¶ Barrel (2)
Index Entry
Barrel:
"So you take a blowtorch and burn out one of the wooden staves of the barrel and the whole thing collapses because that leaves enough room so that the outer part can fall in through the smaller inner part, because what the blowtorch does is let infinity into the system. . . or the nothingness of the Universe gets into the system.
"Let me now make a wooden geodesic sphere in which each of the triangular facets are external faces of a tetrahedron whose interior apex will be at the center of the sphere, and I’m going to truncate ■ those, so I will now see really a wooden barrel-- a spherical barrel and it has tension straps. But its tension straps are triangulated, they are not just in parallel. They cross one another. And once we get a crossing of two lines that cross each other like a pair of shears. . . they are unstable angularly. . . once you get the third one, suddenly it takes hold of the ends of the shears and stabilizes the opposite angle. So now we have an omnitriangulated geodesic sphere of wooden triangular plugs, corks, each one pressed against the other one, each with exterior chords larger than its interior chords and they can’t fall inwardly. When the straps have great circles going completely around they won’t come off and the straps are fastened to each other as they cross
TENSEGRITY - SEC. 450.53 (Gray) +650.61 (Gray)/ 705"
