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"Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trimtab."

Buckminster Fuller (interview with Barry Farrell in Playboy (February 1972))

empirical 6 Aug 22
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5 comments

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Similar to the "butterfly effect" small things do really matter. We are here because of an infinite number of small things had to happen in the right order.

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Howard Huges Spruce Goose had set next to the Queen Marry for many years. I had looked for it a few years back and it had vanished. I think they put it in a museum to preserve it. It was something to see those 2 giant objects in the Long Beach harbor they made even the biggest yachts seem tinny.

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I like it !

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Individualism is futility!
If ya don't have help ya have no one worth helping !

1

Yes, small things can be very powerful, for good or ill, if they happen to be in exactly the right place.

DES32 Level 4 Aug 22, 2018
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