Hacking Pickling

As I mentioned in my last entry, this weekend was going to be the one where I’d be experimenting

I made pickled eggs too.

Can't waste the lovely dill.

with making my own lacto-fermented pickles. Before I get into explaining the crazy ideas I’ve had to accommodate for this endeavor, I should speak about how my first trial at it last year. It was the trial where I was stifled from a few errors, but I was still able to salvage some good results. The problem wasn’t in the recipe I fashioned for the experiment; it was a problem with the structural form of my pickling vessel. It all amounted to the ability to keep things submerged: any matter that you are trying to pickle and preserve by fermenting absolutely has to stay below the surface of the liquid brine. Otherwise, the risk of contamination by mold is very certain, which will turn the exposed cucumbers into a gross gooey gray mush. This happened to me last year with a few of them. Those that were inflicted by this problem had to be carefully removed and discarded immediately. The ones in the middle of the solution were still green and kept their form, but lacking in crispiness. According to my research sources, they were still edible. To be resourceful, I took these soft ones and ran them through a meat grinder to simply make a tasty relish* (waste not, want not). The ones on the bottom of the fermenter were solid and of good quality. I made another batch of sterile brine though for keeping them preserved in the jars, to avoid another risk of mold contamination by using their native solution.

If the walls of the vessel were straight, like that of a traditional European or North American ceramic crock, the matter could be easily solved by just fitting a weighted ceramic plate over the mass to keep everything below liquid level. Although there is a useful airlock system in my particular crock’s traditional Asian design, it was still not enough to prevent spoilage. The curved sides coming to a narrowed opening on top of it make it difficult to insert anything inside to keep the cucumbers (which really like to float) under the brine. Trying to tightly pack and layer the contents, and interweaving sprigs of dill to sort of bind stuff together didn’t help at all either. Solving this problem needed an innovative solution. Time to doing some hacking for this year’s pickle project . . .


Objective: With using just the minimal of materials around my home, to somehow make a liquid permeable barrier, that can be flexible enough to be inserted through the narrow opening of my crock jar, but yet can be rigid enough, and can adjust and expand across the surface, to hold down contents, and to prevent stuff from floating up and breaking the surface of the brine. The materials cannot include, or contain, reactive metals that can oxidize: which might impart rust/metallic flavours in the batch, or might even make it toxic. I’m restricted to using ceramics, glass, non-metallic earthenware, wood, or food-grade plastic. Taking a coffee break to think on it now . . .

Eureka! After dreaming and digging around, I found my tools and materials. They are:

• A bamboo sushi rolling mat (a bit of a sacrifice, but they are cheap, and I could use a new one anyway)
• Chopsticks (natural wood; no paint, varnishes, or other finishes)
• A round Pyrex casserole dish lid
• A marker
• Pruning shears (with flat jaw)
• Glass beads (at least a kilogram in weight)
• A food grade plastic Ziploc bag

My Hack for Making a Liquid Permeable Fermenter Barrier

The bamboo sushi mat is flexible enough to be inserted inside the jar, but for it to lie flat in there, and to prevent one’s pickles from probing through gaps, it must be made circular. The procedure to do this is as thus:

1. Roll out the sushi mat flat, and place an edged form that occupies the greatest circular areas positioned from the centre of the mat. I found a casserole dish lid, which worked well because it didn’t stain with marker ink.

2. Trace the marker around the edge of the circle to mark where to trim off the superfluous lengths of the bamboo rods of the mat.

3. Use the pruning shears to cut away the corners of the bamboo mat. Be sure not to cut through the binding chord/string running along the middle of the mat. Keep the extra string trimmed from the mat when cutting away the corners.

4. Take pieces of the trimmed string, and poke them through the spaces between the bamboo rods, making certain that they wrap around the middle binding chord on both distal ends of the mat, and one in the centre along the same axis.

5. Trim the chopstick such that it extends across the full length across the middle of the mat, perpendicular to the bamboo rods, leaving enough length for it to extend slightly at each end. Tie the chopstick to the mat with the pieces of trimmed string inserted through the points in the mat mentioned previously. This will make the surface rigid once it is put in the fermenting jar.

6. Sterilize the glass beads by boiling them in water. Drain them, and then place them in the food grade plastic bag. This will be used as weight to place and distribute across the bamboo barrier once it covers the contents. Just before placing this bag of glass beads on top of the modified sushi mat in the fermenter, set it in a colander in a sink and pour boiling water around it to get it as sterile as possible.

There are a few recipes out there for making one’s own homemade fermented pickles. I’m not sharing mine, as I don’t know if mine will turn out yet to be worth sharing. But from all that I read and accumulated in knowledge, I will add a few tips as to what I did with mine, which is supposed to make (at least in theory) nice firm pickles (and no . . . adding Viagra in the fermenter is not one of them!).

1. Begin pickling the cucumbers as soon as possible after they’ve been picked (easier said than done) – I made a mad rush to get to the Farmers' Market as early as I could to get my produce while it was still fresh.

2. Plunge them in ice water before processing them – allegedly this is somehow beneficial to get crisper pickles. I presume it slows down the effect of the enzyme activity in them that can possibly soften them, see next point.

3. Get rid of the blossom end of the cucumbers – while scrubbing and inspecting each of the cukes for defects (don’t use any blemished ones), I take and pare away the blossom end of the cucumbers. Not only does it facilitate the brine to permeate the cucumbers more easily, but the blossom end is full of enzymes that soften the fruit body of the cucumber once it’s taken off the vine. Just lightly paring away the skin from the tip should work; you don’t have to get crazy and peel away so much that it looks like you are giving the thing a circumcision. If you aren’t sure which end is the blossom and which is the stem end, just be safe and trim both ends the same way.

4. Cherry leaves – I “borrowed” mine from a neighbour’s tree, whose branches were sticking out into the alley. Cherry leaves are full of botanical tannins that work like a more natural form of alum, a more refined chemical used in pickling used for making crisper pickles. Leaves of other plants, like grape, oak, and horseradish, apparently work too.

My spices and salt mixed together, plus garlic, cherry leaves,

and most importantly, lots and lots of dill . . .

The Process

1. Boil a large pot of water and then allow it to cool to a temperature that won’t scald anything, but remains warm enough that will allow it to dissolve course salt, and can allow infusion and release the aromatics of the pickling spice blend, garlic, dill, and also releases the tannins from the cherry leaves. It will also purify the water, boiling off any residual chlorine, which makes for better brewing project results.

2. Weigh out the salt** and blend pickling spice mix. I like salty and sour pickles, so a 9 - 10% weight of course salt of the total mass of cucumbers should work.

