What's the Source of Value for Students' Gigs?

I was chatting with Spencer Padway yesterday and he asked me a very relevant question. He wanted to know how I thought the students of the "web design" school would be able to compete with the labor and talent pools overseas, the infamous "outsourcers".

In essence, he wanted to know what the business model was for my students, how would they take the information they learned from participating in the educational activities into the real world to earn a living.

This is a very important and often overlooked aspect of learning "web development", and it's one I want to address directly and prepare my students for. Ideally I'd like to place all students in jobs or with work enough to live well.

I want the business model of the school and the business models of the students to have a similar relationship to a garden and the plants growing in it. The garden produces what the plants produce and the plants too.

But who wants our crops? Especially when they're on sale so much cheaper just a hemisphere away?

What's in a Business Model?
In simple terms, a business model is an algorithm that specifies how one expects to satisfy some expenses consistently over time.

One super-simple model that I really love is Kiyosaki's: You have income and you have expenses. You own assets, which are anything that puts money in your pocket, and liabilities, defined as anything that takes money out of your pocket.

The name of game, the generalized algorithm, is straightforward: Reduce your expenses and increase your income until the latter exceeds the former, then invest the difference by purchasing more assets.

Given the above super-simple definition of "business model" and the model of viability and wealth generation outlined, there are three aspects I want to address, and in doing so I hope to elucidate both the interlocking projects discussed on this blog and the path to long-term viability I see for my students. To wit:

• Reducing expenses
• Increasing income to adequate levels and maintaining it
• Information Age Assets

Expenses
In programming we often take the tack of solving the general problem that some particular problem represents, and then apply the general solution to the particular problem and solve it. This works surprisingly often and is almost always easier and feels as magical as it sounds.

Broadly speaking, I advocate a Permaculture garden with energy efficient home and attached energy harvesting gear to supply its own power. For transportation I'm developing powered kites, no really.

"You can solve all your problems in a garden" -Geoff Lawton. It's true. There's a ton more to say, but for now on the subject of expense reduction I'm going to bunt and say "Permaculture" and continue.

Maintaining Adequate Levels of Income
How do you find reasons for people to give you money, and then do it again?

That's the name of the game in modern business. That's what it boils down to at the end of the day, and in the internet age the reasons can become very esoteric indeed.

The TriGalactic game is a lot of things, and one of those is essentially a good reason for people to send in five bucks a month.

But why? And how do you find people to whom your answer to that question appeals?

Let's answer those questions in reverse order. I'm going to assume that TriGalactic has enough appeal, or that Student X has enough appeal, to attract customers, and address the question of how to find them.

Information Age Assets
There is an "asset" that's free, you don't have to pay for it, that requires little or no work (but can benefit from it), and that has the potential for open-ended returns, that is the returns are non-linear and can continue into the future, and it cannot lose money, i.e. it can never become a liability.

Furthermore, it is purely informational, so you can transfer it online and it has no direct environmental impact whatsoever.

As if this weren't enough, it has additional properties that answer the question above of how to find customers that want your particular value. It can connect you within a short time to a huge number of potential clients or customers thus providing the amount of work you need to meet your expenses.

I'm talking about the Dendrite Network, originally part of TriGalactic that I had planned to slowly "phase" into the real world. When I needed a social app to use as a teaching project for the school I figured it would be the perfect OpenSocial application.

The Dendrite Network, when used with a GameSeed that has a multi-tier affiliate program associated with it, becomes a sort of generic "amplifier" network both for the originator of the GameSeed and the transmitters who participate in the seed's propagation.

The Dendrite Network
In this day and age, I see a primary purpose of the Internet and computers in general as supplying you with whatever you require quickly and efficiently. Put another way, the web's job (one of them) is to connect you with the people who can supply your needs at a price you can afford.

This is the flip-side of the coin of finding enough customers.

The DN is designed to propagate "things", and multi-tier affiliate programs for those things give transmitters an additional motivation for participating in the propagation of quality "products". Any "product" attached to a multi-tier affiliate program that comes through the Dendrite Network becomes an asset with the properties described above.

To summarize, the Dendrite Network:

• Connects producers and customers of products.
• Allows rewarding of the intermediate transmitters. With properly designed affiliate programs these rewards can become significant. Participation in the network provides free quasi-passive "assets".
• Serves as a teaching project for our school.

Due to the generalized nature of the Dendrite Network it can handle both finding computer work for our students as well as finding healthy food (See "Promoting Permaculture Food Parks" in the previous blog post Everyone Eats, this ties back in to reducing expenses.)

Who wants our crops?
I am of the firmly held belief that viability in business is directly related to the value you provide your customers. If you're not providing a true value, then you won't last long in business, and conversely if you really are providing something of value then you'll seldom have a problem finding enough work.

The reason the DN can act as "mini-assets" is just that it provides the transmitters the opportunity to contribute something of value, namely their help "routing" the knowledge of the existance of something worthwhile to someone.

