think or thwim

Rod moved to Costa Rica in June, but before he moved he was living in this charming house at the Earthaven Ecovilage near Asheville, NC. His housing expenses were about $40 per month including community fees. Utilities cost him nothing.

It doesn’t look like it from the road, but the hobbit house is earth-sheltered. By coupling the building to the ground and using passive solar techniques, the interior stays comfortable in the summer without using fossil fuels. A wood stove provides the heat during the winter.

Most of the materials came from the site. The house is on a terrace cut into the side of a mountain. Using an excavator, the top soil was removed and stockpiled to be used on the roof. The subsoil was used to make the adobe bricks that would form the walls.

The south wall is cinva rammed adobe blocks. The blocks themselves are a clay/straw/sand/water mixture. They are held in place by mortar also made of clay/sand/water. Around windows and in tight spots, the same clay/straw/sand/water mixture is built up by hand (it’s called cob). There is no insulation in the south wall. That works in because the wall is massive, and it’s shaded in the summer and warmed by the sun in the winter. The mass slows heat movement and tends to even out the temperature extremes.

Above the concrete foundation are a couple of rows of feed sacks filled with gravel. Concrete is permeable, and if adobe were set directly on it, water could wick up through the foundation to the adobe walls. On a typical wood framed house a rubber moisture barrier keeps the wood dry. Here, any water that gets to the gravel is pulled back down by gravity and drained out the bottom of the wall.

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This photo of Victoria Crater was taken October 3, 2006 at 3:27 pm local Mars time. The rover, Opportunity, is at the lip of the crater. Opportunity’s tracks and the shadow of it’s camera mast are visible in the enlargement below. Those are sand dunes in the bottom of the crater.

Victoria Crater is approximately 800 meters (about half a mile) wide. The photographer was the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at an altitude of 268.6 km (167.9 miles) above the surface. The scale is 1 pixel = 12 inches. Click on this picture:

Opportunity arrived at the crater 5 days before the picture was taken after a 7 mile journey from the original landing site. The trip took 951 sols (or martian days). One sol equals 24 hours 39 minutes.

A series of severe dust storms throughout July 2007 have been blocking sunlight from reaching Opportunity’s solar panels, and the rover has been hunkered down to conserve power. The panels normally supply 700 watt hours per day. Below 150 watt hours, the batteries can’t fully charge. At the worst point, 99% of the sunlight was blocked and the solar panels only took in 128 watt hours per day, which is an emergency situation. To conserve power further, Opportunity only sent a signal back to Earth every 3 days.

However, there haven’t been any new storms for the last two weeks, and the sky is beginning to clear. Opportunity (and the Spirit rover on the other side of the planet) have started moving a little. The current plan is to drive Opportunity down into Victoria Crater at Duck Bay.

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If I’m ever stranded on a frozen mountain due to a plane wreck, the first thing I’m going to eat when the airline peanuts run out is my left arm. It is nearly worthless. I’ve been watching it for some time, and it seems to have three basic functions:

• Balance.
• Assist the useful right arm by holding things still.
• Emergency food source.

I don’t want to replace the whole arm, just from the elbow down. We already have the technology to implant electrodes into the nerves of the stump to control simple devices by thought. For me, the most obvious replacement is a crusher. It would be a mechanical hand with an opposable thumb, but the grip would be thousands of times stronger than my current grip. It would still be able to perform 95% of the tasks that my left hand does, and supergrip would be a good trade off for the other 5%.

Interchangeable hands would be ideal. I need a prosthetic lower arm with a socket to hold various tools. This would be a good starter/gift set:

• Crusher - clearly awesome.
• Flat fingers - good for flipping pancakes, and swatting flies. Could have credit card magnetic strip. At the grocery store checkout I could swipe my pinky.
• Hammer - however, a crusher would probably be tough enough to use as a blunt object.
• Scissors - good for trimming bushes to look like animals.
• iPhone
• Hook - for dressing like a pirate.

They could sell them in a six-pack with a carrying case like they do with cordless power tools.

The wife pointed out that I do a lot of typing with my left hand. That and the fact that I fly a lot are the reasons I haven’t lopped it off yet. In a few years brain implants should progress to the point that I will be able to type using my thoughts. If the prosthetic lower arm can have a small storage compartment for beef jerky, there will be one used left arm on Craigslist, but I suspect it won’t be worth much when supercrusher replacement hands become widely available. Left hands are the CRT monitors of the future.

l’Hydroptère is a 60 foot sailboat, but when it’s moving it doesn’t spend much time in the water. Above 12 knots, it pops out of the water and rides on hydrofoils, which look and act like small airplane wings under water. When riding on it’s foils the Hydroptère has very little surface area in contact with the water (2 square meters) and therefore, very little drag.

• 1975: A team of aeronautical engineers, aircraft part manufacturers and sailors managed to convince Eric Tabarly of the project’s viability.
• 1987-1992: Alain Thébault built a 1/3 scale model.
• 1st October 1994: l’Hydroptère’s first flight.
• January 27, 2007: Reached it’s top speed of 47.2 knots - shown in the video below.

hytroptere.com

Here are some smaller hydrofoil sailboats that you can buy:

• Hobie Trifoiler (no longer in production)
• Moth
• Windrider Rave

:: Fresh Creation

From the 5th Annual End of the World Tour.

Imagine this 33 year old Virginian getting up to do his work thinking “Oh man. I gotta go work on that stupid declaration of independence.”

-Bill McDonough on Thomas Jefferson

Find something more important than you and dedicate your life to it.

- Dan Dennent

Paul Graham is one of the clearest thinkers I’ve read. This essay is something everyone should read in high school.

There’s another sense of “not everyone can do work they love” that’s all too true… One has to make a living, and it’s hard to get paid for doing work you love. There are two routes to that destination:

• The organic route: as you become more eminent, gradually to increase the parts of your job that you like at the expense of those you don’t.
• The two-job route: to work at things you don’t like to get money to work on things you do.

- Paul Graham | How To Do What You Love

If this doesn’t make you laugh, you haven’t spent enough time on the internets.

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

Before:

After:

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A while ago I signed up to get the weekly best of Overheard in New York by email. That was a good move on my part. Here are a few samples:

Woman on cell: There’s only one word for this party. And it is “epic.”

–CPW and 110th St.

Hobo: Can you spare a quarter?
20-ish guy: I’m broke. I owe the government 70 thousand dollars.
Hobo, after a pause: Would you like a quarter?

–Madison Square Garden

Small girl’s voice from inside tube: Repeat, I have the prisoner, over.

–McDonald’s playland, 69th & Metro, Queens

Bimbette: Yeah, she’s a vegetarian now. No turkey, no meat — nothing. But I don’t know what she’s gonna do at Thanksgiving, because my aunt makes the best eggplant. Wait — is eggplant meat?

–A train

Father to three-year-old son: You pinky-promised you wouldn’t act like a bastard!

–Bronx Zoo

Really tall guy folding himself into a Toyota Corolla: Don’t let me forget — I have a pocket full of meat!

–7th St, between Ave A & B

Guy #1: Yo B., let’s cross here.
Guy #2: Did you just call me Babe?
Guy #1: No, niggah, I called you B.! You outta your fuckin’ mind?

–Spring & W. Broadway