News

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.

Seasteading 2009 Conference: Wrap-Up Newsletter

We at The Seasteading Institute would like to thank all of you for attending our second annual conference!  We had a wonderful time, and know that many of you did as well.  We’ve been very happy to hear how pleased you were with the event.

Renewed interest in the Isle of Roses

In the Seasteading book, we quoted Erwin Strauss on this project:

Giorgio Rosa was (or is) a professor of engineering in Bologna, Italy. In the early 1960’s, he built a tower in the Adriatic Sea, in water less than 20 feet deep, about 8 miles off the coast of the Italian city of Rimini. This first tower was wrecked by a storm on February 13, 1965. A new one was built, with an area of about 4,000 square feet. It had a bar, a restaurant, a post office, a bank and a store, all surrounded by a promenade.

Conference & Ephemerisle are over

The website & blogs have been quiet because we’ve been very busy (obviously) with the conference & Ephemerisle, James & I just got back last night. I suspect this will be a bit of a decompression week for us, so don’t expect to hear much this week either, but I’ll try to get some links and roundups posted when I can.

Seasteading 2009 Conference – Final Newsletter

As a reminder, Peter Thiel will be hosting the Monday Night opening cocktail reception. For those unable to make the main conference, tickets for this are currently available for $100 via the conference registration page, but it is almost full.

Conference Schedule, Ground Rules, The Market For Ideas, and Reality

TSI must regretfully announce that Professor Romer has decided to withdraw from his speaking engagement at our upcoming conference. His reasons were related to the content of another speaker’s blog (Mencius Moldbug). We do not yet clearly understand his objections, and we do not want to misrepresent Professor Romer, so we can’t be any more specific at this time.

Regardless of Romer’s reasons, his withdrawal triggered an active internal debate around exactly what ideas and people TSI is or isn’t willing to affiliate with.