The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

The Two Things…

The Two Things summarizes essential professional wisdom in two sentences, such as

The two things about economics

One: Incentives matter.
Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

I have five examples.

The two things about hexayurts:

One: take twelve 4×8 panels, as close to Thermax HD as you can find, and then cut six in half diagonally, tape the halves into a cone to make the roof, use whole for the walls.
Two: tape soaks up errors so use wide, good stuff and don’t ever skimp on the tape anchors.

The two things about global poverty eradication:

One: cheap solar panels will drive the second industrial revolution in only a few years
Two: lowering infant mortality is the number one goal, with food security a close second

The two things about the internet:

One: every generation (now two years apart!) redefines cool, and older trendspotters think it’s about technology
Two: every message has two ends and a format, the question is who are the intermediaries and what do they add/subtract along the way (from the wires, through the OS, to you.)

The two things about cryptography:

One: public key cryptography enabled secure communications when all channels are insecure, enabling people who have never had a secret conversation to communicate in secret any time they want to. At the time it was invented, this looked a lot like perpetual motion or levitation to cryptographers.
Two: quantum computers may well undo this revolution, returning us to an age where only those who’ve communicated secretly in the past can communicate securely in the future.

The two things about me:

One: If you have a pair of pistols on the mantle piece in the first act, they should be fired in the third. (Checkov’s gun applied to nuclear bombs, pandemic flu, biometric fascism, the collapse of civilian self-defense and so on)
Two: No human being can write my biography, not even Chuck Norris.

I think of The Two Things as the twitterish version of Wikipedia, really. And I’m not putting all this work into managing apocalyptic scenarios because I enjoy it, but because very few agencies really seem to be thinking about this stuff with a clear eye and the will to fix it. I just wish I had more consistent financial support to continue working on blocking out the general frameworks for dealing with the worst things in the world.

wordpress 2.6 redirecting to login.php, unable to log in problem - I found a fix, problem solved, it’s not cookies

cd blog/wp-content/plugins
mkdir .OLD
mv * .OLD

now try logging in again.

Note that none of your plugins will now work but you can at least log in again.

I haven’t gone through and identified the culprit plugin.

Hope this helps somebody.

Wired on the Hexayurt

Originally designed as refugee housing, a Hexayurt can be built for $200 from fire-safe insulation boards and industrial tape. The Hexayurt Project follows a free and open source model; plans can be downloaded at the project’s website.

I visited two of these innovative shelters last year at Burning Man. One belonged to Lindsey Darby, a 21-year-old college student and co-designer on the Hexayurt Project. The other belonged to Kevin Price, a 47-year-old computer technician from Mesa, Arizona, who said he discovered Hexayurts two weeks before Burning Man. “I was thinking of all the ways the tent would be awful. I went right to it: no prototype.” He bought all the parts, cut them in his driveway and assembled them on the playa.

Inside, both Darby’s and Price’s Hexayurts were spacious, quiet and cooler than expected in the hot afternoon sun. According to Darby, her fold-up Hexayurt took only 30 minutes to assemble on the playa, and its impressive R-value allowed her to sleep later than her neighbors.

“I’ve always stayed in a Hexayurt on the playa, never in a tent, so I’ve always been able to stay in bed until 10 or 11 [a.m.],” she said. “But I did notice that I was always the last one up!”

Vinay Gupta, the Hexayurt’s inventor, said: “It’s like having an entire extra day at Burning Man. You can go to bed at 3 or 4 in the morning, get up at noon, and you’re still human at the end of the week.”

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2008/08/burningman_tents

Very nice, very nice indeed. I’m very happy with this one

Making course corrections

Deep reexamination of my field of projects, figuring out what stays and what goes, what prospers and what should be killed.

I’m feeling very close to the end of this round of work on household infrastructure and called back towards the state level infrastructure stuff - State In A Box, not just the Identity Services Architecture but things like the property rights registers which govern the perimeter of the state, and (of course) the geolibertarian / georgist stuff which has caught my eye for some time.

I mean… conceptually, the tech is done. It needs a few years to mature and a few more to productize, but it’s just not that hard. We’re really waiting for the network and for e-banking in the developing world so people can actually pay us for stuff. If there was banking infrastructure there would be product, and banking infrastructure is coming fast.