Really, if you can't provide something of more value than your brother programmers in the East then I'm certainly not willing to help you rip people off. There are a lot of ways to provide your customers value beyond simply writing code and html markup, and we'll explore those as we go, but I've already given you what I consider to be one of the most sure-fire: Aligning Levels, model on the blog, and directions for applying it on the FunkyGalaxy Mailing list.

If you are truly aligned on each of those levels then my experience indicates that you will never have to worry or struggle for clients or customers or what-have-you. If you're living your mission, you'll be taken care of in a way that seems magical. If you're not, then that's step one.

Introduction to Permaculture (excerpt)

A long quote from the pamphlet "Introduction to Permaculture" from Yankee Permaculture. I've clipped out what I think, in my warped biased mind, are some of the best bits. Mostly the parts where Mollison talks like Bucky really. This is agriculture the way Bucky's work was architecture, the synthesis of science and mystery. Enjoy:

We deal with the Earth, which has a fairly constant energy input from other parts of the universe. We are dealing with energy which has a renewable source, the sun. Between the source and the sink is where we intervene. The more useful storages to which we can direct energy between the source and the sink, the better we are as designers. So what we are up to is making an efficient set of storages that are useful to man. Some of these storages may be useful in the creation of other storages. The amount of complexity we can build into that flow, the amount that we can direct to useable storages in order to hold back energy until we start to use it, that's where the skill of the designer lies. Furthermore, a lot of energies unusable in a mechanical sense are usable in the biological sense. So we need biological as well as mechanical storages.

Energy can be transferred from one form to another, but it cannot disappear or be destroyed or created. So we have a choice in the type of flow that we allow through the system. We can determine whether it is stored or whether we let it leave.

That is the choice we have with water, with rainfall. We can store it or we can let it leave; and if we let it leave, it becomes unavailable to us.

If we would recover it, there is a lot of work to making it available again. Engineers go down to the valley, because everybody can see there is water down in the valley. So they put a block in the valley and the water backs up behind it and you have water, a big lake down in the valley where it is least useful. Where

it came from was up on the hills. Had the engineers stored the water where it came from, then they could have run it through all sorts of systems before they let it escape into the valley. The closer to the source that we can intervene, the greater use is the network that we can set up. So we edge up close to the source to start to intervene in the flow. It's not the amount of rainfall that counts, it is the number of duties we induce that water to perform that counts.

Resources are something you can feed into a system and increase its productivity, or its yield, or the number of useful storages. But if you continue beyond that point of productivity, then the system itself collapses. And that comes down to the statement that any integrated system can only accept that amount of energy that it can productively use. So you can over-manure anything, over-heat anything; you can over-plow anything. Whether we are talking about money or manure, you can put too much of it in. What then happens is first you start to get less and less increase in yield and then more and more increase in a lethal factor. You can't continue to pour in more of the same thing and get a continued increase in yield.

Then there are categories of resources that are of a totally different sort. There are resources which are unaffected by use. You can look at a beautiful view all day and it really doesn't affect the view. Information is such a resource. [But information is preserved by use. -DH]

There is another category of things that is interesting in that they increase if you use them. The more you use them, the more that they increase. Some forms of browse fall into that category. Some categories of animals and plants increase each other by interaction, and some other categories of resource also do that. And some resources, particularly quick turnover resources, simply decrease if you don't use them. Annual grass is a good example. If not used, the amount of annual grass in the system decreases. To some extent, so does firewood in a fire-prone situation. It accumulates as a fuel for wildfire when all of it is consumed at once.

But most resources lie in the category of resources that need to be managed to maintain them. They are those which decrease if used. We will call them finite resources.

There is still another category made up of resources that, if you use them, decrease everything else. We have a good example of that in uranium or plutonium. Plutonium in use tends to lay waste to other resources and some of those uses are horrific. Things like dioxins, if used as a resource, start to decrease the general resource.

So resources have a sort of hierarchy of management and a hierarchy of being beneficial or not beneficial. Most of the things that make us happy either are very manageable or there are plenty of them. There a few things which we think we need, but which make us miserable.

...it is not the number of elements in a system that is important, but the degree of functional organization of those elements - beneficial functions.

Yield is the sum of useful energy stores. It is the sum of energy conserved and generated in systems. It is never just product yield, not the number of pounds of tomatoes, or pounds of fish, or of acorns - which is the normal way people have of measuring yield - but it is the sum of the energy in useful storages. Yield is a function of design, and it is theoretically unlimited. That is, I haven't seen a system where we can't, by better design, increase the yield.

As the design itself is a function of our understanding of the system, so does the yield also depend upon the degree to which we understand things. It is the intellect that decides all these things, rather than any extrinsic factors. I am not quite sure what the intellect is. I have put it as our ability to understand, which may not be intellectual but empathetical.

Between the source and the sink, diversity increases: energy stores may increase and organizational complexity may increase. Our job is to convert those pauses in the flux of some of those categories into beneficial resources. It is the number of niches in a system that will allow a number of species and varieties to co-survive. It is the woodpecker's hole within the forest.