3. Soak cucumbers in ice water, scrub them and remove the blossom ends (as mentioned above), throw aside any with any blemishes, mushiness, or signs of insect activity.

4. Place the cucumbers in the fermenter in layers, alternating with dill, garlic and sprinkling salt and spices between each layer. Don’t allow the contents to pile up! Make sure that the surface is spread level. The final layer of cucumbers should have no pieces of stems from the dill or cucumbers poking above the even surface. Top the last layer with any remaining salt and spices.

5. Place permeable barrier on top of the contents, and secure the crossing piece of chopstick to secure the barrier in a rigid form. Place the sterilized bag of glass beads on top of the barrier, and spread the glass beads evenly on the top of the surface.

Seems to fit very nicely . . .

6. Slowly pour in the warm water from the pot into the fermenter until it reaches above the bag of glass beads***. No cucumbers should be exposed at all.

7. Put the cover on the fermenter, and add water around the lid, creating an airlock. Gases from the lactobacillus bacteria that are metabolizing sugars and fibre can then escape, while (hopefully) no foreign and harmful strains of microbes will be able to enter and contaminate the batch.

I expect some burbling and burping

sometime tonight.

From there onward, it is just a waiting game involving monitoring, assuring that things haven’t shifted, and the removing any weird looking scum that looks like it doesn’t belong there.

*- This relish + mayonnaise + minced onion + ground black pepper + salt to taste = Awesome homemade Tartar Sauce.

**- Shame on you if you don’t have a kitchen scale, and yet still want to brew things! What the hell kind of chef/brewer/fermento are you?! If your kitchen doesn’t have a scale, I guess you don’t want to be a good one. OK, I’ll be kind this one time and give you a hint: 1 cup of course salt weighs about 250 grams. Shame on you again if you’re still stuck in the Stone Age, and not using the metric system like a scientific mind should, and 98% of the globe already does. I draw the line here, and I’ll just let you figure out the conversions yourself.

***- I suppose you are wondering why I have a bunch of glass beads in my kitchen. Remember Aesop’s fable about the crow that was dying of thirst, who found a pitcher, but the water in it was too low for him to be able to drink from it? So he added pebbles in it bit by bit to raise the water level. Same principle applies here: fluid displacement. In brewing, some recipes leave behind a lot of sediment, which cuts down the volume when the beer is transferred to a carboy. The air space and extra surface area from the diminished volume can risk spoilage of the beer. One can top up the volume with water, but that of course dilutes it, and no one wants that! So instead, dropping in sterilized glass beads into the carboy raises the level and shrinks surface area and space between the airlock without diluting it. That’s what this old crow has learned anyway.

The Science Geek Kitchen

It’s the first weekend of what we would call the beginning of late Fall in this territory. The glimpse of the mostly denuded trees, and the past two days’ drizzle has snuffed out the fizzle for anything more adventurous that I may have had in mind. I’m definitely done with dealing with cooking projects for a while. The freezer is full now, and I ran out of containers. I’m starting to putter about with the chore of packing away some my summer apparel and utilities. I get to see just how well the hammock frame I built in spring optimally tucks away with a minimum of space consumed in a closet once it’s disassembled. I’m also mulling over a design in my head for simple collapsible wood crib that I can construct for storing a larger stash of fire wood with the remaining scraps of short planks I have left over from that last project; reclaiming more space given my deck’s limited girth. I’ll be (at least I hope I’ll be) a lot more active this winter than I was for the last one. Given the observations I was making through my depressing infirmity and forced idleness and confinement through last winter, I thought I should do some planning on improving my home’s interior. The hammock project was an eye-opener as to how I essentially doubled my sleeping space with minimalism and modular component fabrication. Unlocking and freeing up space while making the most out of storage is a theme that has become a real mindworm for me.

I watched a bit of a “tiny home” marathon the other day on HGTV; studying the brilliant means and methods some people are using to get the maximum benefit out of a minimal space. That fuelled me with a bit of inspiration as well, and reminded me that I’m still ultimately the master my little realm, and that I’m fortunate enough to have the space that I do, such as it is. My office and kitchen are the biggest targets when it comes to wanting to create effective usage of storage and space, each room with their own different respective issues. I’m concentrating on my kitchen first, as it is that place of the two rooms in my dwelling that is used most and has the greatest play with possibly conserving energy. I also think ahead to the future in terms of what will change socially and environmentally for this region, and how one should prepare for that. I speculate the following things:

·         Population growing faster than the infrastructure is to support it. Resource drains or taking things offline to rectify the problems may be more frequent.

·         Water becoming scarcer, as the city expands, or if droughts become more frequent, and more advisories to conserve water are more likely to happen. Water utility bills go up.

·         Energy costs in general going up, that is if we don’t make a better effort to exploit solar and other alternative energy sources.

·         More costs for waste disposal as our landfill areas become overtaxed. More costs for disposal, waste quotas, and then subsequent penalties for excessive household refuse.

To cope with dealing with those things in the future, it is best to practice and get into the habit of preparing for them now.

Overall, the trend of today in this city, as elsewhere, is having new houses being built with fewer people living in them, and having ever more expansive kitchens where people are generally doing less and less cooking in them. Some people who think they know me would guess that a big kitchen is one thing that I would dream for and covet, but to be honest it isn’t. It may impress others, but not me. It’s a pathetic irony and a stunning inefficacy and burden for me to see: all this wasted space just to be used for mostly just opening tins of soup, making sandwiches, or using a counter to throw take out containers on, because no one seems to have actual time to do real cooking anymore. They are elsewise too busy trying to build and secure a high paying career to pay a sky-high mortgage, which includes this feature kitchen that only serves to be a white elephant. I reflect back on the days of watching my Mom do the crazy amount and output of cooking and food processing that she did in our simple little  kitchen when we lived on the farm: one that was spatially about as big as mine is, if not relatively smaller. I suppose it served as a good example as how to manage my own. In the past few years, in terms of my culinary talent, I have been growing in both skill and desire for more daring experiments on the wild and radical side of food and prep techniques. I now feel a stronger need to set up a proper kitchen space that logically reflects that. Mentally, I’ve been putting a wrecking ball through it, and trying to figure out how to make things ideal from the floor up.

