Archive for January, 2009

Virginia? Maryland? Huh?

January 19, 2009

The plot thickens.  I keep reading “Who’s Your City” and things get more complicated veez-a-vee the ParaTow’s best locational future.

Greater San Francisco remains Number One on the lists of cities where people are open to new ideas and experiences, welcoming of weirdos, thick with patents and better-educated, followed by the other cities that I’ve actually heard of and still hear about: Austin, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Houston, New York City, DC/Baltimore, etc.  (Alas, Muncie Indiana didn’t get a mention.)

But there’s more to it than that.

Like I regurgitated before, the regions are specializing.  And when it comes to naval architecture and marine engineering, that’s all collecting in just two places.  For stuff having to do with drilling for oil and piping it around the seabed, that’s all in Houston/Galveston.  And for everything else, like involving ships and submarines, it’s Norfolk Virginia, part of the Hampton Roads tip of Southeast Virginia, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay home to the Norfolk and Newport News Navy shipyards.  That’s where basically all people in the entire USA who have experience with this sort of thing live.

Huh.  I don’t know a thing about southeast Virginia… or Virginia in general, frankly.  I’ve heard of Chesapeake Bay, but only in the context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Also, I looked up where American blimps (or blimp-shaped tethered “aerostats”) come from, and lo and behold, it’s also the Chesapeake region, with T-Com in Columbia Maryland and ISL Dover nearby Dover Delaware.

Wow.  Joe Biden is the first I’ve heard of Delaware since… pretty much forever, again excepting the Revolutionary War and high school history class.

So huh.

The very same writer of “Who’s Your City”, Richard Florida, also invented the “Creativity Index,” which has to do with a bunch of demographic and economic factors.  San-Fran is of course at the tippy-top and dead last is Memphis Tennessee, second only to… wait for it… Norfolk Virginia. Further up the list lie such bohemian cauldrons as Las Vegas, Grand Rapids, Oklahoma City, Louisville and Detroit.

Dammit!  My first guess is that the whole region has gotten its paychecks from the government (US Navy) for so long that… well… it has come to specialize not just in that kind of work, but a certain kind of thinking that’s cool with that kind of work, day in day out, lifetime after lifetime, where almost all personal and professional relationships are within an hour’s drive.

Okay, well, if I instead wanted to be closer to where the ParaTow’s airborn parts (the big parafoil kite with the fat blimp section in the middle) come from, I’d probably end up in DC or Baltimore.

To the red-stater in me, a DC mailing address would feel vaguely incriminating, and Baltimore has a pretty poor reputation too.

So. I’d appreciate any stories, anecdotes, recollections, cheers or jeers that anyone here can give for either of these two areas: DC/Baltimore Maryland and Norfolk/Hampton/Newport News Virginia.  All I’m going on so far is wikipedia pages and real estate websites, so I’m dying for something more real.

Nothing you say will be used against you.  I’m just going to have to get over there sometime, rent a car, and feel the place out.  But whatever I can learn beforehand will be very much appreciated.

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Moving as an adult

January 14, 2009

Dear very nice and thoughtful people:

Instead of trying to show off to the cloud like I normally do, today I have a request for your help and earnest advice.

The two books I’m looking at, “The Purpose-Driven Life” and “Who’s Your City” are really making an impression on me.

The first is reminding me what I got kinda burned out a few years ago and forgot: That there are just a few key things that I can do with my life (of which I’m also especially capable, freak that I am) that are really f@#$king important, and a zillion other things I can fritter away my days on to no significant moral/emotional/spiritual/family effect.

It’s a 40-day program, so I’ll keep you posted, but my best guess as to what my Purpose is right now is the ParaTow, the output of a decade of pondering and thought-exerimental near-anguish, because it scaffolds up to the ParaGen, which is the very best I’ve been able to do to figure out how to neuter the oil business and all the horrible evil induced by the concentrations of wealth and power that it induces.

It took the elections of 2000 and 2004 to drive home, near-humiliatingly, that I can’t just relax into “Well, at least USA is still #1″ anymore.

And then the Iraq, and now Gaza (relatively microcosmic in scale as it is but still eye-opening all the same) experiences tell me that yes, there is very real, and growing, suffering out there that, to my perspective, essentially flows out of the fact that there’s still a lot of ever-more-valuable oil left in Saudia Arabia, Iraq and Iran.  As long as that oil is worth as much as it’s worth now, “competition” for it will become ever more forceful and urgent, and it’s always the poor who are left in the crossfire.

OK.  So there’s that.

And then there’s “Who’s Your City,” about how the world economy is concentrating into just a few geographic “mega-regions,” each of which is developing its own specialty.  Thematic maps are printed showing the geographic concentrations of not just bulk economic activity, but more specifically-elucidating to my I-think-Purpose, elite scientists and patents issued.

The science and patent maps each have a single spike that tower over all the others and coincide: The San Francisco Bay Area.  Wow.

This phenomenon is helped along by “the 20-mile rule”: that venture funders tend to make risky investments in outfits 20 or fewer miles from their houses, so that they can pop in and see how things are going, which is exactly what I’d want to do too.  Duh!  Of course!

