cc: file, Diane Cluff, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Sara and Des Penny, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, and Lloyd and Luana Warner.
"I sent the following E-Mail on Friday to 38 friends:
I want to expand on my thoughts about Bill a little bit for you kids. I think a good place to start is with eight of the e-mail responses I received relative to the above announcement:
Bill Bavinger and I met through a friend from Evan & Sutherland days, Paul Sovelious. Bill had started a forum called The Third Coast Computer Grahics Society and I was invited to give a talk about some of the work we had done at Landmark Graphics at one of their meetings in the Architecture Building on Rice University. It turns out Bill had `snuck' into the Seismic Acoustics Laboratory and used our Genisco Space-Graph vibrating mirror based true 3-D display device to evaluate some of his 3-D visualization projects back in 1981. When we met there was a magic and a friendship and a common quest which has created an eternal bond. Many others feel this same bond with Bill.
As I have listened to Bill describe his quest dozens of times over the last decade, I have come to know a sensitive and opinionated, insecure and yet definitive, brilliant and sometimes alcoholic, insightful and judgemental, mentor and excellent teacher, computer scientist, ecologist, architect, designer, information guru, and paranoid genius. Being somewhat homophobic, Bill is one of a half a dozen male friends I am willing to say I love (kids, this statement is in no way sexual, as the use of the word love seems to imply in today's sick society). I love Bill Bavinger for his strengths and for his weaknesses. He called me grasshopper. He was truly a good friend and would have done anything reasonable (and possibly even unreasonable things) I requested. The same was true of requests he made of me. In a very real sense he was the twentieth century's, and specifically the information age's, Leonardo de Vinci. Bill was a true renaisance man, often fighting windmills in his own mind. If time forms one axis of a surface and projects and friends form the orthogonal axis, the sheet describing my future had a significant change in form last Wednesday.
Bill grew up in a house without walls. I had the opportunity to see this castle when I went to Mickey Edward's funeral (see http://www.walden3d.com/ hrnmen/1997/9745.html). Bill's Father is a very celebrated modern artist who was chairman of the Art Department at The University of Oklahoma in Norman for many years. He, like Ken Turner, painted light. Unlike Ken Turner, his paintings are not tied to the reality we see every day, rather they are tied to the eternities. When Bill was three years old his father started to build their house. The architect was Bruce Goff, Chairman of the Department of Architecture at the university, and one of the few architects of whom one can speak of in the same breath as his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright (page 455 of Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Brendan Gill). The house is built around an oil well drill stem pipe. There are wires which hold up the roof as it winds around the 100+ foot tall pipe like a spiral sea shell. The weight of the roof is counter- balanced by a bridge over a large ravine to the south. As you walk up to the front door there is this ravine, and the associated pond to the right, a mirror glass wall reflecting the trees and the vegetation, and an 80 foot vertical castle turret wall of natural stone and chunks of glass. The house blends into the environment so well it looks like it is not there on photographs I took during my visit.
There are no rooms in the house. As you walk into the front door you see a large cavern, not unlike a lighted cave, with windows looking out and providing natural light. There is a stream running through the middle of the house with a dozen large trained goldfish. The kitchen is off to the right and the dinning room sits in the center of the main castle turret. It was easy to sit in the dinning room and imagine a young Bill and a younger Bob rock climbing the wall. There are several beautiful metamorphic `rose rocks' cemented into the wall and floor. To the left is a social area, with a circular yellow carpeted bench. Adjacent to this is a spiral staircase which goes up to the pods where people sleep. Each pod is made of rebar steel and hangs from the ceiling. They have spherical bases and in-laid waterbeds level with the floor. There is a curtian which can be drawn around each pod for privacy. The only door inside the house is in front of the toilet, like the door in a public restroom. This `door' is across the hall from a door opening out onto the bridge across the ravine. At the top of the spiral is Bill's room. There are two large sheets of glass and the top of the stone spiral. Being in this room was like being outside. Bill talked about the lightening storms and how it was like the lightening was in the room with him. He also said during the winter there would be a couple of inches of ice form on the inside of large glass walls and it was like sleeping outside.
I could go on and on about the house, the lot, the large rock with a fountain under it which makes it look like it is floating in water, the stonehenge type structures, the paper bag pottery Bill's Mom Nancy made, etc. However, I won't. Rather I will ask you all to remember one of the times when I took you all to Arcosonti, sixty miles north of Phoenix. Paleo Soleri visited the Bavinger house before he did a lot of his writing and work, and it is obvious a lot of his concepts were influenced by what he saw in Norman, Oklahoma. I can imagine what it was like for Bill to grow up in a world without walls. It was similar, in many ways, to my growing up on the farm near Cedar City.
