Joe Dressner and Buckminster Fuller

[Ken Schramm]

While I have been reading "Utopia or Oblivion," Fuller's commentary on Industrialism vs Craft has a certain familiarity.

Does anybody here know whether and/or to what extent Joe may have paid any attention to Fuller? Fuller's creativity, intelligence and prescience on some things is impressive, but his cocksure bloviation, intentionally arcane prose and the blunt incorrectness of so many of his thoughts on the future render him merely pompous to some considerable extent, as well.

 

[Claude Kolm]

No idea. But I will say that for those of us who came of age in the 1960s, which includes both Joe (I believe) and me, the theme of industrial vs. craft was one that was ubiquitous if you travelled in certain circles.

I was in Berkeley in the latter part of the 1960s and there were all sorts of hippies selling craftware on Telegraph Avenue, e.g., handbags made of cutup Persian carpets and all sorts of beadware. One of those hippies was a guy named Kermit Lynch.

I remember back when Fuller was still alive. He was regarded as an eccentric, perhaps a genius but also a self-promoter. E.g., I just learned from looking at his wikipedia entry that he was the populizer of the geodesic dome but not its inventor.

 

[Tristan Welles]

originally posted by Ken Schramm:
Joe Dressner and Buckminster Fuller

cocksure bloviation, intentionally arcane prose and the blunt incorrectness of so many of his thoughts on the future render him merely pompous to some considerable extent, as well.

 

[Keith Levenberg]

This is one of the better thread titles of all time.

 

[Jeff Grossman]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I was in Berkeley in the latter part of the 1960s and there were all sorts of hippies selling craftware on Telegraph Avenue, e.g., handbags made of cutup Persian carpets and all sorts of beadware.

Somewhere at home I have a three-dimensional projection of a Klein bottle that says it was lovingly handmade by artisan topologists in Berkeley.

 

[Claude Kolm]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I was in Berkeley in the latter part of the 1960s and there were all sorts of hippies selling craftware on Telegraph Avenue, e.g., handbags made of cutup Persian carpets and all sorts of beadware.

Somewhere at home I have a three-dimensional projection of a Klein bottle that says it was lovingly handmade by artisan topologists in Berkeley.

:-)

I took topology at Berkeley (I was a math major), but I doubt that any of my profs made a Klein bottle on their own.

 

[Andrew Zachary]

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I was in Berkeley in the latter part of the 1960s and there were all sorts of hippies selling craftware on Telegraph Avenue, e.g., handbags made of cutup Persian carpets and all sorts of beadware.

Somewhere at home I have a three-dimensional projection of a Klein bottle that says it was lovingly handmade by artisan topologists in Berkeley.

I'm still looking for the point at infinity.

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by Claude Kolm:

originally posted by Jeff Grossman:

originally posted by Claude Kolm:
I was in Berkeley in the latter part of the 1960s and there were all sorts of hippies selling craftware on Telegraph Avenue, e.g., handbags made of cutup Persian carpets and all sorts of beadware.

Somewhere at home I have a three-dimensional projection of a Klein bottle that says it was lovingly handmade by artisan topologists in Berkeley.

:-)

I took topology at Berkeley (I was a math major), but I doubt that any of my profs made a Klein bottle on their own.

When I was in high school, we saw a movie made by Profs Hirsch and Smale (later a Fields medal winner for his work on chaos theory) of UCB math showing how to invert a sphere without creating a wrinkle. That’s somewhat Klein bottle-adjacent, I feel.

Mark Lipton
(Pretty sure we only got that movie because their kids were my HS classmates)