September 2008
The Factor E Farm Plywood Hexayurt
Well, it’s actually OSB, but it cost $132 for panels and flashing and rocks very, very hard. Great work!
AKVO’s big, big, big world
Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson does a short presentation at World Water Week.
Really worth watching. Particularly is that it is at heart a discussion of scale as a primary challenge in global change. Worth remembering the world is a big, big, big place… 6,000,000,000 is 20 Americas, six Chinas, 120 Britains… it’s a big, big, big world.
On the global financial collapse
We should have given individuals money to pay their mortgages. That was the real answer here. As it is, the banks still wind up owning the empty houses, the people still wind up homeless, and the crash is still coming. Why the bad debt of the banker can be bought by the state, and not the bad debt of the individuals’s who’s debts comprise the bad debt of the bankers is… state-run capitalism at its finest.
Nice repurposing
Hot tub built into a dumpster via BB.
What I particularly like about this is the practicality of it. Yes, it could use some insulation, but actually the idea of a hot tub you can roll around the place, transport, deploy where needed… nice. Also plenty deep which is unusual for hot tubs. Somebody should take brand spanking new dumpsters and do this conversion on the commercially.
Michael Kay on Mass Casualty Incidents
Unlike a surge of isolated medical emergencies that occur within a particular jurisdictional area, a MCI is marked by the characteristic that the causal agent is the same and that the injured are normally initially located within one (relatively small) contained area.
Michael is one of the Masters of Disaster, and the rest of the article is very interesting, and the rest of the series looks like it’ll be worth following also. Start your RSS readers.
Liberation by Internet at Mises
Liberation by Internet discusses the Internet’s role in creating and maintaining human liberty, with some very interesting analysis.
Thanks Arto
Google’s Project 10^100 - the Hexayurt Project entries
May those who help most win so they say.
I made three entries - the hexayurt, the infrastructure package, and the low cost medical care.
The Hexayurt
The hexayurt is a reasonably well tested next generation disaster relief shelter built on free/open source principles and industrial supply chains. It comes from work done at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The basic idea is to take 12 standard 4′x8′ industrial panels, cut six in half diagonally and fasten them into a cone (see the site for pictures) and use six whole panels for the walls, giving a durable shelter of 166 square feet, big enough for 5 people at UN standards. These shelters will survive 80 mph winds easily.
The emphasis on using standard industrial materials is the key. Nobody can afford to carry extensive stocks of emergency housing for disasters in the developing world, which often displace millions of people. Airfreighting tents is expensive and inefficient, and tents are lousy shelter for long term use, which is all-too-frequently how they are deployed. The Hexayurt idea is that industrial cities near regular disaster zones (Bangaladesh, strife-torn areas of Africa, the hurricane belt) take their existing industrial infrastructure and add a few simple new skills so that before or after a disaster they can mass produce a simple, long-life shelter for affected populations. This is a step towards disaster relief self-sufficiency at a regional level, so that these areas begin to be able to cope without being so reliant on patchy and poorly-funded international relief effots.
The Hexayurt concept has been tested by US DOD, and is an integral part of the STAR-TIDES program. American Red Cross and Netherlands Red Cross both think it is a great idea and have supported its development, and AMURT is considering the system. All of this has been done by a persistent self-funded open source development effort.
The Hexayurt Project Web Site.
The Hexayurt Infrastructure Package
The hexayurt is a free/open disaster relief shelter which has its own entry. However, a shelter alone is not enough to really help people after a disaster. If you have 100,000 perfectly good shelters in a field, the next problem you face is water and sanitation: without some deployed solution, people will get sick and die.
There are lots of appropriate technology solutions to sanitation, cooking without wasting wood or generating toxic smoke, purifying water to drink. All of them are under-funded, under-tested, and under-adopted. Millions to tens of millions die every year because this “appropriate technology infrastructure” is not being properly funded, and the result is needless loss of life.
The key is to understand that credible candidate technologies exist to provide all the same basic essential services that people enjoy in the developed world on a budget of maybe $200. Furthermore, the services can be provided house-by-house. For example, rainwater is collected on your roof, then purified using a biosand filter to give you safe drinking water, rather than having a water purification factory down the road and pipes. These systems are basic, and some need work, but some combination of SODIS, solar water pasteurization, thermophilic composting toilets, sulabh toilets, solar cookers, rocket stoves, gasification stoves, biosand filters, microsolar, microwind and microhydro will provide all the basic essential services of life in nearly any climate anywhere in the world. What hasn’t been done is a global systematic program of testing each of these individual technologies in each region of the world, making local adaptations, cleaning up and publishing the designs, making training videos, running educational courses, and looking for chances to integrated, combine and synthesize systems into whole packages which are proven to provide all essential services in the field. This is our proposal.
The Hexayurt Project presentation on low-cost distributed infrastructure.
The $10 per year health insurance system
There is no current model for health care for the 4 billion rural and slum dwellers. We can lower the cost of some kinds of healthcare to affordable levels using the network. Here’s how.
Firstly, we need a global map of diseases, and their symptoms and progression, represented in a machine readable and standardized format. This is a major labor in and of itself, but will find many supporters in hospitals and universities.
Secondly, a treatment database exists, and is filtered for the treatments which have little negative effect if misapplied by an unskilled worker. For example, giving babies boiled water with a little lentil soup mixed in will not ever harm them, but if they diarrhea, it can save their life.