Now, again, the number of niches in a system depends on the design of the system. So now we have come to the active case. In situations which should be saturated with species, and with yield, we can make a vast difference by seeing where we can create more space, often by very small movements. [After first seeing where the unfilled niches, the empty spaces, exist, and filling them. Temperate ecosystems, in particular, often are incomplete.-DH] The numbers of pairs of pigeons breeding on a cliff depends on the number of ledges. It is easy to increase the ledges. Often, what is holding down a yield isn't the basic factor of food. In fact, food ceilings are very rare things to bump. It is some other factor totally unrelated to food. There are tons of food [acorns] around this environment [Wilton, New Hampshire], with nothing eating it.

What we must do is to see how things work, how different things work. Tribal lore prescribes that one should only carry out necessitous acts, that non-necessitous behavior tends to be very destructive. The rest follows. Therefore, one apologizes for whatever one has to do and does it. But you don't see people doing unnecessary acts.

Now there are different sorts of acts. There are necessitous acts and harmful acts. But there are also beneficial acts. And that gives us another hypothesis - that you probably will get more good back than you design. And this seems also to be true. What has probably been happening from the beginning of a consciously designed system is that when we put three elements in conjunction so that they are pretty harmonious, other beneficial results come out that we didn't design. Now that has happened almost without exception.

This is something that isn't being taught: that once we have done one thing correctly it goes on and it proceeds to do a lot of other things by itself. This seems to be happening. So it looks like there is something going on there, and it is very hard to analyze. Sometimes you make a single move, simple and right, which you intend to be beneficial, and you discover, if you stand back and observe it and leave it alone, that it goes on and gives you maybe another 10 benefits which you didn't count on. Then, if you look into it closely, although you put it together for a single reason - you had reasoned it out - you see that once you did that, there were 12 or 15 other reasons why you should have done it. I think we all know examples of this.

When somebody clamped the greenhouse onto the front of the house instead of standing it out there in the sun, he may have done it for a single reason, to heat the house, perhaps, or simply to make it easier to tend it. But then lots of other good things came out of that.

We are not quite sure what they are doing, but the aboriginal groups go around polishing up their country with little ceremonies. They are fairly secretive about what they do, but certainly they are doing a little countryside adjustment. They have to do a little ceremony to keep the springs flowing along certain a mountainside. We laugh at them. We know those springs will flow whether they have a ceremony there or not. But if we take their religions away, the springs will stop flowing. You don't talk to idiots about advanced concepts. Anyway, they won't tell us much about what they know. I suppose they would worry about what we would do with the information.

There is something we ought to be sitting on the floor and talking about a lot. There is this harmonic that, if we could get hold of it, would give us a lot of understanding, a lot of control over events. Our job is to put things in the right place and then let them rip. But to get one in the right place, we have to have a lot of information about it. Anything we are trying to place, whether it is a building or a tree or an animal or a road or a structure or a person, we have to know these things about it. We have to know its intrinsic functions, what is natural for it to do,the things it can't help doing by virtue of just being itself, being alive. Some animals and plants must spawn and they do that in different ways. Then there are things that we can categorize as yield, which we might be interested in. These may be of two or three levels or natures. There are what we might call direct yields. Chickens lay eggs. Then perhaps there are yields which are derived, secondary, or processed yields. Chicken manure will yield methane. And we have to know what the different yields are.

It also pays to know how elements function. They have behaviors, things that they do. They walk around or they sway about. They have properties. They will or will not reflect light. They have properties by reason of what they are. They have a color. They behave. They have a whole set of interactions and stimulus-response behaviors. Behaviors are short -term and long-term, too. Too often we comment on the short-term behavior of things, which isn't how they behave in the long term. Our science, and particularly psychology, suffers a great deal by not looking at the long-term behavior.

Now if we knew enough, if we had enough information, then a lot of these things could be listed for each element in the system, each entity. And then we could make a tremendous amount of design use of it. But they are not the things that are being listed as knowledge about the entities. You can obtain knowledge of almost anything about a tree except these things. Bad luck! Very little is known about the properties of a tree. As to the yield, it may be almost unknowable. I once tried to find out how people have used walnut trees. I found out that there is a people who base their whole culture on the walnut; other people may base their culture on bamboo. Or you can just take the walnuts by themselves. It is up to you.

If you have a fair idea of what is known about something, then you are able to place it so that it can function, so that its intrinsic function is possible to it. Then it will give its yields and its secondary yields can be taken advantage of, and it will behave in a friendly way because we put it near to things that are beneficial to it.

There is an enormous difference between the way we make a design in permaculture and the way an agriculturist would make it. Really, what we are up to is trying to let things function in a natural way.

Pretty breathtaking, hey?

Permaculture is why I look at the Great Garbage Patch as free candy.

First draft Tensegrity Kite Cell

First draft Tensegrity Kite Cell
Originally uploaded by trigalactic

This is a different design to Alexander G. Bell's. I wanted to make a true Tensegrity design to take advantage of the structural efficiencies.

The hallmark of a Tensegrity design is that none of the compression members (the coffee stirrers in this kite model) touch each other. They never experience anything but a direct inline compression.

This cell is easy to build. You take three struts and put them in a jig that holds them in the proper geometric relationship. You clip on two sails, one to the top and one to the bottom, then clip on the three tension cables. Release your new cell from the jig and repeat as desired.

