Community Content

Flextegrity refers to a set of omnidirectional lattice-building solutions. The website provides a lot of good information. Sam Lanahan is the inventor of this modular building system.

I share about flextegrity, tensegrity and elastic interval geometry when encouraging next generation interest in what design science has to offer.

Kirby Urner

The "old" geodesic group-discussion is back on line. It goes back to 1996 and many of you here were participants.

This archive is now online thanks to Pat Salsbury at Reality Sculptures.

Buffalo Geodesic Listserv Archive

http://reality.sculptors.com/~salsbury/UB-List-Archives/geodesic/

Adrian shares this new animation:

Rossiter Transformation

http://www.antiprism.com/misc/jit_cubo_oct2.gif

"The edges are doubled at the octet truss stage.

The cuboctahedra collapse down volumetrically into an
hour-glass-like pair of tetrahedra. There are three zero
volume diamond "fins" that spiral down the side of these.

You can make this shape from a jitterbug model. Place it on a triangular face. Halfway up is a hexagon of vertices. Push three alterate vertices into the centre. Make the six vertical slanting triangles into three slanting diamonds.

The loss of volume then is 6 tetrahedra per cuboctahedron.

There is originally one octahedron per cuboctahedron so the
ratio of original to transformed volume is

1 octahedron + 1 cuboctahedron : 1 octahedron + 2 tetrahdera
4 + 20 : 4 + 2
24 : 6
4 : 1

Another way to see this is by considering that the transformation
was created by jitterbugging the (6363) trihexagonal tiling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trihexagonal_tiling

The triangle to hexagon ratio is 2 : 1. When you jitterbug it
to close down the hexagons the ratio of areas before and after is

1 hexagon + 2 triangles : 2 triangles
6 + 2 : 2
4 : 1

In the cuboctahedron/octahedron to octahedron/tetrahedron transformation there is no contraction normal to the plane of trihexahedral jitterbugging and so this ratio is also the ratio of volumes before and after the transformation.

I have made another video from a different angle that
makes it easier to appreciate the cuboctahedron/octahedron stage."

Buckminster Fuller's 4D House as a paper model.

A NEW HOUSING ERA
HOMERIZON
Re: A New Housing Era

We invite you to visit our avant-garde housing project web site at www.homerizon.com. We appreciate all comments and suggestions regarding our concept and we ask you to please forward our web site address to your friends and colleagues.

Sincerely,

Kathy Gildart
Assistant to the Director, Homerizon Inc.
Tel.: 506-291-0120
Fax :506-743-9082
input@homerizon.com
www.homerizon.com

PLEASE think GREEN before printing this message

APPARENTLY, NO ONE HAS NOTIFIED THE UNIVERSE THAT THERE IS AN ECONOMIC CRISIS ON EARTH

Sunshine is still beaming aboard the planet at the same rate as before the crisis began. Corn, rice, almonds, olives and peanuts are still growing and producing at the same rate as they did before the crisis. The same is happening with all food crops everywhere.

Airplanes still have the same load carrying capacity. Automobiles get the same fuel mileage pre and post crisis. The capacity of trees to produce lumber products has not changed. Butter and iron ore still melt at their same respective temperatures. The amount of electricity it takes to power 60 watt light bulbs has been constant.

However, despite this consistency, the Associated Press (10/5/2009) reported that the “…financial meltdown…wiped out 11% -- $6.6 trillion -- of household wealth in six months".

Webster defines economics as: ”…production, distribution and consumption (use) of goods and services”. The Universe produces stuff. The Universe distributes stuff. The Universe uses stuff. So, the Universe IS an economy, THE Economy.

However, the Universe works differently than the human “economy”. The Universe does all this producing, distributing and using according to specific rules that don’t change. The rules of the human “economy” change continuously.

Also, the Universe has no “medium of exchange”. It lets sunshine and rain fall on everyone who happens to be in the path of the sunbeams and water drops. Air is available to everyone, everywhere on the Earth surface. Crops grow for all humans who follow the rules for growing plants. In other words the Universe is a direct-access system, no money, no middle-men.

So, I suggest that we humans do one of two things:
1) Inform the Universe that there has been a reduction in wealth, and ask it to adjust outputs accordingly. It’s very exciting this way.
2) Get rid of “mediums of exchange”, since the Universe uses a direct-access system.

Either way, I think things would work better. Having two systems is very cumbersome.

William Daniels
503-314-6902
wdinpdx@yahoo.com
BillionsOfBillionaires.org
Twitter:aWilliamDaniels
10/6/2009

http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/10/05/largest-solar-powered-footbridge-ope...

The Dymaxion Car of R. Buckminster Fuller is being restored by the company Crosthwaite and Gardiner. See synchronofile.com for details.