Is it time to go back to working more on consciousness? On teaching people how to remove the ignorance which makes them uncaring about their fellow beings? I don’t know. I alternate between thinking that it’s important that people study, and knowing that at a fundamental level, anybody can awaken to any degree if they choose - the deep part of us which knows is sleepless and deathless.

The other possibility is that I write the book. I’m not sure that political conditions in America are bad enough for it to be meaningful to write a book about the post-American reality - even if my sense of the situation is correct, until it’s actually fully visible, who wants to read a book about how the cold war has retarded some areas of global political progress by nearly 60 years, and what to do about it, while the situation has not changed?

I guess that’s my major issue right now, actually. I’m going to miss America really, really badly, but the America that I loved, that I considered my country at the most fundamental political level, is already dead. Land of the free, home of the brave, if you are to be found, you are to be found abroad.

I am a Hindu. I am against any belief in hell in any form, particularly eternal hells, or hells to which one is consigned at birth and which require external salvation. I see the black-and-white, hell-centered forms of Christianity turning the beautiful religious balance and freedom of the old America into a theocratic state in which one must profess belief in the more extreme forms of Christianity to enter the White House. And a white house which you must swear religious fealty to enter might as well be a Vatican. The separation of Church and State was the crown jewel of American liberty. And, as a Hindu who was once an American, it hits me hard. In a Christian theocratic state, I will always be a second class citizen, a poor benighted darkie who’s going straight to hell when Jesus comes home.

To have that kind of thinking enshrined in government… I’m better out, frankly. I’d cause trouble if I was in.

Imagine the 14th century Vatican with nuclear weapons.

As an individual there is little I can do to change the world. I’ve found a lot of leverage in working on open source appropriate technology, and in using my peculiar knack for dealing with apocalyptic scenarios to get government to pay attention to the potential of simple solutions to complex contingencies. The idea that horrific political bottlenecks sometimes have technical solutions hasn’t gotten as much traction as I wish it had, but it’s hard to grasp from the inside.

But now my instinct is to batten down the hatches. If the shit really hits the fan in America, and it looks more likely day-by-day, I don’t think anybody is going to be investing massive resources in overhauling US govt. approaches to refugee issues, and even groups like the Red Cross will grow much more conservative. I’ve got some ideas about software for representing complex ideas coming along nicely (Processing, thou art a wonder) but even then, in a dollar == twenty cents scenario, new ideas find few friends.

The other option is to teach. Specifically, to teach the traditional practices in westernized forms, to help people tap their inner resilience to face what looks like a very significant upcoming crisis, and maybe even to find their own potential greatness, to squarely face the situation at hand, and do what needs to be done.

The place of greatest stress in times of extreme change is the mind. While it’s unlikely there will be mass starvation in a collapsed global economy, at least in the west, the relative peace and plenty of the past forty years are poor preparation for a generation that may be called to rebuild the world. People are going to need help, and that work is going to need to be done right alongside all other efforts because people who are paralyzed by change can’t do anything, not infrastructure, not policy, not politics.

So maybe that’s the key to the next phase of the work: teach people how to keep their minds clear and their heads above water in the stormy seas of the uncertain future. To teach resilience, from first principles.

Modern Hindu Religious Iconography

I commissioned these from http://yirmumah.com/will-draw-anything/

To say that I am pleased with the results would be the most profound understatement.

I’ve decided it’s time to formally do some meditation teaching

It’s a bit interesting. The question is, given my perspective, why? There’s a ton of sources out there, written, books, tapes and so on that are perfectly adequate. I’m not qualified to teach advanced practices (being trained in a thing is not the same as being trained to teach people a thing, as anybody who drives will tell you) so it’s not about absolute availability of the tech. Some of it is lineage and current membership - making this particular body of material available in Iceland, although (of course) Ananda Marga has a significant following here, and what they are doing is not a million light years from the tradition of my own teachers.

