The American colonists were among the most fortunate humans who had yet lived. They were beneficiaries of a unique circumstance that would provide the conditions necessary for human Neutrality to work. The Agricultural, Industrial, and Transportational Revolutions coupled with the enormous North American reserves, provided them with cheap land, cheap food, cheap power, and cheap transportation. America would have the equivalent of unlimited resources for the next 150 years. They would be the only independent humans in the history of our world. Time-binding was leveraged with Capitalism all through the Institution of Neutrality. It was this unique set of circumstances that would allow the American revolution to succeed. (03/07/02)
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Donald E. Ingber, MD writes: My interest in tensegrity dates back to my undergraduate years in the mid-1970s at Yale University. There my studies of cell biology and also of sculpture led me to realize that the question of how living things form has less to do with chemical composition than with architecture. The molecules and cells that form our tissues are continually removed and replaced; it is the maintenance of pattern and architecture, I reasoned, that we call life. Tensegrity structures are mechanically stable not because of the strength of individual members but because of the way the entire structure distributes and balances mechanical stresses. The structures fall into two categories. Structures in one category, which includes the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller, are basically frameworks made up of rigid struts, each of which can bear tension or compression. The struts that make up the framework are connected into triangles, pentagons or hexagons, and each strut is oriented so as to constrain each joint to a fixed position, thereby assuring the stability of the whole structure. (03/07/02)
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