The elements of time and energy constraints for single occupants are also the variables in the equation of my idea of a perfect and efficient kitchen space that are often overlooked by architects and designers. Being reduced to the sole manpower of a single occupant doubles or triples maintenance and cleaning time and labour. Having a larger kitchen space is senseless; keeping a smaller, efficient, better organized one is an absolute must. The only sound reason for needing to have the kitchen size that I do have is the fact that I do a lot of home brewing. Unfortunately, the processing and storage of large quantities of liquids/alcohol consumes relatively a lot of space. I also have some stranger things that most other single men wouldn’t think of getting, like pickling jars and canning pots. I do the best I can with what I have, but I’m not exempting myself from trying to learn more about things that I could do to improve. I have a lot established already. To watch me operate my dwelling’s kitchen, my methods most look pretty eccentric or radical compared to most other average bachelors’ homes. No matter how radical it seems, my method in my BACHELOR kitchen (as mentioned in an earlier post, about another episode of kitchen space reclamation) most certainly edges toward the practical and scientific for the sake of all dimensions of time/space/energy/cost efficiency. Here is what I mean:  

Steam and Pressure – For making flavourful concentrated broths in a fraction of the time instead of conventional boiling and reduction, nothing beats a pressure cooker. I love this thing. It’s great for small scale canning also, using a tenth of the water volume and less than a quarter of the time to sterilize and seal jars compared to conventional boiling immersion method. I’m surprised that, despite the more modern built-in safety features that they are now crafted with, there are a few professional chefs out there who are still too chicken shit to use these things. They do require a bit of close-up monitoring, hard to do in a busy and distraction loaded commercial kitchen I guess, I’ll give them that. Mine cooks at a pressure of 10 atmospheres before bleeding out steam, equating to

So far, I’ve been lucky and
 nothing has yet went KABOOM!!!

about 100 metres under water below sea level at 16.5 degrees Celsius (coincidentally, my preferred room temperature).  It scores big with me for the factors of reduced time, hence reduced kilowatt hours, and ultimately good if you are genuinely concerned about conserving/rationing water (see further below about emergency preparedness). I always thought that in terms of giving true aid to people in third world countries, education and technology is sometimes better than straight up food and healthcare. I think of the scene of the Nepal earthquakes in the recent past as an example. In such impoverished high altitude zones with inclement climates and scarce growth, in like the Andes or Himalayas, where you have to burn more fuel for reaching adequate cooking temperatures using water at those altitudes, aide should entail air dropping pressure cookers to these remote places. The problem in such regions sometimes isn’t a question of a shortage of food, but a scarcity of wood or other sufficient combustible material for cooking and preserving it properly (to prevent disease), which leads to wastages and then the consequential shortages. Another problem is difficulty to access to water if there is no convenient infrastructure to get it directed to homes. Using less water, and less time to boil it, means less energy to use. Less cooking time plus wasting less water means less trekking to get a sufficient amount of it. Children are often used for such tasks, hauling water and collecting sticks and animal dung to burn for fuel, and if the labour of subsistence and toiling for essentials becomes greater than time for schooling, these kids are becoming more deprived of an education. Having a simple pressure cooker in such households could help limit all that. Just a theory of mine. 

The quintessential wok with bamboo steamers. A good ploy for
maximizing verticle space while reducing the work of
four burners into one Depending on what I steam, my trick is to
collect the drippings, and cook Ramen or Udon noodle soup
 in the wok's water while I steam the other goodies above it.  

Chinese (Asian) Practices and Methods – I don’t mean to specifically stereotype the Chinese, or to stigmatize them; I am referring to any of the kitchen practices of the people of the Far East Asian nations living in modernity (South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc.) who live with the stresses of over-population, and yet can produce amazing things with limited space and resources. I just assume that the Chinese, the ones with the largest population, who have historically endured more adversities involving invasions and war, famine, and more recently, shortages/rationing wrought by the Maoist regime and overcrowded urban living, have had a longer time and a lot of practice in adapting, and even prospering with such restrictions than anyone else of that region. Learning from the solutions they have created to endure such ordeals seems rather relevant. In Korea, a typical “large” kitchen is probably runs between a half and a third of the size of mine. And then there is Japan: a place where they invented capsule hotels, and have formed and grown cubic watermelons* for ease of shipping and storage. In places like the Shinjuku district in Tokyo, there are entire sushi and cocktail bars squeezed into spots that are less than the size of my kitchen and dining area combined. Going that small is a bit ludicrous and nothing to really aspire to, but therein are the lessons of reducing the need for more single-purpose small appliances for food prep, exploiting more vertical space on one cooking spot (like with the steamer), learning few more of their fancy cutting tricks with my BSFCC (big sharp fuckin’ Chinese cleaver) and using overall less of energy and space. Using all that with current surface area of the counter that I have makes for a more comfortable and effective theatre of operation. 
 

It looks like a collection of
parasitic round worm
specimens from a high school
biology lab, but it's actually
shredded parsnips pickled in
lime, ginger, and garlic

Incubation Environment- I have already expounded enough on how fermenting and pickling at home is for the greater good in stopping needless waste. My kitchen is a fermentation kitchen, meaning that I have to make it easy to sanitize and control the temperature accordingly to make my critters in the carboys, crocks, and jars do their job happily. A cluttered kitchen with hard to clean surface areas is a no-no. There is to be a minimal of any decorative things in here, because all they do is collect dust and thus the kind of crap that would risk contaminating and infecting my living cultures. The larger the kitchen space, the harder it is to be able to prevent this. The kitchen garbage containment is purposely left small, so that it is taken out more frequently to prevent the invasion of mold and fry fruits.

Emergency Rations – If you truly have any scientific/rational mind at all, then you should always be grounded in the reality that some natural disaster at some time has the potential of popping up at any given moment, depriving you of the conveniences that you are commonly used to. Keeping, at the very least, four days of worth of canned food and hydrating fluid around the place for God-only-knows-what kind of shit-storm you may have to deal with (thinking of a worst case scenario of a really bad long weekend when emergency services might be delayed: from a Friday to a Monday). It’s rare that any severe weather related impacts last beyond that. In my region around my home, things like mega-lightning storms, or possibly a tornado, or an ice storm/blizzard, or super-cold snap that knocks out the power, creates water line breaks, and makes it too fierce to navigate outside safely are the most likely weather scenarios that could keep me homebound and stranded. A good measure is having food around that is pre-processed, nutritious, and doesn’t require power to cook it, or some means available that allows you to cook and boil water without electricity, like using a portable butane burner/camping stove (with extra gas canisters) like I have. The water reserve system I have is unique and practical (hint, it doesn’t require me being stupid and buying and storing bottled water, and involves stuff that I can recycle at home for no money), but I’ll elaborate on that another time when it becomes topical.

Nesting Bowls – In a smaller kitchen, my adage of “If it don’t nest, it don’t pass the test” applies.
This ten bowl set here has a collective total capacity of 14 litres (depending on what’s in it, flour/dough can pile up; liquid doesn’t). It all tucks away within a 0.005 m³ space. Packing things within things, like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, is my more favoured way of organizing and freeing space.