I want to add sensors, wireless mesh comms, micro-aero-turbines for power generation, and small microprocessors to make each cell a sort of flocking robot. The corners of each strut-and-sail triangle can clip onto the edges of other cells to create a variety of tessellations in a plane. I'm still thinking about ways to stack planes to make volume-filling kites. That's one of the reasons I made this model, to have something concrete to handle and help figure that out.

Crane to Heaven: Tensegrity Catapults

Ken Snelson invented Tensegrity, Bucky stole it or liberated it, promoted it to the World as a engineering technology, a way to do so much "more with less" that everyone on Earth could be provided for in comfort, without "disadvantaging" anyone.

It has still yet to be fully appreciated as a tool for building machines and structures.

For example, Bucky pointed out that the towers built out of compression-only struts and tension-only tendons could serve as compression struts in bigger towers. You can repeat this fractal-wise to make truly colossal structures. They would weigh next to nothing, yet be stable and able to support tonnes.

People have been exploring what is called "actuated" Tensegrity, which basically means controlling the structures you build by changing either the struts, the tendons, or both under computer control. By deforming the tension "quasi-membrane" you can change the geometry of the structure without giving up its strength and resilience.

Take a look at Ken Snelson's "Arch" structure above.

Unlike a normal arch, this one doesn't require support at both ends. You can disconnect one end and the structure would remain standing. You can start from a base and, by selectively lengthening and shortening certain tendons, create a tower that conforms to a wide range of trajectories.

Let's say you build one of these towers. You use elastic tendons, and you allow for a way to "draw" or tighten the tendons to bend the arch, storing the energy in the elastic.

Imagine attaching some weight or load to the end and using the bounciness of the arch to carry it through the air and drop it back down again somewhere else.

Because the arch is basically a spring, you'd be storing energy in it when you lifted rather than expending it . When you put your load back down, you'd get back most of the energy you put into lifting it (neglecting thermodynamic losses.)

So there's a terrific new form of crane, especially when you consider that you can make them as big as Godzilla and they only become more efficient. But wait, there's more.

A reusable non-polluting path to space?

I love space and everything about it. One day I intend to visit it and take a pee-pee. (It both freezes and boils at the same time. In the sunlight? That's gotta be nice!) But rockets, as fun and sexy as they are, tend to be terribly messy, and hard on the air.

(Not all of them. You can use hydrogen peroxide as fuel and react it with a platinum catalyst and it makes a pretty decent, totally non-polluting rocket. The exhaust is steam.)

Well, you know how a bullwhip makes a noise because the tip is going super-sonic at the end of the curl?

Well, I haven't run the numbers, but what if you were to make a giant, say, kilometer long tensegrity "whip"?

You need to reach about 8kps to make it to LEO. Even if you can't get that fast with the catapult, you could still get a huge kinetic head start. Throw your rocketship into the air and then light 'er up!

Psychological Levels

This is not my idea, it's an NLP model. I can't recall who or where I got it from, and I couldn't find it on a quick google search, so here it is. If you know where I can link to this online somewhere please let me know.

This is sort of a set of levels, each "meta" to the one below it, that you can find in human psychology. It's a model, not a theory, so apply it or not as useful. I follow the originators of NLP in refusing to assign a "truthiness" to the concept(s).

The human being can be modeled as having the following levels. Read from the bottom, most concrete, to the upper, most essential, levels to find the path to God, read down to know Dharma.

• Mission - What are you here on Earth to do? When accessed even atheists speak in trans-personal "more important than myself" language.
  
• Identity - Often considered the "top" level, this is your face, and the internal feelings and chronic tensions of it. It's also your immune system and other homeostatic processes. Mentally it's whatever you say "I am ..." to.
  
• Values - These are your, uh, values. They're usually thought of in timeless terms, existing in a non-temporal realm even though in your life they are subject to change.
  
• Beliefs - Mental/emotional structures in the tissues of the whole body that process and organize sensory input and history to synthesize one's ongoing "story".
  
• Capabilities - Basically time-sequences of behavior organized by your beliefs. You can use NLP techniques to "extract" capabilities and "install" them in others. You can also "extract" behavior-sequences from anyone you can represent internally, whether from memory or creative imagination.
  What this indicates is that anything you've ever seen (or heard or felt!) done by anyone real or imaginary, forms a sort of "library" repertoire of stuff you can do too.
  
• Behaviors - The stuff that can be described by physics, what your body is doing right now. Mostly done entirely unconsciously.
  

Each level guides the level "below" it, regulating it cybernetically to keep it within the "settings" the level specifies. Your values condition and bias your beliefs. Your capabilities are by definition the set of behaviors you you can perform, etc...

Some notes on Beliefs:

• Can be "switched" at will using techniques developed in the 70's and 80's. Put baldly: you can change your own beliefs at will using off the shelf technology. It's not even hard.
• Are always false, no matter how much you belive them. They are neurological energy and information structures in your tissues, not truth.
• You can exist with far fewer than you probably have. Doing so conserves energy. You can even exist in the absence of all belief, but it's kinda dangerous because you tend to just sit there and starve to death. However, the point is that you are not destroyed by the destruction or reprogramming of any belief or constellation of beliefs.
• Beliefs will be congruent with "higher" levels, and they constrain your capabilities. You can't do what you believe you can't, and the converse is also true.
  