Now these databases are combined into a medical expert system, which has probabilities set from field data about the area it is deployed in, which takes symptoms from users and returns non-invasive care suggestions, including “seek medical help immediately” for indications of serious disease. This front line system will likely save lives immediately. As data improves and statistics from all the users are gathered and combined, the system will improve. Think non-insulin dependent diabetes management as an example case.
To handle prescribing drugs, a safe pharmacopeia (drug list) is compiled - under $10 a dose, no refrigeration, hard to abuse, no overdose. People pay $10 per year for health insurance, getting them a few visits a year from a bicycle-riding health worker who has a backpack of drugs, and a more advanced expert system to guide them, analysis of their prescribing habits to watch for mistraining, and tools (stethoscope) for simple medical evaluation. Visits are scheduled in priority order using the network to coordinate. Affordable rural health care needs the network!
Health insurance on $10 per year.
A COSMOS for the 21st Century
Remember the first time you heard Carl Sagan say something that just totally transformed your understanding of reality? I was about 8 when Cosmos started showing on British TV. I lived in a 5000 person sheep farming town. Once a week, I tuned in as a religious ritual to understand the world around me was not made of rugby and action man and the Beano. I tuned in because I wanted to know how the world was made.
I want to extend that model to the rest of the planet, but I want to add in a new concept: training to survive poverty. Yes, the 11 year olds of sub-saharan Africa should see a show that tells them the sun is a ball of burning gas in space. But they should also know germ theory and the lifecycle of the malarial mosquito.
The proposal is as follows: script and fund a pilot for a world transforming TV series. 60 episodes, covering the world of basic survival science using a COSMOS type format. 12 episodes on farming, 24 on health/ecology/environment (linked in the developing world,) 12 on culture, 12 on cosmology. All science to be both pure and applied, from the history of the microscope through to how to make a sand filter. Focus on teaching people what is possible, and showing people just like them doing it. Show them a better world, that they can live in, if they learn and apply appropriate technology techniques, basic science like germ theory, and use the other information resources at their disposal to get the rest of the story.
Series to be produced internationally with local stars, dubbed into many languages, distributed under open licenses. Slick, professional, global culture product.
How to save the developing world for sixty million dollars.
(thanks to Lucas for encouraging me to post this!)
The Reykjavik Briefing - now with added streaming goodness
If you have the time, this is the best presentation of my fundamental ideas about the world and how to save it that I’ve ever done. Please take the time if you’re interested in disaster relief, development, infrastructure or resilience.
Enjoy!
PS: HQ video and the slides for download here.
oh-my-god beautiful short film
Reverie shot as a tech demonstrator for the EOS 5D MKII. Shockingly amazing.
Thomas Jefferson - Light and Liberty - and notes on Gandhi
Last week, I attended a splendid talk by Eric Peterson, editor of “Light and Liberty - reflections on the pursuit of happiness” on Jefferson and his ways. I recorded the talk, and you can download the audio here. Quality is pretty good, the room was well set up.
Thanks to Svanur for the picture!
As you know, I’m a big fan of Jefferson and his perspective on life. I’ve often said that if I had to choose between Jefferson and Gandhi I’d take Jefferson, and this is true for four reasons.
Firstly, there is the matter of the rifle and genocide. I’m entirely unconvinced that Gandhian passive resistance would have worked in the Ukranian Famine or similar cases - when the intent of the opponent is to exterminate, not to dominate, I do not believe that passive resistance can work.
Secondly, there is the matter of consciousness. Gandhi’s approach elevated ordinary people to a sublime plane where the spiritual truths that he had discovered were now visible to them. He inspired people beyond their human limits. But when Gandhi was gone, who could carry the mandate and keep people at that elevated level of consciousness? Judging by India’s subsequent history, nobody was up to it and without a continuous presence of such beings, how can a system which depends on that kind of elevated spiritual insight persist?
Thirdly, there is the hard question of law. Suppose Gandhi had lived until 80 and effectively governed India, regardless of who was theoretically in power. What then would have become of the law? It would have been his law, because in the minds of the people there was no higher authority, and any law of which he did not approve would have been ignored until resources for its enforcement collapsed. Is this the government of law rather than men?
Finally, there is the question of democracy and self-determination. Human solidarity is a beautiful thing, but what of the outliers, the people who will follow their own drum? An approach which is rooted in the inviolate rights of the individual, and greatly limits the power of the collective to influence their behavior or apply compulsion, matters. Nonviolent resistance relies on the ability of the many to overwhelm the few - of the oppressed to crush the oppressor one refusal-to-comply at a time, but what of the individual who wants things to be different, but cannot muster group support? Protection of the rights of the individual, and group solidarity behind the protection of those rights, is a subtly separate process from groups fighting for freedom in unity.
So, all regards to Jefferson. I think that Gandhi saw truth more clearly, but Jefferson and the boys acted on what he saw in a more sustainable way - I believe that Jefferson can be implemented here and now. I’m not so sure about Gandhi, although there is no superior political strategist when it comes to the freeing of the oppressed.
Had Gandhi operated in pre-Civil War America, rather than South Africa and India, I believe we’d have seen a spectacular interaction of ideals. There would be a novel in that.
Enjoy the talk!