* On 14-Jul-2006 at 4:43PM PDT, brian grant said: > Buckminster Fuller's patented Dymaxion Map of the Earth comes to mind as > does his promotion of Spaceship Earth. It's too bad his World Game didn't > get as much mileage; the game's focus on responsible use and distribution of > resources is just as timely today as it was when he was promoting it 40 > years ago.
I thought Annalee was looking for people to interview, but I have to credit Buckminster Fuller as a major personal inspiration, also, as one of the fathers of collaborative cartography, through what he termed the "Geoscope", which could be ... illuminated to picture the earth and the motion of its complete cloud-cover history for years run off on its surface in minutes so that man may comprehend the cyclic patterning and predict. The complete census-by-census of world population history changes could be run off in minutes, giving a clear picture of the demological patterning and its clear trending. The total history of transportation and of world resource discovery, development, distribution, and redistribution could become comprehendible to the human mind, which would thus be able to forecast and plan in vastly greater magnitude than heretofore. The consequences of various world plans could be computed and projected. All world data would be dynamically viewable and picturable and relayable by radio to all the world, so that common consideration in a most educated manner of all world problems by all world people would become a practical event. (Fuller, _Education Automation_, 1962, reproduced from http://www.bfi.org/node/564) I have always felt that the ultimate vision of collaborative cartography could be described as "a geoscope in every home", an idea that Fuller in all his brilliance might never have dared dream of, but one that personal computing and high-speed Internet access are conspiring to make gradually possible. (Jo, Rich and I explored this idea in a bit more detail in the preface to _Mapping Hacks_, a segment that we co-wrote with (the aforementioned) Mike Liebhold, and which is one of my more favorite parts of the book.) I think that Fuller's work suggests a rich potential in all this geowanking, a means by which we geowankers can contribute in a real and material fashion to the gradual solution of humanity's many and complex problems. SDE _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