Google Code Hosting is now a Gadgets Container

You can now host web gadgets on your Google Code Hosting Wiki pages, and your ghost project can be put on your iGoogle page as a gadget.

I noticed the "What's New" link on the Dendrite Network ghost project was "lit up" red, so I clicked on it and was taken here, to "announcements of the latest project hosting features"

Blow me down! Now you can have the Dendrite Network Gadget on the main page of it's own project! So neat. Here's a link to the original blog post describing it: Gadgets and Google Code

Algorithm for Pacific Home

Here is a brief rundown of the general plan that's forming:

1. Build a giant kite.
2. Load it with supplies and tools and fly it to the G.P.G.P.
3. Rebuild the kite into a research station and marine Permaculture farm.
4. Separate Ocean water into water and salt. Water goes to the greenhouse.
5. Melt the salt (probably with Solar energy.)
6. Add plastic and some oxygen. Recover synthesis gas.
7. Combine syngas with water to create carbon dioxide and hydrogen. CO2 goes to the greenhouse.
8. Use syngas and energy from hydrogen to create more Octet-truss kite. Use hydrogen for buoyancy. Create both more flying vehicles and floating stations.
9. Bring home farm produce and other products for sale. The whole process is self-funding and "exothermic".

There are a ton of details, obviously, but I wanted to sketch out the general gist.

The research station would be researching both the GPGP itself and the recycling of it's contents, as well as marine living in a Bucky-esque futopia. It would include Living Machine trials to process and purify the semi-plastic muck, and Permaculture systems to grow food and other products out of the extracted resources.

Additionally, I see the construction of a large floating station as crucial to "igniting" this effort. It gives both a conceptual locus to hang attention on and also a physical destination in the Patch to change it from some waste-"land" into a real place that you can go to and "attack".

One of the reasons I want to take such a very large kite with me is that I can then partially disassemble it and reassemble it as a home base. By carefully designing it and constructing it before ever leaving land, I can make it so that within a day of "landing" at the patch I'll have one much smaller kite and a huge floating house!

Everyone Eats

Everyone eats. It's true, right? Have you seen a hungry person today? Someone who didn't eat?

I was homeless for about four years. Much of that time I ate food that was provided by the various altruistic folks who either ran homeless "feeds" as we called them, or just left their leftover dinners and lunches out on a newspaper box.

BTW, thank you. In a very real way, anything I ever accomplish will be due to you. Rock on.

While out there, and it is out, I noticed that we fell into two main overlapping groups: mental/emotional issue sufferers and nomads.

Now the nomads are pretty cool. They are "homeless" by choice, although usually they do not, in fact, have a home in the conventionally accepted sense, so they will only rarely contest the name.

They're mostly either young kids and adults, runaways and dropouts, or old timers on a groove, lifestyle on lock and no real reason to quite settle down yet.

Now your mental or emotional (what "or"? It's always "and".) issues sufferers are a whole 'nother thing. You may not have this sort of thing where you are, but out here in California the mental hospitals and wards that cared for a lot of these folks simply shut down one day about twenty or thirty years ago. There was some reason, but it hardly matters now, but literally overnight the streets here were filled with, if you'll excuse me, "nuts".

These guys have generally either died or been locked up by now if they completely couldn't cut it out there, so the ones who are left can kinda sorta get by on their own, or in little enclaves. But it's like Victorian England in the time of Dickens out there. I'll go take some photos if you don't believe me. These guys need help.

One easy and most immediate way to make a huge impact on the lives of someone on the streets is simply to hand them something delicious and nutritious to eat. Then do it again the next day. Then repeat for at least a month or three, or until the patient is showing signs of improvement.

You may think that's cute, but ask the fellas at the Seattle House! The first thing I did when I decided to stay was go to the store and drop a chunk on healthly produce. Then I took it back home, cooked it, and put it in front of them.

They say hunger makes the best seasoning and they tell no lies.

So the nomads need good cheap-or-free healthy food readily available, and the poor outdoors out patients need basic food for life because they can't fend well enough for themselves.

When I say food, I feel I should point out that I mean "Organic, Sustainable, Humane" Humane implies vegan, or at least vegan plus dairy, honey... what can be got in harmonious symbiosis.

For it to be food something has to be organically grown, using methods that can be sustained for millions of years or more, invalving ahimsa, non-violence, no harm to animals of any kind.

To have enough food for them, of this quality, my thesis is that it has to be surplus from Permie farms, so they must be selling enough produce to keep themselves running and overproduce enough to feed local petite-fiscal friends and neighbors.

Promoting Permaculture Food Parks

Xerblin is about computer aided living. "What do you want your computer to do for you?" One button per function you want to perform with aid of your computer.

This button would be, say, "Plan menu".

It helps you create a healthy tailored menu, with "taps" into online databases of recipes and cooking and culinary communities and so on.

