The Salvare: Fiction about cruise ship medical tourism
Here’s the book’s website. It is called Universal Coverage, and asks: “If the system failed you, how far would you go to save your child?”.
The Seasteading Institute
Seasteading And The Wall Of Dirt
I have a post up at Let A Thousand Nations Bloom about how seasteading is the opposite of the Berlin Wall:
The Wall thus represented the brute force attempt of the USSR, purveyor of an inferior product, to lock-in its customers. It was literally, directly, physically a means of increasing the cost of switching government.
Why we aren’t going to recycle the North Pacific Garbage Patch
The suggestion of recycling the North Pacific Garbage Patch into building materials gets made a lot. While creative and elegant, with a little examination it turns out to be completely economically unfeasible, and actually wasteful of resources.
Think of it this way. Suppose it were possible to profitably turn trash into building materials. The most efficient way to do this would be to buy a landfill and recycle it. Compared to this strategy, using trash from the garbage patch has a number of major disadvantages:
1) Operating at sea is very expensive.
Engineering Update
Hello everybody,
We have updated our design requirements, and we’d like your feedback on it.
These requirements have suggested two different paths to us, which we are exploring at the moment.
Poll on holding a 2010 Seasteading Conference on a cruise ship
Terry Floyd gave an unconference presentation at Seasteading09 about the possibility of holding a conference on a cruise ship. This could replace or supplement our 2010 Conference (for example, it could be in a different region like Europe, Asia, or the US Eastern Seaboard). Terry created a survey which many conference attendees have filled out, and we’d like to get y’alls responses as well.
BTW, videos from the conference should start appearing this week or next!
Wendy Sitler-Roddier on Seasteading Architecture
ClubStead’s architect Wendy Sitler-Roddier answers a number of questions about the ClubStead design:
1) What parts of the ClubStead Project were you specifically part of, and who was responsible for the other (building and architectural) details?
MI&T designed and engineered the platform for the proposed ClubStead structure and I was commissioned by MI&T to conceptualize the architecture on the 400’-0” by 400’-0” square deck.
TSI Hiring: Development Manager / Community Relations
We have a new job posting up:
TSI’s Development Manager will be working on two main areas: Community & Awareness, and Fundraising. On the Community side, they will help manage events, PR, TSI’s membership program, community feedback, and related areas.
Seadrome
Jeff Chan gave an interesting presentation at the recent conference about Seadrome, an ocean platform design created back in the 30’s as an airplane refueling stop. It was never built due to increased aircraft range, but the design still serves as a good example of how to build a spar platform for the open ocean.
Check out the wiki page on Seadrome, and the PDF of his conference talk. He focused on the common elements between Seadrome, ClubStead, and other designs, as an indication of how best to approach the spar platform portion of the design space. As with other talks, we’ll be putting this talk online later this year once the slides have been edited into the video.
Useful medical information from the military
Was briefly researching motion sickness, and stumbled across the book Medical Aspects of Harsh Environments, published by the Borden Institute, part of the US Army Medical Department, in two volumes: Volume 1: Hot Environments, Cold Environments and Volume 2: Mountain Environments, Special Environments (ocean surface, underwater, high-G, spaceflight, etc).
Both are ava