I think I have two things to put on the table. Firstly, a fluid discourse about the scientific method and the mystical traditions of India involving pretty seriously thought out material on the nature of the scientific insight on the nature of truth, the yogic nature of truth, and a point-by-point comparison that lets people easily understand how the nature of observed truth is changed by the precise axioms of the modes of rational enquiry picked. The crucial axiom from my perspective is that disciplined observation starts at the objects visible to the five senses for science, vs. in meditation and yoga where it starts at the horizon of consciousness, cataloging and observing inner experiences, thoughts and feelings as if they were birds or plants or physical phenomena.

That distinction - where do you start observing the universe - critically affects one’s conclusions about the nature of reality. It also critically changes the degree to which physical objectivity is a product of the work - for good and perhaps ill.

So, anyway, that’s one thing - I can discuss the scientific method and the yogic method as modes of enquiry into reality with defined principles for discovering truth which have many similarities and a few key well-defined differences, particularly in areas like access to instrumentation.

The second thing is that I think a few of my friends could do to see me in serious mode. It’s not real obvious seeing me noodling around Reykjavik that if I was in India odds-are people would expect me to be in robes and giving out public blessings on special occasions - and if I was in India, I’d have to learn a ton of the local conventions to be able to play the role!!! - but none the less, it’s true. I spent pretty much 15 years with my personal spiritual enquiry as the primary product of my life, and that time was not wasted - when I turned back out to the world, it was with a new eye. So I’ve got a few buddies who’ve expressed an interest in meditation, and it’s a lot easier to hear that stuff from somebody who’s in a consecrated space and is laying it down old school, rather than discussing generalities in bars.

Fundamentally, I’m a meditation teacher who’s been choosing not to teach to focus on other things. But now I sense that it’s time to rebalance that, and that the actual primary lifesaving work would benefit from me actually assuming the role once in a while, and making the systems that bring things to light available for the (surprisingly few!) people who want them.

Meditation in these traditions is not for sissies or mugs. It’s difficult, painful work because it means examining the fundamental limits of being human: what the buddha discussed as old age, sickness, death and “dukkha” as well as our old friend impermanence. But we see the suffering that comes from those processes as avidya, false knowledge, caused by mistaking tailor’s dummies for real people in a car crash, for example. When you actually see birth and death clearly, with a kingfisher’s eye (see “finite and infinite games”) much becomes simplified. When suffering, pain, violence and torture are understood - and I’m not saying this is fun - one can break out of the frozen horror which we so often feel when confronted by those unpleasant aspects of human nature and do what needs to be done if anything can be.

Human nature is made of unexamined assumptions. If you start seriously questioning how you got to be the way you are, you discover a lot of “memetic” (ideas, language) material that simply wound up in your head because it wound up in the head of your parents and teachers and they repeated. Questioning and reality testing that material results in fairly radical personal change against or at least away from cultural norms. Going further to examine our basis of biological instincts to see how much freedom our intelligence and rationality can win from the patterns of behavior that went straight from genetic storage to our minds constitutes a second degree of freedom. Past that, there is the level of pure philosophy where we examine how we know what we know, and what it means to believe that we know anything at all, right down into cogito ergo sum and the territory of being and nothingness.

I can cut through the crap, and teach the techniques which enable other people to cut through the crap. I just didn’t for a while because other things were more urgent, and also very much needed activities. But now it’s time for me to rebalance the material and spiritual work at something closer to 50/50 and that means making available the more serious side of what I do for the people who want it.

The things I work on in the real world are serious: 30 million deaths a year from poverty, losing 25% or more of the human race to a full-severity H5N1 pandemic flu, evacuating cities after nuclear bombs have been detonated in them. I deal with death, and more essentially, with the preservation of life day in, day out, every single day. And I smile, and laugh, and have hope for the world, for humanity, and for myself.

But every single thing on earth we have yet identified as life is dying. Even if everything I hoped for in terms of poverty and disease came to pass, old age would get us all. Even if transhumanism is fully realized, machines break down eventually. Death can be postponed a little by ordinary means, and perhaps a lot by extraordinary ones, but it is coming for everything which is.

The certainty of the immortality of consciousness, freed from all forms and constrains, as an absolute property of being is obtained by meditation. I can teach immortality, not the attainment of it, but the recognition of it as the current position of all that lives.