Inert Energy Food Storage – I always have dried foods or canned foods around and keep them in reasonable plenitude. Pantry space for that is always important. They can not only serve as emergency rations, but the other nice feature about them is that they don’t need any more power to keep them preserved, unlike relying on a fridge or freezer. Dehydrated food is shrunk and thus economizes on space. Jars are reusable. Buying bulk food to fill them is cheaper, reduces packaging, and is ultimately better for the planet. 

Ferro-Magnetic Induction –This latest little acquisition of mine is the new boss in town out of all my

 

small appliances: a portable induction cooktop. It’s a misnomer to call it a burner, because it itself emits no heat. The only heat on the surface of the cooker is that which is absorbed from the cooking pot. It can bring a litre of water to a full boil up to eight minutes faster than the highest setting on my conventional electric coil burner on the stove top, with less power! It’s even faster at boiling water than my electric kettle. I’ll have more precise digital temperature control when heating stuff in a range below boiling for culturing. It’s perfect of singles like me who only are only cooking with one pot or pan anyway. To put it bluntly, my electric range is a piece of shit in comparison, and microwave ovens never heat evenly. I’m curious to see how many kWh will be peeled of my next utility bill as I use this thing more frequently instead of my regular stove. It’s easier to clean, greener, super-efficient, safer to use with safeguard technology programmed in it, and plus it’s just cool to say that I can cook with freakin’ magnetism. No self-respecting science geek gourmand should be without one. However, because it functions with magnetic fields, it only works with iron or stainless steel cookware. See next point.

Iron (or Stainless Steel) –I will keep only cast iron or stainless steel in my kitchen, and avoid the fancy-schmancy pots and pans with non-stick coatings as much as I can. When those coatings chip, flake, or get scraped off because SOME ASSHOLE WAS USING A METAL UTENSIL ON THEM!!!!!, destroying the surface and thus depleting it of its purpose**, they obviously get into our food, and they are proving to be toxic compounds. More and more studies are suggesting that these “state-of-the-art” pan-coating chemicals are linked with things like certain cancers and creating obesogens: compounds that trigger cellular metabolisms to produce more adipose tissue. I’m more prone to being genetically predisposed to obesity as it is, and I need no extra help from that shit. Once the coating is gone, they are useless and need to be scrapped, therefore wasteful, adding another toxic thing into a landfill. A good cast iron or stainless steel pot or pan will last longer than I will if treated and seasoned right. In general, it’s probably a good idea just to avoid space age coatings, plus plastics all together for stirring and serving utensils too. If you wouldn’t eat a cheap plastic spoon for fear of it being somehow toxic to you, then you shouldn’t be dipping and gradually dissolving bits of it into your hot food while it cooks. There are already warnings about microwaving food in plastic containers. A metal spoon/ladle or spatula will last longer many times longer with only a slightly higher relative cost. Wood or bamboo are other options too if one is into cheap and renewable.

**Nothing screams out attention to detail for conserving and efficiently using space than using science to take a thing that naturally grows round and making it square.

**-You know who you are, person(s) at work (no names mentioned)!

The "Before I Die I Want to . . ." Wall

Despite having half-shot hips and knees, I kept to my commitment of making the distance mandated by my running programme yesterday morning (I’m aching terribly from it today). It was a lovely day, and getting hot. I started out a little bit later than I really should have. More people than usual were circulating and amassing along the trails and the banks of the river to watch the Dragon Boat races that were taking place that day.

For my longer runs, I often pick a route that passes along the trail cutting through River Landing, but yesterday was the first time I noticed a special feature put on the vertical face of the north bank pylon of the Sid Buckwold Bridge as I ran under it. I don’t know when it appeared but it must have been recent, and out of all of Saskatoon’s bridges this is the only one I saw it on. If it was up there for very long, I’m embarrassed to admit how oblivious I've been to it for all this time. It would be due to me usually having eyes front focused or tunnel vision when I’m exerting myself. However, this time I was stopped in my tracks because the message of it was very bold, striking, and profound. It was sort of a public message board that we as citizens could contribute to, with a very distinctive theme. It was simply a ruled blackboard with an open ended, fill-in-the-blank statement . . .

 

Curiosity led me to stop and linger around there for a while to see what was listed there. It’s interesting what people will dare to put there when they can do it in anonymity. There was no chalk around to make my contribution though. I wondered if this is a feature unique to our city, or if this is part of some grander movement around the country, or globally. If it is national or global, I’d be quite interested to see what differences and similarities there are in the types of wishes people write out.

In a sociological perspective, if this is a genuinely accurate sample of what goes on in the heads of people in this city, from what I could judge from the collective wish statements made on there, I must say that generally the people of Saskatoon are:

·         Not too materialistic, which is nice to see. There weren’t many, if any, wishes for wealth, cars and mansions, or owning other such finery. I saw one statement about winning a lottery but that was about all that struck me. The luxuries our citizens mostly listed was about freedoms and experiences that they wanted to have, like traveling abroad, “to retire”. There were lots of intangible things up there too, like “to fall in love”, “find my soulmate”,

·         There weren’t as many vulgar, low-brow scribblings up there as I expected. In such a public place with a node of contact with a high property crime/economically disadvantaged area, I thought there would be a lot more content on there that would be there more the sake of defacing it rather than serving to expound good intent. One example of the low-brow stuff was “get stoned with Snoop Dog”, but for every one stupid statement like that, it was countered by a lot more noble stuff, like “learn another language”, “get my Ph.D.”, “starting a business”, “to see my great grandchildren”, etc.

·         I was expecting more levity and humour like, “see the Toronto Maple Leafs win a Stanley Cup”, but that wasn’t the mood of this monument of our city’s residents. It was more serious, but a positive sort of seriousness. There were very few messages of desperation (maybe the Leafs comment counts as one though). The only one that stuck out for me was “to stop living in Hell!”

·         Lots of wishes and pleas for grander designs of positive social/environmental change, like “to be free from fossil fuels”, “see the end of global poverty”

I don’t know if this wall of wishes gets periodically washed down, recovering and renewing space for other people to add more things. There is a comfort in knowing that there is a lot there already that I have in common with some other souls out there. With facing my own mortality some while ago, its big message gives me pause for thought about it. There is a lot that is left that’s undone. I am left to wonder what I have that is not on there, and is unique for me.

I do know that I will be running by there more often to read it and to see if there are any more additions and changes. Perhaps I’ll make it a point to run over there with my own piece of chalk next time.

