Welcome to TSI’s February 2009 Newsletter! While January was mainly about releases like our ClubStead design, new front page, and the Wired Magazine article, this month we focused on longer-term planning, from scheduling Ephemerisle and the Seasteading09 conference to a 100-year timeline for seasteading.
Community
- Membership Program is almost complete, will be kicked off in the next few weeks.
- $1000 Design Contest is running, and with two months to go, we are excited to already have 4 entries!
- TSI GTGs
- February Social at Red Rock Cafe was excellent, about 25 people and many new faces again. Moving the socials around the Bay Area seems to work well at bringing a variety of different people.
- March Social – tentatively Saturday March 28th in the East Bay.
- Seasteading Conference / Ephemerisle:
- After some discussion and polling y’all, we decided against the proposed July 4th date. Instead, the conference will be Sep. 28-30 (Mo evening, full day Tuesday, Wed through dinner, location TBD), and Ephemerisle will be Fri Oct. 2 – Sun Oct 4 (in the Sacremento River Delta).
- This date allows everyone (including us) a bit more prep time, doesn’t interfere with holiday plans, is a year from seasteading08, is a good time in relation to Burning Man (long enough for people to have recovered, short enough for them to still have some post-festival glow), and is during the full moon.
- The river delta location has a number of advantages, including that it is already used frequently for (smaller) boating parties, so our use will be uncontroversial. It is not a challenging environment (beyond being on water) as there are few waves, but we think that’s fine for the first Ephemerisle. We will likely feature a prototype contest during the festival for models able to deal with higher-wave conditions than at the event. The hope is for these contest entrants of 2009 to become the standard platforms/vessels of 2010, which would then be in a tougher environment, and would again feature a contest for models to push the boundaries again, so we can incrementally make our way to an Ephemerisle in international waters over the course of 3-5 years.
- A full press release with more details will follow when we have a conference site, festival location, and more details nailed down.
- Community stats for February – January stats in (). We’re very excited at the continued rapid growth of the mailing list and registered website users.
- www.seasteading.org: 1067 registered users (800)
- Facebook Group: 330 (276)
- Mailing List: 318 (211)
- LJ: 36 (35)
- Website migrated to a new host which is faster and should be more reliable. Statistics:
- Again, our 2nd best traffic month ever, beating January and only exceeded by last May’s slashdot/gizmodo/etc.
- Feb daily averages: 2400 visits (1900), 11k pages (10K), 102K hits (64K).
- Interesting Blog Posts:
- Vince’s Seasteading Views – Patri posts about Vince’s manifesto on the single-family seastead approach, which is being discussed on the forums as well. It’s great to have such knowledgeable community members thinking about the best strategy to move seasteading forward!
- Liz posts A bunch of rich white guys? So were the founding fathers – and their success brought freedom to everyone, in answer to a common question.
- FAQ: Why Not Just Hide? – An answer for the extended FAQ.
Volunteer Coordinator Report (from James)
- Key Accomplishments
- Justine Lam and Jessica Richman joined us at the BIL conference. They are planning an organizational outreach program for us, researching lists of think-tanks, schools, conferences, etc. we might be able to collaborate with and devising effective ways of reaching out to them.
- Cheryl Cline came to one of our Bay Area meetups, and is now helping write material for the upcoming seasteading book and a seasteading article for expatriation website EscapeArtist.com.
- Basia Montauk will be joining us shortly, helping with community relations and publicity among other things — welcome, Basia!
- Our ever-present sysadmin, Ben Lavender, got us moved over to a new hosting provider, which should make the site run much more smoothly.
- Some much-needed help on our website development team — thanks and welcome to Mike Norman and Sean Lynch, new website sysadmins, and Steve Kane and Andrea Fassina, new developers.
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We’re talking to a number of other cool, smart volunteer candidates as well. Our sincere thanks to everyone who has been offering their time.
- Key Needs (complete list)
- Website Development Manager
- Website Product Managers
- Volunteer Recruiter
Technology
Wayne’s Engineering Report
- Web cast MI&T engineering meeting on 5Feb2009 (The webcast quality was awful; we will have to do much better.)
- Solicited and answered questions concerning ClubStead
- Dropped the Hawaii to SF loop from consideration.
- Moved Seastead to be located off of Southern Calif. coast; Off San Francisco location has been dropped.
