Happyinmotion

Here’s a great article on Karl Polanyi, titled “Karl Polanyi Explains It All”.

If you’re trying to understand how the financial sector has become parasitic, why politicians have been bought, and how public debate has bcome so impoverised, then you won’t go wrong starting with Polanyi’s book “The Great Transformation”. It was written in 1943 and made the case for balancing the Market with the State. It laid out the reasons for the balanced social market economies that made the second half of the Twentieth Century into the best time to be alive, in all of human history.

If you want to understand why that has all turned around, then you’ll want to read Thomas Piketty’s update. As for what to do about the political imbalance between the rampant Market and the supine State, that’s harder. I asked that question in 2008, I’m still asking.

The bag on the right is a Timbuk2 Classic messenger bag. I’ve had it for fifteen years and I’ve used it just about much every day. It has done pretty well but is starting to die.

The bag on the left is the replacement, also a Timbuk2 Classic messenger bag. I expect it to last a while.

I saw a two-person version in that video that everyone watched this week and thought to myself, more looks feasible.

I have no idea what this move is called. It’s not in the three person sports acro list. I’m going to call it “Andrea & Wendy doing shoulder hand-stands on my thighs”.

It’s actually cake for the base but surprisingly bent for flyers.

We can grow maybe a third of the firewood we need on the land we have. Which is nice.

Obviously, the supply for each year depends upon which trees we’ll be trimming or felling. This spring, we got Joe in to trim back the big pohutukawa as it was overhanging the house and blocking the sun. That gave us a year’s worth of wood all by itself.

That’s a lot of bucking and splitting and stacking to do, maybe three cubes? I’m in favour of making this easier and safer, hence my three recommendations for firewood processing: the old car tyre, the bucking stand, and the maul handle protector. Continue reading Making firewood easier

That sign does indeed say “Lord Weston’s windy crack”. Yeah, I dunno. It was certainly howling a gale up there. Further along was a proper shed. Cut for sheddie pics

Courtesy of Camera von Theuns. More at his site.

Our snug is, well, snug. That’s kind of the point. But it does mean that the wood burner is worryingly close to the hi-fi amplifier and the shelves. Hence I thought to myself, I’ll make a heat shield out of aluminium sheet. And to make it look pretty, I’ll write some code to generate a pattern and get that pattern laser-cut into the aluminium and it’ll look a lot like every other algorithmically-generated laser-cut pattern, except it’ll be uniquely mine and a project I can take right through from writing the code to screwing it all together.

It didn’t quite happen like that. But we’ll get to that bit.

Everyone and their dog is using Voronoi patterns, coz computational design is the flared trousers of this decade. The patterns are vaguely natural and there’s a wonderfull Processing library called Toxiclibs that makes this easy. Some messing about tweaking parameters gave me this design, which is just as flowingly organic as I wanted, i.e. not much by most people’s standards, daringly lacking in rectangularity by my standards:

I sent that design off to Ponoko for a quote. And then I fell over, coz US$60 for the aluminium sheet, US$50 for the laser cutting, and US$100 for the shipping, coz they don’t cut metal in NZ. I asked some more local cutters and they said a worse price. Errr… no. Instead, I just had some long showers and pondered, until I came up with another way to do it.
Print out the design full scale, glue the design to a sheet of aluminium from the pile in the workshop, and use that design as a guide to drill some holes free-hand:

Round the corners, deburr, run an orbital sander over the surface, tidy up, and it’s done:

Things I’ve learnt from this project:
1) Laser cutting metal is still really expensive.
2) Absolute positional accuracy is still really expensive. If you can design it away, then do so.
3) Per dollar, laser printers are astoundingly accurate pieces of kit.
4) Brushed finishes on aluminium hide a multitude of sins. Orbital sanders FTW!

The IPCC summarises climate change research. The first of their three reports, on the physical science of climate change, is out now. It covers the research since the IPCC’s last report, in 2007. After reviewing about 10,000 papers, the message is very simple:

The more fossil carbon we burn, the hotter it will get. It doesn’t really matter how fast we burn it, but if we dig it up and burn it, then we commit the planet to warming.

And that’s that. You can read the rest of the report if you like, but the single key message is right there.

(Figure SPM.10 from the Summary for Policymakers)