Siesta Fiesta (Part 2: Having a Fit)

I'm so glad for the 180 degree change in weather status since the weekend. It allowed me to move my

An exploded view of my
joinery system

mass of lumber and dirty business outside and continue on with my initial project in the sunshine. The hammock stand project has gone through a few dozen mental revisions, and I've had enough slight mishaps and mistakes occur to educate me a little better, nothing so serious that couldn't be corrected with a little innovation. In fact, some were welcome; they helped make me see a clearer vision of a version that would satisfy my earlier stated objectives. It actually made me see how I could make a convertible setup with just a changing some parts which can make two versions of a frame setup. They are:

Version #1 – The original double-mast version. The one made for being used for camping and the like. It's the form I'm working on now. So far, all the segments I cut can fit in the trunk of the car; so I reached the second objective.

Version #2- The deck version. A version that saves even more deck space, and requires the need of

The above pieces put together to make
a bracing point at one end of the frame

only a single mast point. The plan I have in mind still conforms to my first constraint of having no permanent attachment to the exterior of the building. This version technically requires even less material than that of my original plan, thus passes the imperative of approaching the goal of using dMass (I may have to borrow that spare wood to make corrections).

My greatest successes at this point are:

• Minimum of actual numerical measurement – I've only used my measuring tape about nine times. That was mostly just to get a rough overall assessment of how large it was going to be. The actual fabrication was done mostly by using a bevel gauge, a marking gauge, the straight edges of a roofing/combination square, and edges of the cut wood itself. This yielded for me . . .
• Making the snuggest, tightest tenons that I've ever made using soft wood. I'm impressed that I've worked myself up to having this sort of skill with mere hand tools
• Except for carabiners and eye screws attached to the hammock, it still no nails or fasteners holding the frame structure together
• Inclusion of a middle extender piece, to adjust by replacement of only one section of wood to account for the hammock fabric getting stretched, or if the hammock itself gets damaged and needs to be replaced entirely
• Only one cut/splinter so far*

The mishaps and failures so far are:

• Making the snuggest, tightest tenons that I've ever made with soft wood. I'm concerned about them being so tight that the extra strain may cause splitting and cracking around some critical pressure points on the frame. I have yet to test it out. The super-tight joints and mortises also keep my objective of an easily collapsible system (with a couple whacks of a hammer) for the sake of storage from being realized.
• A rapidly dulling ryoba saw that is finding too many knots in the wood. I noticed too late that some sections between some larger knots have looser wood fibre and would have an easier tendency to crack. I may have to dip into my reserve and buy some extra lumber to correct for these defects.
• I made my mast tenons perhaps too narrow. I think I need to fashion some sort of reinforcement struts as a correction. So much for the idea of tensegrity
• I made a poor choice for the kind of joint to use to bind a middle extender segment. This "bird's mouth" with locking pin set up wasn't a good idea, plus a loose knot I exposed now makes it inadequate. It is at least correctable, and there is enough of an end to spare to fashion another more stronger configuration
• 
  

  

  One of my boo-boo's

  I actually needed a power tool; specifically, a drill to bore some pilot holes for eye screws. I'm thankful that I have a kind neighbour who allowed me to borrow his.

So, I'm still stuck with doing these revisions and corrections piecemeal, and I'm not finished this yet. I guess there will be a part three . . .

What it will look like once finished.
Ella is in the background, awaiting the
chance to test this thing out.

*- I've discovered the hard way that while on blood-thinners, a simple brush with one small saw tooth on a fingertip can make the place look like a murder scene. I hope to be off these things by this month.

0.1 Of 2015

By my reckoning, I realize that as of noon today we will have exactly one tenth of this year behind us. It's also a dear friend's birthday today. Treating her to an enjoyable lunch was probably the only thing that gave me enough drive to wander outside and beyond my home for the day. Flurries have been occurring since last night, and it's still continuing to snow now. Anything pleasant and alleviating that resulted from the abnormally early thaw we had in mid-January has now been buried, obscured, and erased in the bleak whiteness.

At the beginning of the year, I made some 52 week to-do and wish lists. So far, I'm on track with keeping on task. Today was used to do and assess the progress of such things. The best thing about it is that I'm forcing myself with my own curiosity to try out some new hacks to overcome the procrastination. Some of the goals and expectations on them range from a blend of the realistic to the trivia, to the eccentric, to the outlandish and extravagant. The lists contain anything at all that I feel puts me a few steps forward towards whatever I liken to be as abundance and progression towards the better. I told myself that if I could even fulfill 10% of these things I've brainstormed I'd be happy. Well, the tally shows that I've done this, or at least got the smaller things cleared away. I am happier, or at least a little more content and satisfied; and along with getting other spaces and other stuff in order, I'm feeling a lot more confident that I can achieve even more yet.

One cheap old shoe rack + 4 notch cuts + Ella's
kennel + fitness gear = New exercise station +
2 cubic meters of reclaimed condo space.

Regaining my strength and endurance back has still been a major struggle. Now that the last of my closets have been organized, I managed to station my fitness equipment in a place where I'm not tripping over it, and yet at the same time, in a convenient enough spot where it's accessible and not likely to be completely ignored. I did have some lavish plans to build a more elaborate shelving system, but after some more juggling and reassessment, I resorted to some repurposing and hacking with using only a saw. Making four simple notch cuts saved me time, space, and money. I didn't even need to consult Pinterest to figure this hack out.

Rediscovering my near-to-expired passport some time ago has sparked me up with a travel bug. Holidaying abroad was on that list, but so far the picture is no clearer than to just get out of the country. I'm not interested in going to the USA*, or Mexico, or any other Latin American or Hispanic nations. Been there; done that. I want the chance to go someplace and use either of the two other languages I know, or either of the two others I've been casually learning now while I still have the capacity to use them, and also to allow me enough freedom to avoid the tourist resorts entirely. That's about as clear as the picture gets for me as far as travel goes thus far. It's one of those more extravagant things on my list.

I'm hoping tomorrow will be more moderate weather-wise. I think I'll dare myself to try out some Nordic skiing now that enough snow has returned to do it.
*- Maybe some other time to visit my dear cousin.

The Bachelor Spring Cleaning Chart

I've been going through a phase of insomnia since last Thursday, due to a mixed bag of reasons. I have brainstorming, with the help of Pinterest, to blame for last night's round of it. I don't know why I've been so geared to start my "spring" cleaning so early, but I did. It's something I'm usually a consummate procrastinator for doing as such. Perhaps it was due to the past few months of aching for change for the better, or a prompt from the last couple times of having avalanches of junk from top shelves falling on me when I've opened closets. Whatever the case, I welcome having now the health, energy, and motivation to commit to such a task. You'd think that making room and carting away trash would help set my mind toward a peaceful ease. However, that hasn't been happening. Instead, I've been setting my brain on fire with wild ideas, and researching ways to repurpose and reorganize space and objects after I've cleared away and purged all the surplus detritus.

