Bucky Fuller Revisited

I ran across an article in last Sunday's New York Times about everyones favorite cold war era stalwart visionary inventor, engineer, author, and architect Richard Buckminster Fuller.

I remember being quite impressed with this man's writings. While I was in college, I read his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Critical Path books. He introduced the concepts of synergetics and tensegrity to me through these writings. A prolific inventor and thinker, he held 28 patents and was great at reframing complex concepts in new and intriguing ways. People are verbs more than they are nouns. The universe is that "omni-interaccommodative, nonsimultaneous, and only partially overlapping, omni-intertransforming, self-regenerating scenario." To that affect, he was also prolific at coining new terms such as "livingry" and "dymaxion." I was so influenced by this man's work that I even named my startup company Dynamical Software, Inc. as a sort of reverent nod to this man.

Like almost any modern example of good journalism, the New York Times article references a recent event and presents a mild expose. The recent event is an upcoming exhibit (June 26, 2008 through September 21, 2008) of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The expose is a debunking of his "suicide story" in which he claims that, after dropping out of college, failing at business, and becoming a heavy drinker, he seriously considered suicide. Just as he is on the precipice of that dark commitment, he receives an epiphany which causes him to devote his life to the betterment of mankind as a sort of cosmic experiment. Based on research at Stanford University and an upcoming book called "Reassessing R. Buckminster Fuller," the New York Times counter-claims this famous suicide story to be a myth created by Bucky himself. This research does assert that he did have a nervous breakdown after an extra-marital affair, with a women half his age, fell apart.

Blogging Considered Harmful

As a blogger, I feel compelled to blog about this NY Times front page article on the health perils of blogging. Apparently, some high profile bloggers have recently suffered heart attacks. Without benefit of any kind of scientific or statistical research, the piece attempts to paint a world where bloggers and smokers share the same fate.

I blog as a hobby and not for pay so I am not exactly an expert on this subject. One of the reasons why I do not attempt to blog for pay is precisely what the article addresses. There is little to no money in it. To make a living off of it does require long hours.

It's not unlike the economics of food production. The person who picks the crop and the person who rings up the purchase makes the least amount of money. It's the people in between who stand to earn (or lose) the most for their bottom line. The blogger is like that person working in the fields. It's the content aggregator or publisher who stands to make (or lose) the most amount of cash in that world.

There is a book entitled Wikinomics that I consider as the sequel to The Cluetrain Manifesto. I'm sure that you have heard the phrase "content is king." These books make the case that the new content that is king is user supplied. This world is not about the cult of personality which is why blogging alone is a very hard way to get rich.

Happy Birthday Mr. Heinlen

Apparently, today is Robert Heinlein's birthday. What self respecting male American geek could claim not to have read some of this man's books in his youth? I believe that the first book of his that I read at a pretty early age was Podkayne of Mars. His most famous book, of course, was Stranger in a Strange Land. Who could have known that the utterly wild premise of this book, that a science fiction writer could orchestrate a new religion, would become true one day?

But it was Heinlein's book I Will Fear No Evil that revealed to me the true reason why death is, ultimately, a good thing. If no one died, then there would be no room for children and we would all suffocate in our own endless supply of complaints, fear, cynicism, and irregular bowel movements.