September 2007
Raised Brow on Hexayurts
Raised Brow is blogging about Hexayurts. I responded with some expansions.
Hi, Vinay here, designer of the Hexayurt.
For disaster relief in America, we have a plan. It’s a good plan, according to both the American Red Cross and FEMA.
Here’s how it works. You got four things you need to put together when it comes to rehousing a person in a hexayurt in a disaster. Those four things are:
* the person who needs shelter while the situation calms down
* a household who’ll give them a place to put the hexayurt, and provide access to a toilet, a shower, and electricity etc.
* the raw materials to make the hexayurt. Every day the building industry in the US uses enough to make 120,000 hexayurts, enough to shelter 600,000 people.
So we have a plan for using a distributed database to connect these resources in a disaster. It’s something that Amazon, Google or Yahoo - or any number of other big internet companies - have the hardware and software to do.
Then we need a way of making sure that you can get access to the database and find your way to where you need to get to. Two ways of doing that.
* Pre-printed emergency response plans, or
* A dynamic system you connect to over the cell phone network, coupled with emergency cell systems.An emergency cell system is a national supply of free cell phones, and mobile cell towers made to be helicoptered into disaster areas, with self-contained power and satellite links to carry the calls.
Expensive, but necessary. When something happens, you fly in the emergency towers, and give anybody who doesn’t have their phone with them a phone. It’s that simple.
On the phone, there’s a link to the “where do I go to find a shelter?” link, and it takes the GPS data from the phone, and guides you to a place where a volunteer host family, raw materials, and some builders all coincide to give you a nice new place to live.
There are three goals here:
* reduce the load on first responders, like the fire service
* enable the people involved in a really huge disaster to get shelter, to prevent more Superdome type scenarios
* to built self-reliance as a key part of disaster response
We’ve learned, from Katrina, that the Federal Government is not well suited to doing disaster response in the US. It’s got too many separate departments, too many rules, too much bureaucratic slowness and all other kinds of problems. And that’s not something we can reasonably expect to change: you make a machine to do one job well (handle ordinary times) and you can’t expect it to suddenly do well in a massive crisis.
http://disastr.org
Is the site we made that describes the plan. Please click the link and learn more about our plans for protecting Americans in disasters.
How young America is
“We’re new at this,” Weiner continued. “Sixty years is not a lot of time. The Chinese have been at this for 2600 years, the British for 500. And we’re just getting our feet wet, really, in the business of international espionage.”
Tim Weiner on the CIA. Haven’t read the book, but that insight is worth noting.
Hexayurt clustering on Flickr
from DonEastWest’s photo stream
Nice to see people thinking in public about this stuff 
that way we can all learn from each other.
More thinking about (the non-existence of) 4GW
One of the gems from Ken Wilbur - before he vanished off into vaporspace with Spiral Whatever - was the concept of “pre/trans confusion.”
4GW is either very old - the same tactics insurgents used against the romans - or nothing at all. The call for 5GW, for 6GW, for nGW seems to be layering more and more layers of obfuscation on top of a remarkably simple concept.
We need to get much, much better at occupying countries if we are going to be doing any more of it.
Running an occupation is not warfare in the conventional sense. It is certainly a military activity, but it is sharply distinct from war.
The problem here is that nobody likes to think of America has having an army of occupation, so we come up with terms like 4GW and so forth to disguise the simple fact: we’re an occupying power and have not traditionally played that role, so it’s all learning from scratch.
To think of this as netwar against insurgency simply continues the idea that we’re fighting a war. We’re not: we’re occupying. It’s a different activity, with different goals, even if the body count and hardware look very similar.
This is the pre-trans confusion. We need to be studying older, more fundamental forms of conflict - occupations - rather than moving on to newer, more ethereal forms of conflict. Iraq isn’t some highly complicated nGW trauma, no no no - it’s a botched occupation.
NGW is about saving face. Occupation is about stabilizing the situation.
How, exactly, we leave is all that matters - that and, of course, making sure that we learn exactly what lies were told to get us into the war, who told them, and why.
I tread a very fine line between thinking as a “friend of the military” and a humanitarian. A lot of people think the two are different, but again and again it seems to be that the surest way of preserving civilians is to not start wars. The second way is to swiftly and effectively finish wars that had to be started.
We broke rule #1 in invading Iraq: that is a war that the evidence (no WMDs) shows we did not need to fight. And I agree very much with the political case that evidence was being distorted or outright fabricated to make that happen. On the other hand, now that we are in this war, the correct thing to do is leave without causing more bloodshed.
