I just love this post. This is exactly the kind of magic that I hoped that Global Swadeshi would produce. Now let’s build it!
I’ll note that the same logic applies to the dry coastlines of Africa too. And I bet there are ways, at scale, of cutting corners we can’t even imagine now.
Really great video on systems thinking from Paul Krafel.
Via Evonne - great link, thank you so much!
People are astonishingly successful endurance runners, “and I don’t think it’s just a fluke,” Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines. “We’re loaded top to bottom with all these features, many of which don’t have any role in walking,” Lieberman says. Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.
Although Bramble has studied locomotion in animals ranging from tortoises to jackrabbits for 40 years, he was first tipped off to the hypothesis that humans were born to run by one of his students, David Carrier. In the 1970s, Carrier was assisting with Bramble’s studies of how dogs, horses, and people regulate breathing while running. A marathoner himself, Carrier began to wonder about the role of endurance running in human evolution. People, he noted, can shed heat quickly—not by panting, like most animals, but by perspiring through millions of sweat glands. A lack of fur also helps dissipate heat more quickly.
Still, Bramble eventually came to realize that people turn in remarkable performances. He once filmed a horse cantering, with Carrier running alongside at the same pace. The movie showed that Carrier’s legs were churning more slowly than the horse’s, which meant that the student’s strides had to be spanning more distance per step than the horse’s.
Although Carrier moved on to other research, Bramble grew convinced that his student had discovered something. During a visit to Harvard in 1991, Bramble encountered Daniel Lieberman, then an anthropology Ph.D. student, making a pig trot on a treadmill. To glean insights into how bones grow—and thus to better interpret fossilized human jaws and skulls—the student wanted to see whether the repeated impact of running would spur a thickening of the pig’s skull. “You know,” Bramble said, “that pig’s not holding its head still.” He went on to explain that adept runners like horses, dogs, and rabbits keep their noggins remarkably steady as they lope, thanks to an obscure bit of anatomy called the nuchal ligament. It’s a tendonlike band that links the head to the spine. People, he said, have a version of this band.
Rummaging through a collection of replicas of fossilized primate bones in a nearby lab, Bramble pointed out that the nuchal ligament leaves a trace—a delicate ridge—where it attaches at the base of the human skull. Then the scientists noticed the ridge in a pitted, yellowed skull of our 2-million-year-old relative Homo erectus—but not in older hominids known as australopithecines, who walked the earth as far back as 4.4 million years ago. “Holy moley!” Lieberman thought. “There’s something going on here, and what’s more, we might be able to study it in the fossil record.”
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/may/tramps-like-us
http://www.igf-online.org/fileadmin/Images/Menue/Pdf-Dateien/RE_SunventionSept06_engl.pdf
Looks GREAT. Several devices, well-explored design synergies and so on. Cutting edge work from the Tamera Ecovillage in Portugal.
Amazing stuff, well done folks.
http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200809#08
They’re so big, there are likely to be problems on any given drive (56%) which is (the author notes) a big issue for RAID.
Seems like exactly the sort of thing ZFS was designed to combat.
A direct drive 5 KWh electric motor carbon fiber lightweight 45 inch propeller gets the little airplane climbing at 500-600 feet per minute. The ElectraFlyer-C has a cruisng speed of 70 mph (112 kmph), a top speed of 144 kmph, and your flight time would be 1.5 to 2 hours. That is with the top end battery pack, of course. With others, your flight time would be a lesser. yes, you can carry that 110 W charger when flying cross-country. The ElectraFlyer weighs around 250 pounds.
Damn clever.
The researchers had already shown that each session of intellectual work requires only three calories more than the rest period. However, despite the low energy cost of mental work, the students spontaneously consumed 203 more calories after summarizing a text and 253 more calories after the computer tests. This represents a 23.6% and 29.4 % increase, respectively, compared with the rest period.
Blood samples taken before, during, and after each session revealed that intellectual work causes much bigger fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels than rest periods. “These fluctuations may be caused by the stress of intellectual work, or also reflect a biological adaptation during glucose combustion,” hypothesized Jean-Philippe Chaput, the study’s main author. The body could be reacting to these fluctuations by spurring food intake in order to restore its glucose balance, the only fuel used by the brain.
Have I told you that last year I basically spent something like seven months sitting on my butt figuring out incredibly tricky and important things, and got really fat?
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-09/ul-iwi090408.php
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/september10/helicopter-091008.html
Somebody please, please show these people Terminator.
They take the computational fluid dynamics models and then test them against the real world. With good results. But what’s with the production?