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

[Kirby Urner]

> 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

Curious:  were you aware of 'Synergetics' (links last post), that it was
online (the context for that 'tree' quote).  When I showed the hardcover to
mom some years back in Jersey City, her reaction was "I didn't know he wrote
anything like that" (and yet she knew about the domes and like that).

He did hold the Elliot Norton Chair for Poetry at Harvard at one time, and
one of his most insightful commentators/biographers was Hugh Kenner, the
famous James Joyce scholar (and later a columnist for BYTE magazine).

> 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.

I'm not a big fan of the popularizations which make "Wittgenstein versus
Popper" the boxing match of the day, the incident with the poker
notwithstanding.

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

Yeah, right on.
 
> 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.

I have access to some of the correspondence between the two.  Cordial,
friendly.  They overlapped in a good way.

> 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

But just the concentric hierarchy piece:  you've got these few polyhedra,
they organize this way, and the relative volumes are like this.  It's not
that big -- something we can share in K-12 no problem (and I do so).

I hope this thread continues -- the hypertoon in Python gives me a strong
foothold with edu-sig at python.org I'd think.  But right now, gotta get the 10
year old to her piano lesson.

Later,

Kirby