This time around hasn't been as overwhelming and frustrating though. I fashioned a bit more of a sounder system for conquering clutter. For my own benefit, I've listed some common sense things to remember that greatly simplified things. Since it is very process oriented that goes through some repetitive loops, I decided to make this a flowchart, and take advantage of using a learning moment on how to create such things. To see the flowchart better, use the "Ctrl and +" keys to zoom in, and "Ctrl and - (minus)" to zoom out again.

  

Or, I could scrap all this and call the new Maids in Lingerie service, that has recently established itself here (or so I've heard)

The Future of This Year and Beyond

I'm kind of down in the dumps again. I was actually looking forward to returning to work this past Monday to keep from stagnating anymore inside. I welcomed it as a definite mark of reaching near recovery. I suppose I was a bit delusional about it. More than one person observing me commented that I'm probably not ready to return yet. A recent sinus infection has been stifling me, and has set me a few squares backward in the recovery game. With this current cold snap, straining myself to breathe the super-chilled -30 to -45 degree air while doing some trips outside has been doing no favours for me either. It has been difficult, and I'm back to gasping for breath, and tiring very easily. This morning, I could barely crawl out of bed; not that there was anything pressing to crawl to and attend to. It was -30 °C this morning with an even more ridiculous wind chill: same as it has been for the past while since the day after New Year's Day.
 
As last year has been a period of pronounced frustrations, stress, and hardships, I haven't bothered to fashion an entry about the year in review of 2014 as I have with other years. It's nothing I want to regale here now. I reviewed back to the beginnings of last year, and the year before that, and noted that there sure hasn't been a good start to any of them. The notable thing that was happening after reviewing those times was a pattern straining myself to be active when I was indeed ailing, or ill with some damn thing. This year I'm going to make it point not to be that stupid again. There was nothing heroic in doing so, and all it has seemed to do was incur and beget more trouble and misery.

The one sensible thing I did at the beginning of the year was to hoard a huge stack of my favourite magazines* from my nearest library. I made a point to list and note all the things of science and technical innovation that I will be hoping and wishing for in the near future. If these things actually come to fruition, it will actually give me some optimism for us a human species.

1. Plastic from Thin Air: It basically involves taking captured industrial/agricultural gases like waste methane and other hydrocarbons, and processing them through a bioreactor, using enzymes to create plastic polymers rather than relying on petroleum by-products to produce them. The petroleum-based plastic productions create pollution; the making of plastics from methane capture reduces greenhouse gas and reduces pollution. Stick that up your ass, Big Oil!
   
    
2. Cleaner and Cheaper Energy Storage: One of the bigger hurdles there is to sell green and renewable energy as viable alternatives to the paradigm we have now is the fact that energy storage of wind/solar energy requires piles and batteries that themselves are made of toxic substances, and are just as taxing to the environment for their production. There is now the Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI) battery than relies on salt water based electrolytes to use for that. On top of being non-toxic, it is also relatively cheap and can be set up in a scalable modular fashion, and doesn't risk overheating. It is versatile enough to be used within a home or on the grid.
    
3. Robo-Crabs: This sounds like some sort of exotic super-mutated affliction you might get after visiting in a brothel in Tokyo. Actually, it is a robotic development in Korea where they've made six-legged, ¾ tonne, walking robots that can crawl along the sea bottom of previously unexplored places. They are equipped with such features as 11 cameras, sonar, and a Doppler array that can accurately chart the sea floor and monitor currents. Exploration is all fine and good, but what I would like to see them outfitted for is the ability to do deep sea salvage, and to be able to have some role in cleaning up some of the millions of metric tonnes of toxic junk and contaminants we've already thrown in this world's oceans.
   
    
4. Self-Fueling Ships: One factor of the expense of a shipped product is always the fuel used to transport the car, computer, or other thing-a-ma-doodle from their production centres, like for example in Asia, across the Pacific, and to the ports here. If you checked your globe or atlas lately, the Pacific Ocean is a pretty friggin' huge expanse, and getting stuff across it from point to point gulps up a lot of oil per shipment. What if then something else amazing can happen, like a ship that has its own power generation plant on it that can produce its own fuel right from the seawater itself, not needing to carry along any dirty petroleum? This research and development is happening right now with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, known as it is right now as Electro-chemical Acidification Carbon Capture, and they are making commercial grade fuel this way. The process involves, like making plastic from air as I mentioned earlier, taking carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and hydrogen, and with a catalytic process, the ship makes its own fuel from that stuff found in the seawater. What I don't know is how the rate of production to the rate of consumption ratio is within such a system. If it allows for a completely self-sufficient system, and can even produce more fuel than it consumes, this would be a revolutionary thing. The potential for this as I see it is:
   1. Less dependence on foreign-oil from unfriendly nations if there is no longer a need to dock at these places halfway around the world to refuel.
   2. A greatly reduced need for military spending, because as it is now with the U.S. Navy at least, the military cost of securing corridors to import oil from regions from the Middle East greatly surpasses the actual value of the oil tanked and shipped through these shipping lanes.**
   3. If the model of this sort of cargo ship is such that there a constantly running plant for making fuel, and a reduced need for actual fuel storage, more space on the ship can be utilized for loading on more cargo, thus there is more logistical efficiency. If the ship somehow has maritime accident where the hull is breached, there is then less stored fuel being dumped back into the sea, thus a lessened risk of an environmental disaster.
   4. The use of harvesting ships/plants with this technology to mass-produce surplus fuel (if possible), so that there is a less energy consumption (more passive way) to glean (renewable) fuel directly from the ocean, instead of environmentally destructive exploration, water diversion/contamination through processes like fracking, and reduced drilling through land and seafloor to get at it.
   5. This technology actually absorbs CO₂ and thus helps to prevent global warming, or at least reduces the carbon footprint.
      