It also taps into another group of databases and communities, the food growers. Since you're planning your menu in advance, you'll know your grocery needs in advance, yes? Give that information to your friendly neighborhood primary food producers and they can adjust their growing and delivery cycles with the aid of sophisticated computerized models.

We'll call it "Cybercapitolacommunisticalblooie", it's cool.

With a handle on their demand, and a network to buffer unexpected fluctuations, growers can reduce expenses and operate much more efficiently. You may think efficiency would preclude surpluses that could be distributed to the poor, but in Permaculture abundance and "return of surpluses to the community" and features of the methodology. They are built in to the design system inextricably.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Molten Salt

I was thinking the other day about water purification out on the ocean. There's an old evaporation method that would leave behind lots of salt. In Permaculture anytime you have a supply or surplus of something you consider it as a resource and try to find way to employ it. So what use O Salt?

BTW, this is exactly the reason why, when my friend first told me about the GGP, I immediately exclaimed, "Wow! A huge pile of free resources just laying there for the taking in Int'l Waters!? I'm moving there!" I'm not insane, nor brilliant. I'm a Permie.

So salt, just by itself is pretty amazing stuff. Not only is it delicious, despite being made from two extremely iffy substances, chlorine and sodium, but it has useful industrial properties as well.

But where it gets really interesting is when you heat it up. When you, in fact, liquefy it.

Molten salt, it turns out, is an extremely useful liquid. I recall hearing about solar power plants in the desert that use mirrors to melt salt, which is then pumped to a storage vat or heat exchanger.

It melts at 801°C (1473°F) and becomes like water. Red hot water, but a gentle liquid that's stable at normal atmospheric pressures, nontoxic, nonflammable, and relatively easy to work with.

It's a great way to store and move heat, because it holds so much of it. But then I found "What is Molten Salt & Its Technology?" if you read one web page on molten salt this year, read that one.

Read especially the part about Molten Salt Oxidation (MSO) which is basically the funnest way I've ever heard of to do fun things with trash.

Here's the deal: You get a great big vat of salt, you beam it with concentrated sunlight or grind it in a gigantic mortar, until it gets all red hot and nice and soupy.

Then you throw in A) some trash and B) a pinch of oxygen.

The trash oxidizes, burns, but without flames, because it's "underwater" only the water is molten salt. Am I going too fast here?

The trash and the oxygen burn together in the salt bath. Liquid fire.

All the nasty molecules are broken down into simple harmless parts. Whatever trace amounts of various elements in the trash either escape as gas, fall to the bottom as "ash", or remain disolved in the soup. These all have to be collected, scrubbed from the fumes, rinsed from the salt and raked from the bottom of your vat.

If we wind up using MSO, finding ways to ensure that all the elements in the soup are accounted for, either sequestered in harmless molecular form or reused in safe industrial processes, will be one of the true challenges in this adventure. (Caring for the sea life we are sure to find is another one!)

But most of the plastic we are going to recycle is carbon and hydrogen, and these react beautifully to being oxidized in salt. All the carbon oxygen and hydrogen eventually leave the soup together as something called synthesis gas which is a mixture of CO and H₂ (carbon monoxide and hydrogen).

It's called synthesis gas because you can apparently synthesize most organic chemicals from it. You can also burn it as a fuel, or you can react the CO with H₂O to make carbon dioxide and more hydrogen.

We can feed the CO₂ to our plants, and use the hydrogen for energy and buoyancy.

We can convert the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch directly into air-for-plants and hydrogen gas!

Education Intentions

Education is about building Character, and learning about the actual structure of our Universe and how the physical energy and matter literally dance in such beautiful and intricate and lovely ways is one of the basic modes of developing the respect for life and for each other that leads to such character.

The highest known expressions of "just" matter/energy are what we can dryly call "biological systems". That's you and me buddy, and all the living critters on the globe, from the lava to the hard vacuum.

One fascinating aspect of these (us!) living systems are that they are made wholly of people. When we look around, each plant and animal and human being we see is breathing, and is a sentient being.

Only through ignorance can you escape this fact, and to dispel such ignorance is surely the use of activity, burned calories, over priceless time, called Education.

When we created lens that allowed us to examine living beings on a very small scale, we discovered something outlandish. All these living beings we see, ourselves not excepted, are again themselves made of living beings.

Now, a bit further down the line, we have a much greater knowledge of these tiny people, and it turns out they've had a civilization going for a couple of billion years. If you find this cool, check out "Microcosmos" by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, it could be the first time you will have seen the true dimensions of life on Earth.

My friends, you and I and all the multicellular beasties are latecomers. The tiny ones rule here and have for millenia out of mind. They are powerful beyond conception, immune (as a gestalt) to anything and everything we could ever possibly think to throw at them, and we depend on them utterly, we'd die in an instant without their constant intimate symbiosis.

One of the best ways to think of us macroscale beings, anything large enough to see, is as "toys" or "artworks" in massive energy and fluid (matter in life is almost always in the form of some slime or goop) dynamics. We are art collectives of cellular lifes.

