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