Dear Mr. Crow,
My appologies, I carelessly mailed a version of this moments ago without proofreading, and have discovered a parade of errors. Please accept this corrected version.
I have invented a construction system but I'm not an academic or a professional and I'm having the devil of a time figuring out who to describe it to. I thought you might be able to help me, perhaps by referring me to experts at the University in intellectual property, licensing, or industrial development. Actually, my discussion extended into other disciplines. Especially I would be most interested in communicating with people about virtual reality ... I heard a professor is much interested in Second Life!
I have lived near the University for many years and stayed somewhat connected. This is my way of being an ASU student.
My strange plan is to license this product to builders. Architects could specify it. Actually, that's not quite right. I would license manufacturers to build kits which builders can assemble to create, for example, large buildings which are fit or molded around existing structures or bridges which delicately span terrain at a very large scale. The strength of the structural materials employed is utilized to the highest degree - similar to airframes, light and rigid - and yet it's possible to assemble and disassemble extremely voluminous structures at little expense. For temporary applications the components are wholly reusable.
Actually, Mr. Crow, I ought to extend my discussion in a more personal direction. I am a crazed economics scholar, and the trends I am seeing in the data are really astonishing. There is, it seems to me, lots of evidence we are, as a species, headed in the direction of a huge explosion in economic activity. The size of it, according to my measurements, is overwhelming. This evidence I'm looking at is very abstract. It doesn't predict the nature of this bonanza, only its size. Oh, and its duration, which is a short number of years ... perhaps a century. We can also detect some of the likely players. But my sense is those players have only a limited idea of what the actual game is going to be. Rather, they know it's afoot and are investigating possibilities.
At the most esoteric extreme of the evidence is the evidence for a boom in space travel. I was just over at the science programs open house, and would somewhat imagine this will not sound so strange to you. Still, I wonder what you think. To me the evidence predicts a massive human space migration in the offing. It's quite whacky. It's going to be a huge, huge market, like selling cars or jet travel, except bigger.
It is going to require highly economical extremely versatile extremely mobile super strong and ultra light weight structural systems.
Still a bit more context - it is necessary to me to provide this:
Terrestrial infrastructure will play a very large role in creating and supporting this reality. The nice thing is the evidence - some of it - points towards a green and lovely earth acting as, in some sense, a home, or just home, for all those travelers - if this happens - or just for us. We could ask the theologians about that one. In a sense this huge project, a new blossoming of humanity, is an educational project. This blossoming will be achieved via the discipline of design, and millions of people will train in that discipline. For these reasons I'm deeply interested in computing. I'm deeply interested in a lot of things. The new blossoming of terrestrial humanity could be described as urbanism. In each of these areas, space, urbanism, and computing, I think the industries will move in directions that will surprise most people, and at a pace that will continue to surprise us. For example, I think most people, if asked, would say the computer revolution is mostly over, but the evidence I'm presented with suggests it has only begun, and that the dramatic rate at which computing developed in its first wave will continue <I>exponentially</I>.
I think I know where it's going. This is my other major invention. My essay is not complete without description of it. My core thought is that information is not data. Data is the emergent medium, but information is, narrowly speaking, rendered markup, and, broadly speaking, in the emergent nomenclature, virtual experience. This subdivides into a spectrum of applications. Ultraviolet is the classical arts, which convey experiences to us, their patrons. Their markup is things like scores, plays, painterly aesthetics. Then there's the scholastic disciplines, and all our literature, and the technical design disciplines, and all of these have to do with overwhelmingly one thing: visual representation.
This visual representation, this information, is printed words, the actual shapes of the letters, and of the words, and it is diagrammatical imagery and pictorial imagery of every type, and then it is like a tunnel, leading deeper, because we sometimes see paintings of rooms full of paintings. In fact, we often see such pictures, in fact, all our pictures are ultimately of that sort. I predict that that is the evolutionary direction of digital media.
Virtual Reality somehow, today, hovers on the fringes of computing. It's the most esoteric lab work, and the strange world of gaming. Now, inevitably, we will extend it more and more into everybody's real lives: our work. This is how more of us will become designers, planners, and analysts: people who could never have, in the past, afforded or accessed extensive libraries and laboratories of various sorts, and who even still can't, will, in the near future, have access to those facilities. But this will not be lists of files, certainly, or even (just) interlinked "pages", but more, actually, like actual libraries ... where you walk into a room, beautifully furnished, and on the shelves and tables there are books. Select a book and turn the pages. And you can make copies and put them in your folder and then, in another place, you can spread them out and study them, make even more focused notes, assemble them into, say, letters, in envelopes, and send those envelopes to other people, who will find them in their mailboxes, which are in rooms - thinking Second Life.
These applications require an algorithm for describing an infinity of space. That, to me, is the key point, the key principle that actually defines them. Our computers, their physical memories, can handle this, it's our software that needs to develop. We need to take the next step, but that step isn't incremental. Describing limited space, and, by extension, severely limited space, simply won't do. But there is a transitional reality, something between lists of file names and arbitrary renderings of pages and the unattainable, evolutionary ultimate expression of the principle. That transitional methodology is along the lines of wysiwyg web design, multi-layered web pages, browser zoom implementations, and interactive lists.
I know it sounds crazy. I actually am a crazy person. I have no intention of communicating with anyone by any means other than e-mail, and for people to get to know me better, I publish blogs. I have a very settled but very out of the ordinary life that revolves around a beautiful house (that I lucked into) and wild and fairly amazing garden, a kitchen ... a laptop computer and endless web pages. Nothing, really, is going to change that at all, and it's too strange to readily invite people in - I have to do it unreadily ... virtually.