This means getting swiftly oriented to the reality of what is happening, which means carving a deep gash through the nonsense about nGW and getting back to the basics: failed occupation that was not planned for correctly, that must be righted or our exit will result in a slaughter. To preserve lives means walking the line between staying put and taking hits while trying to rebuild infrastructure, and simply leaving.
My State In A Box - Identity Services Architecture paper is now online!
State In A Box - Identity Services Architecture - fifty pages of brain-breaking Gupta-at-his-finest assault on business as usual thinking about biometrics and liberty. From the abstract:
State In A Box presents a coherent vision of overhauling the fundamental assumptions made about nation state infrastructure to enable breakthroughs in SSTR functions. The Identity Services Architecture presented enables low cost, high security financial transaction infrastructure to be rolled out using 2D bar codes, public key cryptography, camera phones and biometrics in a novel configuration which both protects civil liberties and provides strong identity information for legal processes. Furthermore, an approach to international control of a single international biometric database is presented based on the chaordic work of Dee Hock, the architect of VISA. The assessment at the heart of this paper is that the benefits of a correctly-designed rights-respecting cross-jurisdictional chaordic governance structure cannot be forgone if we are to see a realistic implementation of biometrics as an enabling technology for development.
We anticipate the cost of issuing an ID using this technology to be less than $1 per head.
Now, of course, you’re wondering what this has to do with the Hexayurt. The answer is everything. Hexayurts do individual infrastructure. State in a box does state infrastructure. In between there’s a missing piece called “The Citadel” which does municipal infrastructure.
Put it together and you have everything you need to restore, rebuild, reboot or just plain start nation states.
As corporations spread through the 19th and 20th centuries, from a handful of entities created by the writ of kings and queens, so I believe it will go for Sovereignty itself. The various forms of the “sovereign individual” movement are making glacially slow but steady progress, and corporations attack sovereignty itself by doing all of their business in America and paying taxes in Bermuda. Soon somebody will figure out how to get sovereign status without owning their own army, probably by a franchising / defensive services architecture as Ken McLeod discusses at length in his work, and you begin to imagine a patch of land in some African country which has a different State for every square mile, and every single one of them is basically some internet servers and a mail drop.
Say AAARRRRR if you’re with me.
PS: This post made in honor of the upcoming International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Most people take that instruction at a “syntactic” level and think that one must simply say ARRRR and so on to be talking like a pirate.
I find that to be inadequate for my own deepest Pirate Nature, therefore I decided to talk like a pirate at a syntactic level for the entire week.
New generation solar technologies report
If you’re coming from Worldchanging, the post with Alex and I discussing long term prospects for cheap solar, and the likely impacts, is here: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000510.html
So, there’s basically three or four ways of doing this I’ve been able to track down.
There’s the self-assembling paint on or printable panels coming out of New Jersey:
Mitra and his research team took the carbon nanotubes and combined them with tiny carbon Buckyballs (known as fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Buckyballs trap electrons, although they can’t make electrons flow. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons. Nanotubes, behaving like copper wires, will then be able to make the electrons or current flow.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070719011151.htm
They haven’t made a dollers-per-watt prediction in public but they’re implying radical cost reductions.
Then there are the “quantum dot” solar folks. The approach is somewhat beyond me, but the nutshell is using relatively conventional solar fabrication techniques, possibly including plastic solar cells, but with the energy capture being done by single particles hanging in an isolated quantum state, somewhat akin to bits in a quantum computer. Why this is useful I don’t know, but the efficiency limits are twice or thrice what we have in current solar cells.
http://jobwerx.com/news/Archives/konarka_biz-id=947081_470.html
(that’s talking about quantum dots on plastic, but you can also do quantum dots on silicon.)
Then there’s the “big iron” approach - big solar reflector arrays pointed at Stirling engines.
http://www.stirlingenergy.com/products.asp?Type=solar
In terms of costs, these things are already about competitive with conventional PV. But in terms of manufacturing there’s huge room for price cutting. Dean Kamen (Segway, prosthetic arms etc.) is trying to build economies of scale for the Stirling engines by getting them into hybrid cars as an alternative to the conventional internal combustion engines currently used.
The collector arrays they are using are also really expensive hard engineering. They need something lashed together from bamboo and surfaced with a replaceable mylar tarpaulin.