       
5. The Solar Roadway: It's incredible to think of how much actual space we have dedicated just to drive on and reserve for parking our vehicles, and all the rest of that time that a road surface isn't used it just lies there being exposed to the sun, growing and producing nothing. Why can't we multi-use these roadways and parking lots to serve us with harvesting energy? Think about how many square meters of roadway there is in your general area alone. Well someone has already thought of that and is working on a solution. There is development going on right now for the implementation of photovoltaic cells that collectively act as an actual road surface, that not only collect and covert solar energy, but these cells networked together can potentially do to the following things:
   1. De-icing roads and reducing the need for deploying and powering snow-removal equipment, and less fuel to be used for surface maintenance and applying salt and grit.
   2. You could actually recharge an electric vehicle with passive solar power in the very spot you park, extending the range of your E-car within and throughout the city you are using it in where these are equipped.
   3. Powering Signage, and through a traffic computer network, power LEDs to create messages to apprise motorists of adverse road conditions ahead using the road surface itself.
   4. Animated markings and road warnings that are triggered with foot traffic and the crossing of cattle and larger wildlife like deer. It would protect both the motorist and the wildlife, saving countless lives and many millions of dollars, and spares us all irreparable damage to the natural habitant from the loss of many creatures. The downside is that this might have some Hill-Billy Rednecks being upset and disappointed that there is less road kill to scoop up off the highways for some vittles.
   5. Since the road itself is already based on a network, it can be used as a default pre-existing conduit to conduct and transmit power and use fibre-optics to boost communications/internet connectivity, without extra cost or needing to claim more land to build separate infra-structures for such things.
      
       
6. Improved Virtual Reality Platforms: I've been long hoping for the day that VR technology will become more sophisticated and dynamically interactive, so integrative and vivid to the senses, and most importantly affordable that it will become more practical on a household. I think the amount of unnecessary travel time and costs it will save, there will be no risk of lost luggage when you want to tour the Louvre. I can't even find the right words to pluck the ideas from my imagination as to what will happen with online shopping, architectural design, fully-immersive game experiences, and other alternative virtual lifestyle scenarios. The technology that will help enable this is the new 360fly Camera, which records video in a 360 degree space, and 240 degree up and down field which will make for a completely immersive video experience. I think Facebook will really amp up R&D and make huge strides with this technology this year after settling in with their acquisition of Oculus Rift. Google and Samsung is really. I think I'll be buying stock in this stuff, plus investing in Depends adult diapers, because you'll indeed be needing them after playing around in the more dramatic and vivid scenes with this stuff.
   
    
7. 3D Printing: It's becoming more than just some fad now for model makers and geeky hobbyists fashioning chess sets. A functional electric car has now been 3D printed. For now on a domestic level, if there is anything that isn't strictly material composition dependent around the home, this is going to be a huge game-changer. Homes themselves may soon become 3D printed, as predicted by futurist and social engineer, Jacque Fresco. Using organic matrices, collagen, and living stem cells, the prospect of printing replacement organs is coming closer to a reality.
8. Aerial Drones (UAVs): It is interesting seeing these develop, but they are last on this list because I see them being mostly on the bad side of the double-edged sword of technology if placed in the hands of the common public. For law enforcement, I see them as being valuable tools for surveying accident scenes, and maybe tracking/pursuit of marked criminals, as they are a lot cheaper than helicopters. However, I can also see them being used in questionable and wrongful purposes by law-enforcement, like equipping them with teargas or pepper spray canisters to intimidate or discharge on peaceful protesters. For commercial use, it may be an instantaneous, and as-the-crow-flies way to transport smaller objects, but for now their relatively short range, glitch-fill guidance systems, and their vulnerability to bad weather still makes them a questionable choice to use for a quick and reliable delivery service. I certainly don't see them as being cost effective enough yet for an average company to deploy them. I haven't yet heard of any overwhelming positive feedback about Amazon's trial use of them. They are, however, making big steps into having these things more maneuverable, simplified, and function more autonomously for civilian use, and that's what scares me about them. The ones with the cameras mounted on them make my cringe when I think about all the different ways they could be used intrusively and to violate others' privacy. In the wrong hands, I see them being more dangerous than handguns. They aren't regulated, and there is nothing to stop some terrorist or some other demented, Unibomber-esque type of psycho-bozo out there to equip one with an incendiary or explosive device, or to use it as some other kind of weaponized platform and fly it into God-knows-where. Then again, that already happens with conventional vehicles, however this way though seems just a little more treacherous and insidious because it is capable of an extra vertical axis for destruction, and capable of being maneuvered into previously hard to access places.  

So here is a scene I can imagine happening with these innovations, within the next decade, put in the context in a contrasting comparison of the experience of what I went through while shopping recorded in the last entry.
 
Let's say that it is -35° C, like it was on the day of my last entry. You are strongly disinclined to tax yourself and your vehicle to make a shopping trip, so you slip on your VR goggles (#6). Even in -35, the power to run the computer and VR peripherals is banked solar energy stored in the home battery (# 2). You now walk through the virtual showroom, of let's say, IKEA. You find some object, and can you can get a better sense of function and dimensions of objects when you now explore through online shopping. Maybe you'll chat a bit with the fellow consumers/avatars as you shop. If you don't speak each other's language in real life, the VR will compensate and translate the dialogues between you and others simultaneously. As you shop, you could then simply import a sample copy of a virtual object temporarily and place into an exact virtual augmented reproduction of your real living space for a comparison and "feel" before you make up your mind to buy it (the real object to occupy your real space). You even have the option to scale the object larger or smaller, or change the patterns and colours as you see fit. The (real) object's material composition, dimensions, and weight are such that when you decide to buy it, you have the options of A.) to use a drone(#8) to deliver your purchase to you (or to the nearest distribution center with a dronepad at its shipping depot, where then a regular delivery truck service may relay it to you within a day), or B.) have the form plan downloaded directly to your own 3D printer, and for a reduced price that excludes material and shipping, having the object made there at your home, also within a day. You select option B. The plastic filament loaded in your 3D printer to make your salt and pepper shakers, or whatever, is locally produced from a bioreactor stationed at a manure lagoon (#1) at a dairy farm. Speaking of dairy farms, I need in both this scenario and in real life.
 
Your electric (or hybrid) car, or possibly the vehicle that may deliver your milk to you, was being charged by #5, and even though it's -35 outside, the roads are clear and de-iced. The battery in the electric car is a lithium-manganese composite. The manganese was harvested from nodules gathered from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, harvested by Robo-Crabs (#3), and thus have been made much cheaper to manufacture. The operational platform for this mining project was a ship that produced its own fuel (#4). Another such ship that re-supplies it is a modular cargo vessel, a concept by Jacque Fresco, where one module exchanges the manganese nodules for sustenance, meanwhile the other separate and modulated cargo units split off from the "mother ship" which is anchored or stationed at the most logistically ideal launch point for maximum efficiency and economy, and they scatter to deliver, exchange, and return with their particular consignments nearly simultaneously to Manila, Jakarta, Seoul, wherever they are conveniently needed within that region, rather than having that one ship slowly and serially visit and waste precious time loading/unloading and refueling at each separate destination port, spending less time at sea. Each reloaded modular pod ship would then rendezvous and reattach to the mother ship before it collectively returns to its home port.***

It is fun to imagine and speculate how developments like the ones I listed, how combined together and made to work synergistically, and paint a whole picture of what living on this globe could look like. In these few paragraphs alone, I think I just theoretically reduced the world's reliance on petroleum through alternative energy, and reduced and rectified shipping by a grand percentage, as well as cleaned up some greenhouse gas to boot. I hope I live long enough to see such improvements happen.

