A map of 2008 pirate attacks may be of interest to y’all. It’s pretty cool, you can click through to the detailed report. I love how our world is filled with data!
Notice the complete lack of pirates in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, for example.
Their plans are inspired by the ethos of the modern tech industry, where grand quixotic visions are as common as BlackBerrys, and they see their task not as a holy mission but as something like a startup.
This is not fiction. It is happening now…
We’ve completed our analysis of the responses to our community strategy survey, originally posted here. Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond!
There’s a forum thread about Seasteading Theme Songs, including my 80-song seasteading playlist. Go suggest your favorite ocean, freedom, politics, pirate, etc. song!
DanB’s Realist and Idealist Views of Basesteading addition to the wiki reminded me of the classic low-road vs. high-road distinction which always seems to come up when talking about seasteading strategy. I think this distinction and terminology is useful, so here’s a crack at a book section on it.
Set your DVRs to record The Discovery Channel at 10PM on Monday June 8th (check local listings for local times). The series is Mega Engineering, and the episode is City At Sea. Note that they are putting the first 3 episodes of this new series into a 3 hour block, City At Sea is the 3rd of these 3 episodes. It covers several projects besides seasteading. We will try to get a video of our segment up.
A friend of mine from college, a mechanical engineer (and one of the most brilliant engineers I know), has been researching ocean wind energy systems. We’ve been discussing his ideas, and some of his thoughts on the industry are worth sharing (emphasis added):
At the DC offshore renewable energy (electricity from waves, tides and currents) conference, I found that only a COUPLE outfits (namely OpenHydro and Pelamis) were actaully getting anywhere besides just talking and burning up grant money. They had real hardware being demonstrated and ordered by utilities.
The Seasteading Institute has crowned the winners in its first Seasteading Architectural Design Contest. The Contest, which ran from February 1st to May 1st, invited participants to design the floating city of their dreams. The winning design was awarded a $1000 grand prize, and there were four additional $250 prizes for specific categories.
Seasteads are permanent, stationary structures specifically designed for long-term ocean living.
We have finished judging our first 3-D design competition, and can now present the winners. We had a great level of participation, with 41 entries being submitted. More importantly, the quality of the entries was generally very impressive and the competition was very close, as several of the winners won by the smallest margin possible.
