[Edu-sig] RE: Pygame, gameMaker etc.

[Arthur]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kirby Urner [mailto:urnerk at qwest.net]
<snip>

> 
> It takes some getting used to, but it's readable prose.

Of course there are infinite valid ways of describing a tree.

Its readable prose, but not particularly pretty prose. It ain't science, it
ain't poetry. It is a perspective, a way of looking at a tree.  And I think
I appreciate that in its time a perspective - wholistic/holistic - that was
lost or well on its way to being so. And therefore of importance.  

But I would contend that Fuller was much more successful in getting his
message out than you seem to feel.  So much so that someone who was not
around when he was pressing his points, and able to understand the milieu in
which he was functioning, might not see why we might be honoring him. 

Any good consultant's goal to make himself/herself obsolete. As a
philosopher, I think he was in the tradition of pragmatism - and would come
out on the side of Popper in the debate between Popper and Wittgenstein as
to whether philosophy actually mattered. 

His idea had and have practical implications.  And I believe those ideas
have been quite influential.

So it is anything but an insult to Fuller to consider him to have obsoleted
himself, at least a bit.

Reconciling Wittgenstein and Fuller, though,  would certainly take an Urner.

> Fuller's deeper commitment was to invention *in language* i.e. to come up
> with an integrative way of thinking about everything using geometry as the
> principal source of metaphors.  Per the quote at my synergetics page:

<snip>

> Indeed, Fuller  dedicated his magnum opus to Coxeter, probably the premier
> geometer of the
> 20th century, or certainly one of the top ones.  He was paying homage to a
> leading light in a related/overlapping discipline.

You and I seem to take slightly different things away from the dedication to
Coxeter.

Perhaps Fuller is saying something not too different from Plato, in pointing
to Coxeter. 

Which gets us back to our argument of some 5 year's standing now.  Me
thinking that you want to push folks ahead to the ideas of the Master, while
allowing them to skip most of the prerequisites. Can't happen.  

I assume that I can't really fully appreciate Fullers ideas until I know a
decent amount of what he knew, as background.  Certainly a task in itself.
And he is giving us a very good clue as to what he himself considers as
prerequisite to his ideas, in his dedication to Coxeter. 

And I am hard at work. Though it is taking me well beyond Geometry 101.

Art