Applied Ecology

When you are in the garden, and by garden I mean Permaculture garden and Living Machine reclaimation and production plant, natch. When you are in the garden, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics become visceral experiences.

These dry bodies of knowledge come alive and find their fulfillment in a garden as easily or more so than in a lab.

The perfect setting for education is in the garden.

My primary education in Ecology as a science came from reading Paul Colinvaux's Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare, a fantastic book I learnt (sic) of from the Next Whole Earth Catalog, itself a piece of incredible work. It was nigh onto my bible for awhile there in high school.

Not coincidentally, now that I think of it, that catalog is where I first learned of Permaculture and Dr. John Todd and co.'s Living Machines (back when his outfit were still called "New Alchemy Institute" I believe.)

Now Permaculture and Living Machines are nothing but applied Ecology-- literally living in harmony with Nature "plus science". Both are done with a profound reverence for the living beings involved, without respect even to their kingdom, and both are founded on and informed by science.

To have a school and a garden coextensive with each other is the most natural thing in the world. It builds character and it provides the prefect "matrix" for a grounding (pun intended, sorr') in scientific aspects of wholistic learning.

This integrates "food" and "education" nicely, but what about "cleaning up the GPGP"? (Those are the "triune goal".) And what about the dynamic web apps? and the TriGalactic game?

That's a whole 'nother blog post's worth, but this is long enough, so here's just the outline and I'll make the actual post later.

We want to teach Physics, Chemistry and Biology. That means math, which means computers. To me that means Xerblin but also you (the "students" of the "school") need to know real world systems too.

To learn to use computers to help you learn to deal with complex dynamic systems is the whole point of Xerblin, and the whole "Private Goal" of the TriGalactic "Game".

And just BTW, Languages, lots of them

Magnus Effect Calculator, Thanks NASA!

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Glenn Research Center has provided a great Java applet that calculates, among other things, the lift on a rotating cylinder due to the Magnus Effect.

Using it I found the following (all for a cylinder twenty feet long):

• for a large radius of three feet and 20RPM, the lift is given as 825lbs.

Wow. That's regardless of the mass of the tube itself. But that's pretty big, what if you use a smaller radius?

• for radius of one foot, an RPM of 180 gives 827lbs.
• for the same radius and only 60RPM, still 274lbs of lift.
  

That's still really impressive. Four smaller tubes would exceed the lift of the one big one at only three times the rotations per minute. But if you're using octet-truss structures to create your cylinders then bigger is better. You can create hollow tubes out of strut-work and make them as large as you please. Let's go with something still managable, say, ten feet in diameter (which seems to be as large as the calculator app wants to go, it seems.)

• A cylinder five feet in radius, turning only ten times in a minute, engenders according to the NASA Java applet, the staggering amount of 1144lbs.

Over a half a ton per twenty foot length of tube. Wow.

Fullerite Kites, Magnus Effect, and the Lazy Man's Way to Travel a Thousand Miles on the Cheap

One of my heroes is Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller. Some people haven't heard of him. You can tell people when you encounter such, "He has a form of carbon named after him." You see most people only get a unit of measure named after them: Volts, Ohms, to name two easy ones.

Anyhoo, he invented, or noticed anyway, that you could make a very very sturdy structure by combining struts in tetrahedrons and octahedrons in a way that mimicked the closest-packing structure of a bunch of spheres. He called it the "Octet Truss" and it turns out to be very useful.

The cool thing is Alexander Graham Bell, of telephone fame, also invented it about fifty years earlier to prove a point about heavier-than-air flight. He made giant kites out of it. The largest carried a man while being towed.



The point is, you can make kites out of Octet-truss as large as you like, and they can carry heavy loads.

Once you have the machinery and tools to build one "cell" of such a kite you can build as many cells as you like and keep adding them to the kite.

The OT is literally the strongest structure known, the strongest structure theoretically possible. Even the atoms use it. We can use it, and will, to build a huge kite, I'm thinking about a quarter acre, and then we'll pack the kite-making gear and build more octet-truss out on the water to house and protect us.

Bucky thought big and we will too. There's no limit to the size you can make these structures. We could build into the stratosphere if we wanted to, or down to the ocean floor.

We can have mile-wide flying structures with carrying capacity of millions of kilograms. Condos in the air, complete with organic Permaculture/Living-Machine food/waste cycles in greenhouses and ponds.

But wait, there's more... The Magnus Effect

There's a great way to control the air pressure around your kites to give you the ability to fly without regard to ambient wind conditions. It's called the Magnus Effect even though it was actually discovered by Newton and it is what makes a curve ball curve.

From the wikipedia article:

The Magnus effect is the phenomenon whereby a spinning object flying in a fluid creates a whirlpool of fluid around itself, and experiences a force perpendicular to the line of motion and away from the direction of spin. The overall behaviour is similar to that around an aerofoil (see lift force) with a circulation which is generated by the mechanical rotation, rather than by aerofoil action.

Briefly, if you take a cylinder, wave it in the air, and turn it on its axis while you do... ...it becomes a zoggin' great wing!

You get quite a bit of lift. One article I read in the old defunct magazine "Omni" stated that if you were to put ME airfoils on a bus you could fly it around at only thirty-five miles per hour.