- Increased payload from 6000 tons to 7000 tons to better match the estimated payload mass.
- Wave information table for off San Diego is:
How Often Wind Speed Wave Height Period (year) m/sec ft/sec m ft sec 1 16.04 52.62 7.00 22.97 12.5 10 17.5 57.41 7.70 25.26 12.5 100 18.9 62.01 8.30 27.23 12.5
- Wave information for off Santa Monica is similar.
- The updated design has somewhat thicker columns and slightly higher air gap.
- Fly-by video for ClubStead is nearing completion
Patri’s Engineering Updates:
- The ClubStead Engineering Page has been updated with some new information:
- Engineering Q&A text
- List of questions for next Q&A.
- Improved SketchUp Model – more polished and with more architectural detail.
- New stills of the more detailed model rendered with Rhino 3D (as seen above).
- The 3d flyby is still in progress – turns out that rendering at HDTV resolution takes awhile…
- We are still discussing how to proceed next, including the possibility of an engineering design contest, perhaps to be held at Ephemerisle
Awareness
- Free Talk Live Interview.
- Upcoming stories in 2 major print outlets (6-figure and 7-figure circulation).
- TSI Talks & Conference Appearances for March and early April, from our public TSI Google Calendar (XML, iCal, HTML)
- CT – Wed, March 4 – Patri speaking to Yale College Libertarians. 7:30 EST, William L. Harkness Hall, Room 119, Yale University, New Haven, CT, open to the public.
- NYC – Thu, March 5 – Social meetup open to all. 7PM EST onwards, Gossip, 733 9th Avenue, New York, NY 10019, 212 265-2720, , We have the 2nd floor to ourselves. Gossip is on 9th Avenue, between 49th and 50th on the West side of 9th Ave. Closest trains are the C/E to 50th St., followed by the 1/9 to 49th or the N/R to 49th. Closest MTA Bus coming from the North or South is the M11, closest from the East is the M49. Contact Guy Tower for more information regarding transit or local food:
- NH – March 6 – 8: Patri at NH Liberty Forum, giving a talk Saturday at 11AM EST in the Main Hall. (You must pay to attend the event)
- MA – March 9th, social in Boston open to all. BOSTON BEER WORKS, 112 Canal Street, Boston, MA 02114, 7PM-10PM EST.
- Notable blog posts / referrers:
- Blender Nation on the design contest.
- Bitter End, a maritime blog, Seasteading Water World 2.0 Or Utopia? – You be the judge.
- Declan McCullagh’s CNET article: The next frontier: Seasteading the oceans
- The Popular Science blog: Seastead, Ahoy! Don’t like your government? Maybe it’s time to make one of your own
- Patrick Takahashi on Huffington Post: Blue Revolution
- BLDG BLOG on the Seastead Design Competition
- Brad Taylor has some thoughts on the inherently libertarian aspects of seasteading.
Administrative / Misc
- Our timeline for seasteading, while still under development, is ready for review by the community. Please discuss it on the forums. We are hard at work on our 2009/2010 strategy as well.
- We have started work on our 2008 Annual Report & Form 990 (tax return).
- Still muddling through HR details like an employee handbook.
The river delta location has a number of advantages, including that it is already used frequently for (smaller) boating parties, so our use will be uncontroversial. It is not a challenging environment (beyond being on water) as there are few waves, but we think that’s fine for the first Ephemerisle. We will likely feature a prototype contest during the festival for models able to deal with higher-wave conditions than at the event. The hope is for these contest entrants of 2009 to become the standard platforms/vessels of 2010, which would then be in a tougher environment, and would again feature a contest for models to push the boundaries again, so we can incrementally make our way to an Ephemerisle in international waters over the course of 3-5 years.
You need waves to test models, and my memory of the sacramento delta is that it is really flat. An easy way to make waves though is to have a speedboat pass by quickly. I have had this happen when I was testing models. Getting a wake of 1 to 2 feet is easy. This is enough for 1:25 or 1:12 scale type models. It is a bit small for 1:5 scale, but would be better than nothing. If you had larger and faster boat you could get even more than 2 feet. It would let you have a very well calibrated wave. Say boat goes X MPH and passes Y feet from model. Or even have all the models in a line and the boat pass all of them at the same distance and speed at once.