Bill participated in our first serious organizational meeting for Walden 3-D, Inc. I brought in a consultant from Chicago named Rick Duran to facilitate the meeting. Ray Gardner came down. Chris Schmidt, Townsend Dunn, and several others participated. Sherry Sump handled all of the arrangements. We met in the Stoffer Hotel at Greenway Plaza. Bill's ideas and experience became the driving force of the meeting. Over the subsequent years Bill participated in Walden 3-D bringing The Buckminster Fuller Institute to Houston to host The World Game here; he was involved in The Barker Texas Project (http://www.walden3d.com/w3d/design/W3D89A); he went to Utah with Mic Patterson of ASI and others involved in that Walden 3-D planning meeting, and stayed with me at Uncle Lloyd's; he was right in the middle of the Columbus Project we spent a couple of years on; he was with Roice and I when we went to Mexico for the eclipse and helped survey Monte Alban and one of his students built the the resulting 3-D Planetarium Presentation of the ruins; he introduced me to IDEF modeling and the concepts we built as the Oil & Gas Knowledge Backbone; he was involved in the founding of HyperMedia Corporation, in the founding of Advanced Structures Incorporated where Roice works, in hiring Sara to color all of the counties in the United States, etc., etc., etc. Over the time I have worked with Bill, it is safe to say many of the ideas which I have found exciting have come from him and his insights in information theory.
I won't attempt to describe Bill's ideas in detail. Partly because you kids are most likely not interested in this kind of stuff right now, and largely because I'm not smart enough to understand it all good enough to explain it. However, I do want to provide enough of a description you each will understand why I feel there was `a major disturbance in the force' last Wednesday night. I am not using the Star Wars quote to make light of the seriousness of my topic. In fact, I was touched when Bill's and my friend and colleague Sam LeRoy said he woke up about midnight Wednesday feeling something very bad had happened.
Back in the early 1650s the French philosopher Decartes laid the foundation for our modern mathematics with his invention of the cartesian coordinate system. He was looking for a natural coordinate system which tied directly between physical nature and his mathematics. Descartes invention of the Cartesian Coordinate System as an arbitrary framework has become the information framework of our logic, our mathematics, our calculas, the street layout in Nauvoo and Salt Lake City, and our society. More recently Einstein was looking for a natural coordinate system within which to develop the `theory of everything.' He never found it. Bill Bavinger found this coordinate system. In Bill's primary area of interest, his discovery allows the information barrier between natural systems and built form to be bridged. Conceptually Bill's work allows the integration and cross-referencing of light, matter, space, and information in a natural coordinate system. He developed elegant ways of using his concepts so a digital computer can become an analog computer, no longer requiring an operating system like DOS or UNIX. He was technically positioned to replace MicroSoft.
In my field of study, we plan to use the infinite grid to keep track of information like number of wells drilled, depth to geopressure, and hydrocarbon production histories all across North America and eventually across the world in simple spread-sheets. These data can then be differenced, compared, integrated, and used for doing trend analysis. An interesting example that Bill did just before we helped him move to Norman (http://www.walden3d.com/hrnmen/1997/9744.html), was to take 800 stocks from the U.S. stock market and perform a principle component analysis, then having identified key endpoints from the raw data mapping each stock in the 3-D space of a hypersphere, the 2-D projection of which is called a manifold. This turns out to be a natural and a very easily understandable way to comprehend data with multiple variables. One other example of the infinite grid has to do with companies involved in building things. Bill used a $75 CD with every phone number in the U.S. on it, along with a tax code defining the type of business and the latitude and longitude of each phone +/- 5 meters to build a map of the density of businesses in the building industry across the U.S.A. We posted maps displayed on a Landmark workstation at http://www.walden3d.com/SIC.
There was an interesting article in Discovery a couple of months ago about how a scientist has used manifolds and 6-D tensor math to unravel the dance of the honey bee. In Bill's mind, his technology would allow man and nature to live in true harmony. He talked about a time in the future when someone from outer space would visit earth and would fly across a lush green and blue landscape and not see a sign of human activity. Like his Dad's house in Norman, the human activity would be integrated with the natural environment. I hope we will be able to salvage and implement his ideas, for in my mind, Bill's technology is the coordinate system for building the city of Zion, which the scriptures talk about extensively."