But what that means, and why I still spend all my time shoveling death into the ground and raising life from it is a mystery that has to be seen and not explained.

slipping through the cracks

it’s not hard to see
the details of the plan

arching off into the hyperbolic distance
fractal repercussions of every cut thread

i think i saw you again
this path we call progress

infinite goals
semantic, memetic, genetic

in being born
we are reaching for infinity

profusion, duration
space and time

the life of the mind
is the mind of life.

closing thoughts from a long day

If you want to change the world, get serious, get educated, and get to work. Pick a problem, whether it’s water quality or organic agriculture, and get good and educated. A lot you can get online - start with TED talks for an overview, then progress to UN reports and similar documents. It might take a year or two to master the language and get a sense of what’s going on in the field because, well, it’s a hobby - you’re doing this in the time you might be fishing.

But after a while, if you’ve got a reasonable degree of practical intelligence, you’ll start to say “I know how this works, I know why people don’t have clean water, I know what diseases they face.” Maybe you donate money to pay other people to work on this. Maybe you volunteer to travel and help somewhere as a part of an NGO project. Maybe you stay at home and tinker with things searching for a breakthrough.

If we had a few tens of thousands of people behind us with about this much involvement, we’d be fit to change the world in some big ways. It’s a Linux or Wikipedia amount of effort and labor. We have an operating system. We have an encyclopedia. Now we need an infrastructure workbook.

Practical back-yard engineering culture is what is going to save the world. Mass production has its role, but we still don’t have evolved designs on all of these basic systems like wood stoves. The field is wide open to innovation.

I’m just beginning to see the Hexayurt Project people supersede my understanding of what needs to be done in some areas. If you need to know where to buy tape, or what the supply chain issues are with boards in a given geography, or feedback on new door design, the mailing list is better than I am - lots of people, lots of thinking and independent study and experiment and organization.

That is very, very gratifying. It was hard when this was my project, but it’s much, much easier now that it’s ours.

Now let’s see if we can’t get similar movement on all these other areas, a great alliance to push appropriate technology development up to the point where it just starts growing like cell phones, and leaving goodness in its wake.

what I’m up to right now

Gupta Option is where the policy work lives. Check out:

* Winning the Long Peace on appropriate technology as foreign policy.

* State In A Box - Identity Services Architecture on failed states and making biometrics safe for general use, particularly in bringing banking services to the very poorest.

* Severe Pandemic Flu Strategies on dealing with the real worst case scenarios on pandemic flu.

Hexayurt.com is where the free/open housing and infrastructure work lives. I particularly recommend the “Ending Poverty with Open Hardware” video linked from that site. This project is fully live, is commercially funded, and is moving forwards into mass production quite soon.

* Disastr.org looks at using Hexayurts to rehouse hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of Americans following a catastrophe.

* Live Unplugged takes a look at what high-tech low-impact self-sufficiency might look like for small farmers later this century. It’s a deeply inspiring vision of a positive future, and many people find it very useful for focussing on what needs to get done to make it real.

* STAR-TIDES is a volunteer project I helped start which includes many people at National Defense University which is focussed on developing appropriate technology infrastructure options for disaster relief, poverty and humanitarian crisis.

Global Swadeshi is a social network I cofounded which is connecting all the people who are working on solutions for self-sufficiency for everybody, from small farmers up to villages, towns, and eventually maybe even cities. Extremely high quality debate and cooperation are emerging from here.

Finally, I’m working on two new, long-range projects.

* An Free/Open Source Appropriate Technology license and associated patent pool.

* Raising massive funding for a comprehensive science-based broadcast television educational curriculum for the poor

A little further back, I spent some time volunteering at the Rocky Mountain Institute where I co-edited Small Is Profitable which was The Economist’s Book of the Year in 2003, and the highly acclaimed work on energy independence for the USA, Winning the Oil Endgame.

I’ve generally kept this stuff split up on dozens of different domains without much linking between them because I wanted each work to stand on its own, but I think it’s time to bring them together and make it clear that there’s a whole systems perspective here. I think I have a decent plan to fix the world, and I’d like you to consider appropriating pieces of my plans into your plans, and maybe working together with me on *our* plans to fix the world.

Hail, and welcome.

Vinay Gupta

The waiting is over.

Can’t tell you why yet, but it’s on now.