So that’s a fourth technology pathway. That one is more a series of incremental improvements (say a factor of two or four cost reduction in the Stirling engines, plus a corresponding factor of four for cheaper solar concentrator design.)
Not quite such a radical breakthrough as the new PV cells but “good enough.”
All of these technologies are on much less aggressive schedules than the Korea / Heeger plastic solar panels, hence my usual estimate of “20 years” until we see solar power for 1/2 or 1/4 of the current price of grid power.
http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=1634
http://www.shortnews.com/start.cfm?id=63637
The Korea / Heeger team, however, put the whole thing so much closer and so much cheaper than we have any reasonable right to expect. I’d be having some serious doubts about it, but Heeger does hold the Nobel for his work on conductive polymers, so he’s a credible guy.
Some random blogger wrote to him to confirm the story:
http://community.livejournal.com/peak_oil/628223.html - Heeger confirms the story is basically accurate, and that they’ll have products for indoor use ready next year.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19044/ suggests that Heeger’s commercial effort wants to hit 7% efficiency before going after the rooftop market because rooftop real-estate is expensive.
Part of the reason that this isn’t big news is that people love problems, but hate solutions. For all of the focus people are putting on Darfur, the MIT team doing stoves for Darfur get little attention and support. Similarly, people are willing to fight tooth and nail for restrictions and taxes on energy use, but where’s the official paper from Greenpeace saying “this Heeger guy? Give him a blank cheque NOW and let’s innovate our way out of this mess!”
The emotional register is all wrong. It’s a simple story about “man in lab coat saves world” - there’s no conflict, there’s no struggle, there’s no yelling and screaming. Nothing in the typical emotional spectrum of environmentalism. So the story just kind of slips by.
To put some more context around this.
In 2003, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) issued a report entitled, “The Future of Nuclear Power”. They estimated that new nuclear power in the US would cost 6.7 cents per kWh.[1] However, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 includes a tax credit that should reduce that cost slightly.
(from the “new nuclear power plants” article linked in the earlier msg.)
So let’s run numbers for these notional 10 cents per watt panels.
1 kilowatt of panels = $100.
Life of panels? Let’s be conservative: 5 years.
Hours of daylight: Let’s say 8.
300 days a year of sunlight: Arizona.
Kilowatt-hours of electricity generated for your $100 investment: 12000
Cost per kilowatt-hour: 0.83 cents.
Conventional solar panels have a useful lifetime of about 15 - 20 years. My guess is that the plastic panels will be a little less robust but 5 years is low-balling it. If it turns out to be 10 years, we get 0.42 cents per kWh. At 20 years, 0.21 cents.
Now, that only covers daylight power demand - not storage. So odds-are that you have a three phase adoption process: panels go up to cover daylight peak loads in heavy daylight AC areas (i.e. Texas, some of California). Then you see a round of infrastructure to cover night loads and less sunny days - my guess is that you wind up with “pump it back up the hill” hydro or flow batteries or something - or possibly you build some kind of obscene “timeshifting” electricity cable to move power from Africa or the Middle East to America. Superconductors, of course. If that can’t be done economically, then it’ just won’t be done - maybe you ship hydrogen, maybe you just run your night loads off other power sources.
This is really what the fuss is about. We might be five years away from electricity in sunny areas in day time costing 1/10th of what it does now. Changes the whole game.
Hexayurt 3D animated gif
yes, you have to see this:
Click on the link to go to an animated GIF of a hexayurt popping out in 3D. It’s rad - I took one of Kevin’s Stereo Pair Images and animated it using Jim Gasperini’s Animated Gif 3D tecnique (slightly NSFW) and, well, it rocks
Isn’t that just rad?
State of the Art in Appropriate Technology
(from an email)
I think that there are maybe four dozen plausible solar cooker designs, tops, of which three or four are head and shoulders above the rest and have become standards.
They’ve been shaking this stuff out for 30 years. Doesn’t mean there isn’t room for innovation, but the field is much, much smaller than you’d anticipate and a lot of pre-filtering has already been done.
Likewise improved stove designs: wood gasifications stoves, of which there are maybe three approaches, rocket stoves, darfur stoves… biogas diigester systems of various kinds… steam injection stoves (as far as I know not yet practical)… less than a dozen basic technologies are in play, of which only three or four models are common. The Stove Community has been working on this for about 30 years too, and they’ve written off most of the space as unworkable.
