaction to the trauma that was the Bush administration. (via)

Google is doing WHAT? No, not THAT. But just about everything else. Image Gallery

Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition Click! is a photography exhibition that invites Brooklyn Museum’s visitors, the online community, and the general public to participate in the exhibition process. Taking its inspiration from the critically acclaimed book The Wisdom of Crowds, in which New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki asserts that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals, Click! explores whether Surowiecki’s premise can be applied to the visual arts—is a diverse crowd just as “wise” at evaluating art as the trained experts? (via)

Summer reading: how to pick the right book for any trip A Room With a View might be perfect for a Tuscan villa, but what should you read at the Burning Man festival or while cooped up with the kids in a West Country cottage? Six leading writers select the best books to take with you - whatever type of holiday you're going on (via)

How to tie a tie (including the fabled Pratt Tie Knot) (via)

Daniel Schorr: Economy Reminiscent Of Great Depression Dan, one who grew into adulthood during the Great Depression, remembers... and sings.

factoid: On Wikipedia, the biography of George Costanza is five times as long as that of Tim O'Reilly.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment. Buckminster Fuller, Interview, April 30, 1978 (via)

What We Can Learn From Buckminster Fuller

As you might have noticed, I'm a total geek for Buckminster Fuller. I'm reading Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth again this weekend and I really enjoyed this Wired photo essay.

The above image is one of his wackier ideas:

To construct one of his Lightful Towers, Fuller imagined that one airship would first drop a bomb and create a hole in the ground, then a second airship would drop the building into the hole. The stacked apartment unit would be sealed into the ground with cement and ready for use.

There is a more human, even somewhat darker side to the Fuller mythos that was brought back to mind by the comment on the above post and was hinted at in a recent New York Times article. We'll be exploring this side of dear old Bucky in the offing.

Bucky Fuller notes

John Todd, Jaime Snyder and Hunter Lovins interviewed on Democracy Now

Dr. John Todd was awarded the first annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize at a conferring ceremony at the Center for Architecture in New York City on Monday, June 23rd.
(prev)









A model of R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion Dwelling Machines” community, about 1946. An exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art will offer a review of some of his grandest designs.

The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller

AS the designer R. Buckminster Fuller liked to tell it, his powerful creative vision was born of a moment of deep despair at the age of 32. A self-described ne’er-do-well, twice ejected from Harvard, a failure in business and a heavy drinker, he trudged to the Chicago lakefront one day in 1927 and stood there, contemplating suicide. But an inner voice interrupted, telling him that he had a mission to discover great truths, all for the good of humankind...

But recent research has shed new light on Fuller’s inner life and what really drove him. In particular, it now appears that the suicide story may have been yet another invention, an elaborate myth that served to cover up a formative period that was far more tumultuous and unstable, for far longer, than Fuller ever revealed.

via roamin

Buckminster Fuller exhibition at the Whitney opens today (prev)

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge: The Movie

BFI:

Bucky had it right. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

That’s why we’re awarding a $100,000 prize each year for comprehensive solutions that radically advance human well-being and ecosystem health. The 2008 prize will be conferred June 23rd in NYC.

A lot of times, promotional videos like this are awful. This one is really good.

Exhibition of sculpture and prints by Buckminster Fuller opening at Sebastion + Barquet Gallery

The Buckminster Fuller Institute:

The word Dymaxion combines three of Fuller's favorite terms: dynamic, maximum and tension. He applied it widely to a number of his inventions including the Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map. His map received a patent for displaying the world's geographical data on one surface without distorting the relative shapes and sizes and without any breaks in any of the continental contours. This map is presented as a unique six feet by twelve feet silkscreen print on canvas and as a 50 inch x 72 inch edition on paper. During his lifetime, Fuller lectured tirelessly. Excerpts from 42 hours of his audiotapes, titled Everything I Know, will provide ambient sound for the exhibition.

This exhibition at Sebastian + Barquet is concurrent with the major retrospective, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from June 26 - September 21, 2008.