*- As nice and easy as it is to download things on an e-reader or laptop, I still like and appreciate the old-fashioned method of reading and turning of physical pages. Plus, using the public library is a free pleasure we should never take for granted. The magazines I chose were: Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Make: magazine.
**- Because this is being developed by the US Navy, its first deployment will most likely be destined and claimed for some insidious and low-brow barbaric military utilization, all guised in the name of defense. The proof of how wasteful military spending gets is pretty much self-evident as indicated in this one point here.
*** - It shows how stupid we are in allowing our governments, military, and policy makers to get with destructive power when we've sort of already developed a model for a multiple simultaneous delivery system like this for the function of laser-guided bombs and nuclear warheads (MIRVs), but failed to orchestrate such a system that benefits us as a model for more efficient commercial shipping.

The Future(s) That Didn't Come

"To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - R. Buckminster Fuller

Ever since last week, as the comic con geeks and sci-fi nerds were celebrating Star Wars day around the globe (May the Fourth be with you), I've been dwelling on the not-so-fiction based topics centred around the future and human society. I got to thinking about the ideas I had formulated back in the days of my youth about what I imagined the future (this present) would be like. Helping a friend re-organize and add fixtures to her garage over this weekend drew me to thinking about and the subject of the futuristic architecture and living space again; put into the context of the stuff of what I had envisioned decades ago in my teen years.

I wasn't very hopeful in those formative years that we would ever survive as a society, or that I would even survive to adulthood given that the media was always reporting on the sabre-rattling between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, spelling out that the Cold War was going to turn hot any second with little or no warning. It was depressing knowing that the most radical advancements in technology then always seemed to be in the hands of the military, which made it feel even more like the race toward Armageddon seem inevitable. There was more than one teacher I had tuned into reminding us of all that gloomy business. I got into reading magazines like Omni*, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics when I was about twelve or thirteen, more to escape that fear than anything: to turn toward looking into some sort of future that didn't involve some sort of annihilation. Back then, I was actively being a 'futurist': actively speculating what the future technologies and society would be like if we survived, or altogether managed to avoid such destruction. I'm, of course, thankful that events occurred where the scenario of being reduced to a pile of ashes or stricken with the lingering torturous suffering of radioactive fallout never happened, but sadly, neither did the better future that I was preparing for come to fruition either. The forecasted future(s) of technical innovation and social evolution that was to provide enough for every citizen on this planet to live comfortably with an abundance of energy and material resources for physical and societal well-being never came, nor is development coming quickly enough for such possibilities. It's great to see that for the most part, we have been able to stamp out and hamper hard-core global Communism to allow ingenuity, technology and efficiency to thrive. Now all what we have to do is stamp out and hamper hard-core global Capitalism and religious theocracies, and the respective crushing poverty, oppression and ignorance it brings to billions. All these radical systems I mentioned do nothing good for the ecology and environment of this planet.

I was very intrigued back then by the work and writings of Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was such a brilliant man. He got me turned on to his version and vision of applied geodesic geometry, the concept of tensegrity, and synergetics. Also, it was he who got me absolutely hating my geometry class in high school at the time, which seemed in comparison so backward, so primitive, so dull with all the in-class recitation, and rote learning of proofs that we would never have practical use for in the real world. There was nothing creative about it; learning from a teacher who didn't do much more than regurgitate from an antiquated textbook from the 1950's. Each minute in that class felt like a step backward into some sort of intellectual retardation. I dropped it. To do that for an entire school year was hell to me.

Today, I'm very disappointed to see that geodesic dome designs aren't more commonplace for being used as self-sufficient homes, or at the very least ones that are used as greenhouses for local sustainable food growth to avoid the cost of shipping. I'm upset that there still isn't a pan-global hydro line network, lines across the Bering Strait to make a Trans-Siberian/Trans-Manchurian hydro line that switches energy from one continent to another at times when low night time use occurs the surplus production gets diverted to the other side of the globe when and where the need is high during their respective daytime hours, thus making the use of that water powering turbines more effectively and efficiently, thus relying less on other more destructive and wasteful power production. It angers me that South Korea and China have more Mag-Lev bullet trains than this continent, a supposedly more technically advanced one. As a citizen of Earth, I'm pissed off that there is money galore to peck into pristine spots on the Earth to access oil and natural gas with methods that contaminate and pollute the water, but isn't yet an established infrastructure for a cleaner hydrogen economy.

The one established trend that I'm glad was predicted correctly by Becky Fuller and is the phenomena he coined as "ephemeralization" or dMass: the trend of being able to do more with less energy and material** and resources. Think of the mass of material that a smart phone has been able to do away with as computing memory capacity with a given amount of chip-space gets ever more faster and powerful as it falls within concordance with Moore's Law. I attached a You Tube video which gets the point across better than I can.

Another great thinker I respect is Jacque Fresco who was a peer to Bucky Fuller, the founder and creator of the Venus Project. He is a (yet) living contemporary architect and social engineer for resource-based synergistic systems.

 

 

In regards to having a better future all comes down to being a depressing realization that lot of great systemic things have not come to fruition because they fly directly into the face of people who are stupid, greedy, incapable of using common sense, and can't fathom what a paradigm of interdependence looks like, and the ideas are supressed because of some institutional propaganda, promotion of omni-ignorance and pervasive poverty in places; not allowing a better systems to get a toe hold to begin with. I'm still lost in wondering if I should be hopeful for a better future or not.

Buckminster Fuller would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that the average schmuck with a cellphone or tablet, something that has manifold times the computing power that was used to put a man on the moon, is using an obscene amount of time doing nothing more with it than trying to reach a next level of Candy Crush instead of using an app or apps to actually make a difference in their lives.

*- Omni was a futuristic magazine, but unfortunately, it itself didn't have a future. It stopped publication in the early 90's. However, I heard rumours that it may be revived in a digital edition. Omni is an interesting title, because as it relates to Fuller, it was frequently used as a prefix by him in a lot of his visionary writings.

**- Bucky would argue that there really is no such thing as solid "material", but rather "energy-events".