For water purification, there are half a dozen systems: SODIS with plastic bottles, SOPAS (solar water pasteruization) using solar cookers, large array UV/solar, sand filtration (not portable for the most part), potters for peace filtron (bacterial recontamination issues) and the lifestraw (can’t be used by children, the very old, or the very ill == all your most vulnerable groups go unprotected.) There are a few options worth looking at that I haven’t explored, but the general shape of the field is well understood.
Same for shelters. Three or four standard relief tents, the shelter systems domes, the global village shelters, these unifold things (new to me), hexayurts, and various “local materials” options which NGOs have asked people to build from time to time.
I went through the field broadly and did a survey from 2003 -> 2006, generally working through what was understood to be State Of The Art and picked the Hexayurt Project Infrastructure Package from the best stuff I could find.
The “aesthetic” of the Hexayurt Project package is forward looking - Wood Gas Stoves are *wonderful* but not *quite* ready for field use in lifesaving situations yet - but we also have pretty good options for fallbacks to established practices.
It’s not that I was beating off options with sticks, it’s that there were large periods of time when I couldn’t find *ANYTHING* that looked like it would work, then I stumbled on one or two decent ideas.
The reason that the developing world is not using these technologies is because almost none of them actually work in practice in field conditions well enough to spread like the cell phone did. The model here isn’t sifting through piles, it’s picking three or four things, making sure they’re well tested and accredited, and then getting them **finished** - polished, tested, refined and then rolled out. Nearly nothing **actually** makes the grade - we’re looking at things which are *close* and hoping for future refinements.
We don’t want to re-invent the wheel: there are already large, established, highly capable and technical communities of practice that are working in these fields. We’re just picking a few things they recommend, and trying to get them through the validation processes so the NGOs etc can use them.
I do not believe that anybody alive understands the actual network of interconnections well enough to produce a useful taxonomy of appropriate technology solutions at this point - for example, the Sustainable Settlements Charrette neither produced nor used such a taxonomy. RMI doesn’t regularly use a taxonomy for infrastructure that I’m aware of.
Taxonomies are incredibly difficult and require profound thinking on the fundamental questions, and that thinking has not been done yet. It’s the work of years.
It’s a spectacularly hard problem. It *looks* simple, right up until you consider a story like the kids who were given reverse osmosis water, got adapted to it, then the filters went away and they got stick.
That, right there, is an *incredibly* important example of how precisely understanding the parameters of the problem is much, much harder than people think.
You can say “water purifiers” and, if you wire that into the taxonomy, it’s wrong before you start. The actual category is something more like “prevention of water-borne diseases.”
Now you’re into the space of public health. What did we discover? Reverse osmosis purifiers **CAUSE** water borne diseases **when you take them away.**
This is **vital.** RO turns out, in some situations, to be a problem, not a solution.
Here’s another hoary old classic from the archives of mishandled interventions: Operation Cat Drop.
http://www.strange-loops.com/scicatdrop.html
This is our enemy, right here: partial understanding that looks like complete understanding, followed by mayhem.
We cannot just drop the gear into categories and not break the entire cognitive space which exists for doing whole systems based optimizations of the problem space. It’s a mistake from Day One to think that we know how to model these processes.
Loose binning, yes. **very very very loose binning** reflecting a well-understood common format, sure.
But not **anything** that pretends to be a taxonomy. We are not there yet, and it’s hard to imagine how we get there without several years of work on public health and technology issues, another extremely poorly understood area.
If it was simple, it would have been done already. I’ve been at this for *five years* and the longer you spend with appropriate technology, the more complex the field becomes. First class engineers have been working on improved wood stoves for 30 years and still haven’t come up with something which is good enough to have spread all over the planet in the same way cell phones did.
This stuff is hard. Harder than we know. Getting started is easy, but getting to completion and actually having a tangible impact on the world is hard.
I should say, though, that a taxonomy of **PROBLEMS** is much more tractable, and a taxonomy of infrastructure is also a lot more tractable. It’s not an insoluble problem, but progress has to be exceptionally carefully thought out!
I think that a *functional* taxonomy based around simple classes of problems: “purify water from bacteria” “purify water from chemicals” is plausible. It’s the mapping of those atomic solutions into healthy patterns of life which is the incredibly hard part!!!
Over to you, Woody
Over on GuptaOption.com
Winning the Long Peace - the future of the nation state in the age of disaggregation.
