Dunbar’s Number and Seastead Size
(This is a small new section for the book beta. I will frequently post such sections as writing progress on the book continues. Comments welcome.)
The Seasteading Institute
How not to seastead
(this will go into the book beta, in the Review section)
Made To Stick
This morning I took a leadership class that used the principles from Made To Stick, a fascinating book about what I’d call “memetic engineeering”. The authors try to figure out what makes some ideas spread so fast, even when they are false (like urban legends), so that those principles can be applied to spread important true ideas.
Today’s updates
- Lasse notes that the UC Boulder talks I gave in 2005 are up on Google Video, here’s a page with them embedded.
- I’m working on job descriptions for some paid staff and volunteers we’re looking for.
- Lots of small website bugs fixed. More still to come.
- Some more “user properties” have been added, you can click on your name on the upper right, then click Edit to fill them in.
Website issues
Thanks for all the bug reports on website issues like broken links. Most of them have been fixed, except for users not being able to create new forum threads. Our programmer will fix that tonight, and for now I’ll start some threads. If you find more problems, please comment here.
UPDATE: I think I fixed the forums issue, let me know if you still have trouble.
Welcome to the new blog and site!
As long promised, we’ve redesigned the website with forums, blogs, and more, as part of launching The Seasteading Institute. If you haven’t yet, you may want to read the introductory press release. Please poke around – you’ll see some familiar content from the old site, and some new pages to reflect the project’s more active status. Expect to see lots more over the coming weeks and months as we kick into high gear!
An octopus’s garden…in the shade
It seems quite likely that our large sea-cities will be free-floating, for various reasons. First, there are not very many seamounts to anchor to in international waters (> 200nm from any place a rock sticks its nose above water). Second, the need for an exit from unhappy nation-neighbors and the dictates of dynamic geography to be modular suggest that we’ll get more freedom and safety if we aren’t tied down. Just common sense, really.
Floating Home 3d Warehouse challenge
Google’s 3D Warehouse for SketchUp models has a weekly challenge. Last week’s was to model a floating home.
General
Mark Twain: “Buy land. They’ve stopped making it.”
Seasteaders: “Memo: Production Resuming.”
Sealevator
Wayne had an awesome idea today for a demo device we could build in the Bay, we call it the sea-elevator (sealevator?).