It also makes a great airborne generator!

The equation for lift on such a cylinder indicates that as you increase the radius of your tube you increase the lift geometrically, by the square of the radius.

If you make your tubes out of Octet-Truss then, as you make them bigger and bigger, they are just as light and strong or more so, and you get much more lift.

We will have Magnus Effect "pontoons" on our kite to generate lift (and maybe thrust) and essentially remove the need for relying on ambient wind conditions.

I literally see a "kite" more than a hundred feet on a side, shaped like three herons playing follow the leader too closely, with the "bellies" full of plastic recycling gear, food and organic "cultures" plants, animals, microbes, etc..., water purifiers, tools, everything needed to go out to the GGP and start the self-replicating recycling process.

Like I mentioned above, we'll bring the OT-making gear too and build luxury homes and idyllic farms and factories out on the Ocean, out of the trash.

We can convert the GPGP into fuel stock!

There is a process that converts plastic and most other trash we're likely to find in the Great Garbage Patch into fuel stock that can be refined into fuel.

It's called "Thermal Depolymerization", or TDP, and it breaks down the long-chain molecules of plastic and other material into short-chain hydrocarbons suitable for use as fuel.

The fuel produced exceeds the input requirements for the process itself by an attractive margin. To quote the Wikipedia article:

If one considers the energy content of the feedstock to be free (i.e., waste material from some other process), then 85 units of energy are made available for every 15 units of energy consumed in process heat and electricity. This means the "Energy Returned on Energy Invested" (EROEI) is (6.67), which is comparable to other energy harvesting processes. Higher efficiencies may be possible with drier and more carbon-rich feedstocks, such as waste plastic.

And, it can convert most of the hazardous materials afloat in the patch into useful, relatively non-toxic chemical "stock". Again from the Wikipedia article:

The process breaks down almost all materials that are fed into it. TDP even efficiently breaks down many types of hazardous materials, such as poisons and difficult-to-destroy biological agents such as prions.

Once we have converted the trash into fuel, we can burn it for heat and [other] energy, passing the exhaust through "bio-scrubbers", algae filled solar tubes that can remove the carbon dioxide. I suspect that with the help of Living Machine designs we should be able to remove other pollutants too.

We can also convert the fuel stock into fertilizer. Granted, this is not Organic Farming, but in the middle of the Pacific Ocean any foodstuff would be valuable, even if it was merely "thrown away", so to speak, into the oceanic food chain. Surely it's better for the plankton to munch on junkfood than choke on indigestible plastic? Or we can feed the nutrient slurry to organisms living in our Living Machines and convert it eventually into, who knows? Bamboo for structural material? Coconut? Sugar cane or beets for processing into sugar or alcohol fuel? Once it's no longer rude poison the sky's the limit.

Hang on, stay with me, we can make new plastic out of it. That's right. You can burn it, turn it into fertilizer, or reprocess it into new plastic, of course biodegradable from the start this time, and make things out of it.

We can make new barges and boats, floating islands, Dymaxion truss greenhouses and more conversion "factories". I want to create a self-replicating trash-eating system, mimicking Nature and producing life and growth and health from inert matter and sludge. That's a good way to tackle the GPGP: turn it into life!

TPD will be an integral part of the "metabolism" that we'll use to digest the plastic bolus of the patch.

You've gotta come back.

Back in the City
Originally uploaded by trigalactic

I finally returned to the foggy city. It's good to be back but I miss my friends already. Have they already turned to cannibalism? Is Saad roasting on a spit as we speak? Only time will tell.

Meantime, I've narrowed down my "mission" to three broad areas, food, education, and the Great Pacific Garbage Heap.

These ideas all tie together and sort of give a coherence to all my activities, both real and imagined.

For example, take food. To me this means Permaculture, the "art and science of creating and maintaining agriculturally productive ecosystems", plain and simple. "You can solve all the worlds problems in a garden." -Geoff Lawton

We need to create Permaculture food generation areas all around human habitation and we need to use Dr. John Todd's Living Machine technology to clean up and purify our wastes and waters.

We can live clean and healthy. We can provide enough food for everyone to have decent nutrition and health. The tools are there.

So this brings us to education. I want to teach Ecology, and Permaculture as applied ecology. In this context I want to introduce physics, chemistry and biology. These are tangible bodies of knowledge in the garden and in the kitchen. They also require math, and these days that means computers.

It's not enough to simply teach "how to earn a buck making websites", I want to improve the world through computer science. Permaculture, food logistics, these require us to deal with systems like the weather and distribution routes. And then there's the Garbage Patch...

I want to clean up the G.P.G.P.

When I first heard about it I thought, "Wow! All this free garbage floating out there in international waters just waiting to be taken!" Let's go out there, reprocess it into useful forms and found a new life in the sea!

Well not exactly. I do want to go out there, and I want to recycle or reuse all that trash. I just don't want to live out there the rest of my life. But for that, I'm totally serious.

There's a fortune to be made out there. Free resources ripe for the plucking, and you're not even ravaging anything! In fact, you're helping.