America has to choose one of three paths:
- surrender our position of military preeminence, or
- continue to maintain it with no mandate from global citizenry and wind up surrounded by enemies, or
- find a way to legitimize that position and win that mandate.
To continue to wield armed dominion without legitimizing it by gaining a mandate from global citizens will make America the target for generations of attacks of all kinds, all justified with the rhetoric of “freedom from American Imperialism.”
And so forth for about 10 pages.
It’s something I wrote from a fairly govt. centric, realpolitik position, and does not reflect all of my true beliefs or feelings about these issues - that’s what the book is for.
Bothering Barnett again
A long comment about Islam and terrorism and the rest of it.
What on *earth* did you say to get the Other Barnett so riled up. Goodness gracious!
I’m a Hindu. I’m pretty much equally dazed and confused by all of the Monotheisms. This “I’M RIGHT YOU’RE WRONG” thinking about religion is quintessentially Un-American. This is supposed to be a country in which the nature of your religious beliefs is your own business, and that foundational agreement to disagree is critical to our interface with the Muslim world.
Let us consider the venerable Treaty of Tripoli (1796)
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/treaty_tripoli.html
So that’s the first part. Whatever people want to say about Islam from their own personal perspective, let them, but this is not the Crusades with a Christian country on one side and a Muslim country on the other. We’re fighting these guys for reasons which have nothing at all to do with religion on either side, and everything to do with political self-determination.
Should the Muslims be free to live under Muslim theocracies if they choose to?
Of course. If a group of people vote for a theocratic government because they wish to live under those laws, let them. Is force, civil war, revolution an acceptable way for power to change hands to a theocracy? Maybe - certainly the US has it’s fair share of dictators who were considered allies and friendly powers over the years.
So this is not about religion.
It’s about a political group using religious language to try and achieve a political end: a Sharia-based “superstate”, the Ummah, a sort of Muslim European Union.
But that’s not the same as a religious war. The distinction is that within Islam there is a “constitution” as well as a religion. Sharia is a *system of Law* and the primary motivation of a lot of the Fundamentalists is that they want to live under that system of law **as a political choice, not just a religious one.**
This is something that gets lost in the simple minded-rhetoric about Islam a lot, but there’s actually a sophisticated and coherent political philosophy in there, and it’s got a lot more influence on the current situation than people thing. Sharia as a nation-state level legal system, if you include the Islamic Finance sections, is about as livable as many other national legal / political codes. It’s not some kind of abomination. It’s a code of law, and people did just fine under it for century after century, including the Jews who were often far better off under Muslim rulers than Christian ones.
What does Osama want? He wants his chosen political viewpoint to be dominant in Saudi Arabia, and he can’t get there with us interfering in Saudi internal affairs to keep the oil in the hands of a sympathetic regime. He also can’t get it because of the bad blood between the folks in the region and Israel.
But if Osama was an anarchist, would his actions change any? No. It’s the same set of tactics any small revolutionary group would use - the Anarchists of Europe are probably the closest historical parallel. Invading countries would not have freed us of the anarchists. Over-reacting to them, however…
It’s not religion, it’s just politics, with religion being used to get the troops moving. The Ummah - the “Muslim Superstate” is a very close parallel to the Holy Roman Empire back in the day and, I think, equally unlikely to be a major modern military force even if the Islamic Fundamentalists succeed in rolling over Saudi Arabia to create it. Muslims have proven to be perfectly able to keep their heads level when in possession of nuclear weapons - witness Pakistan - and yes, a new era of Mutually Assured Destruction would be awful - but if we were fast on our feet with the diplomacy, even a fundamentalist Saudi might be kept free of nuclear weapons.
Seriously. It’s not unthinkable. Pakistan has bombs, and nobody’s used them. So at that point, it’s not that Muslims are inherently unstable as nuclear powers. What’s going on is simply not that simple.
Frankly, we could simply have ignored these Al Queda more or less completely and still come out ahead by a massive margin. 9/11 should have been treated as a matter for Interpol and special forces rather than as a major foreign policy event.
The mistake we made was that we involved nation states in fight against non-nation state actors.
Invading countries is no way to handle non-state actors.
Death from above, in various appropriate forms, is.
Ask yourself how Mossad would have handled 9/11 if it had happened in Israel. That’s probably what we should have done. And there would be no “Global War On Terror” - there’d be three or four or five hundred dead guys shot in the back of dark alleys, and generally life would go on without us breaking the bank fighting wars against states that are largely irrelevant to terrorism.