grunch.net

Looking for Synergetics on the Web?  You have come to the right place.

About Grunch

The word Grunch traces to a satirical narrative published in 1983 and entitled Grunch of Giants (St. Martin’s Press) by its author-inventor, and Medal of Freedom winner, R. Buckminster Fuller (Bucky).

Therein he declares “the U.S.A. we have known… bankrupt and extinct” which to him was a sign the nation-state era was drawing to a close in some dimensions, a trend he’d anticipated.  Clearly we still have political parties, lots of nationalism, and so on.  Nothing with a lot of inertia really turns on a dime.

Would the USA turn into something more like an operating system? I speculate about such a so-called USA OS in my own writings (link, link).

Fuller pointed out the lack of a “group word” for “giants” in English, such as a “murder” of crows or a “gaggle” of geese. By “giants” he meant the literally soulless corporate persons of legal fiction.  Countering Grunch, were we the people, the true source of intelligence and invention on Spaceship Earth.  Grunch.net, as a domain name, therefore represents a unity of opposites, as does the (potentially benign) network’s Grunch concept itself (Bucky’s coin, after all).

My thanks to Trevor Blake of Synchronofile for the earlier front page theme here, much more stylish.  This website has recently fallen victim to various malware attacks specific to WordPress and at the moment I’m back to plain vanilla boilerplate for my template.

Some of the links, such as to a copy of my Applewhites Visit Oregon, may have been lost at the WordPress level.  My apologies, if you were maintaining those links.

About Me

My name is Kirby Urner (Kirby: by the kirk, or churchyard; Urner: from Uri, a Swiss canton) and I originally hosted my content at the Teleport ISP here in Portland, under the moniker pdx4d.  Check out the GRUNCH entry in Robert Anton Wilson’s Everything is Under Control to see my old URL.

My first web project, when the web was still young, was to publish Synergetics on the Web.  I’ve preserved that website largely as it was, a lot of hand-coded static HTML, with table tags to control layout.  Freezing it as it was entails lots of broken external links.  Check archive.org if you’re a cyber-archeologist doing reconstruction.

My web site did not then, and does not now, feature a copy of Bucky Fuller’s Synergetics (Macmillan, in two volumes), as that was being handled by Dr. Robert Gray and Fuller’s estate.  I wrote much of what’s currently in Wikipedia under Synergetics (here’s my original draft), keeping in mind that there’s at least one other book, by a different author, using that same title.

Synergetics on the Web was and is my own interpretation of the material, developed in collaboration with numerous talented others in the waning days of the 20th Century.  I was gratified to find the links to it from the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences under A005901 and A005902.

Historical note:  I was the first webmaster for Kenneth Snelson, the great tensegrity artist. He gave me permission to keep the old web site available even after he got his own domain and a more professional web developer.  I was doing the work as a volunteer, as his friend.  He later gifted me with Barrel Tower, a small tensegrity I often share on my Youtube channel.  I’d visit him on my trips to New York.

I was also the first volunteer webmaster for BFI (Buckminster Fuller Institute), in collaboration with Kiyoshi Kuromiya, who snagged the bfi.org domain name.

Here in the 21st Century, I’ve focused more on sharing Synergetics through my Github repos, especially through School of Tomorrow (another literary allusion, to House of Tomorrow) and Martian Math memes.

Kirby Urner
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