So yeah, it looks like the Bay Area is in my future if I want to give this mission its best possible chance at success.  I think I’ve figured out a way to make a small manually-controlled demo of the ParaTow myself with only a little money right here in Seattle, but “moving forward” if I can get someone to bankroll its further development, that someone will probably be within easy driving distance of San Francisco, and therefore so will I have to be.

And that also kinda sucks, because I’ve made some friends here in Seattle, and that takes a while for me, the awkward ingrate that I can be.  Also, my only brother lives here, just three blocks away, and I’m going to miss him.  He’s really doing well in life, and to be frank, I really benefit from being close to his success and growth.

So anyway…

Who out there has likewise moved to someplace far away for a “mission-oriented” reason?  How did you deal with not knowing anyone?  How did you deal with being far from your siblings and family?  What other advice can you lend me?

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Two books

January 14, 2009

Man. Wow. Two books that are really rocking my socks right now are “The Purpose-Driven Life” by Rick Warren (who’ll be swearing in Barack) and “Who’s Your City” by Richard Florida.

Upshot 1: “You were created by God and FOR God.”

Upshot 2: Damn y’all, it really IS all in Northern California.

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Container Blimp

January 7, 2009

Instead of trying to justify the building and operation of very large blimps by exploiting their unique VTOL (vertical take off and landing) capabilities, here’s a different approach.  Let’s look at finding a niche for blimps in an established, commoditized and analyzable industry: container shipping.

There’s a “hole” in one’s options to ship a container across the ocean.  It’s either on a super-slow and super-efficient ship or on a super-fast and super-gas-guzzling jet plane.  The fuel-burn ratio is like 100:1.

There’s no middle ground, and economic dogma states that The Market always wants to be segmented.

o Mac Mini, iMac or Mac Pro?  15″, 17″, 19″, or 21″?
o Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile or Cadillac?
o Old Navy, Gap or Banana Republic?
(etc.)

Thesis: Some containers are late, and cause losses due to downtime at their intended destination.  The only choice in these situtations is to eat the downtime losses or repack everything into a cargo airplane and pay through the nose to get it there on time.  Either way, it’s expensive, and that expense is bourne by the economy in various ways.

A Container Blimp, then, is that middle ground.  It has a speed and fuel efficiency somewhere between a ship and an airplane, truck-ish or train-ish.  Surely my math is simplistic when I try to locate the correct size, but it’s definitely there somewhere.  Blimps double their fuel/ton-mile efficiency with every doubling of scale.

Besides conventional container traffic, such a contraption would also allow “UPS Ground to China.”  Just three days across the Pacific Ocean (or two days for the Atlantic), for instance, would let “about a week” thinking still work when shipping packages to foreign countries.

And an added trick is the idea of not landing the blimp at some airport and having stuff loaded into it, but rather to hoist it up and set it down all at once in the form of a special-purpose barge (exchanging it with water mass each time).  That way, interfacing with the existing infrastructure (cranes, trucks, railroads) is entirely conventional.  Also, it means the blimp is never flying over land, which will surely help regulatorially.

Posted in inventions/schemes, videos | 3 Comments »

Tough but Helpful Affirmation

January 7, 2009

I was super-duper anxious and afraid of life this morning (and the past few days too), driving to the airport to pick up a friend (lordy driving is a drag), and in a moment of genius free-styled the following:

“I deserve a real life.”
“I deserve to be healthy.”
“I deserve to have friends and to be somebody’s friend.”
“I deserve to love someone and be loved by someone.”
“I deserve a home.”
“I deserve to work and to help people.”

I can’t manage to get through it out loud without tearing up. “I deserve a home” always chokes me up. So I reckon I need this.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Parafoil Dynamic-Ballast Blimp; take 2

January 3, 2009

(This is a next-level follow-up to a previous posting.)

Over the break I found my sliderule and got more serious about estimating this thing’s size and performance.

I dropped the idea of using methane (CH4) as a lifting gas and instead went with just hydrogen (H2).  Hydrogen can be made from diesel fuel (vital for military markets… sigh), lifts more per cubic meter and has a lower fuel energy density (about 75% less), which is exactly what we want in this case.

See, the backbone of this whole scheme is that instead of having to vent lifting gas upon putting down something heavy, it allows you to productively recover its fuel value over the return trip (if it’s a certain distance or longer).

It uses deployable hanging parafoils to pull down on the blimp after putting down something heavy.  Its propulsion engines switch from a lift/weight equilibrium of hydrogen and diesel to hydrogen only.  Ergo, the blimp’s static lift is contantly decreasing until the downward-pulling parafoils are no longer needed.  Once enough hydrogen has been burned the parafoils are retracted back up against the envelope (and out of the airstream), and the engines switch back to hydrogen and diesel for the rest of the return trip.

Okay.  So far so good.

What I learned is that the parafoils-deployed hydrogen-burning first part of the return trip is still 800-1000 miles long.  To set down an interesting-size payload (a 40-ton container or a 80-ton M1 tank), that’s still a lot of hydrogen gas to burn up in the engines, and it takes a while.

And then I found that most interesting off-road shipping routes (Kuwait<->Badhad, ‘Stans<->Kandahar, Yellowknife<->the diamond mines in northern Canada) are less than 1000 miles each way.

That’s a bummer, because the blimps need a return trip 800-1000 miles long to profitably burn up all that hydrogen.

Cheat #1: Just vent the rest.  Doing so torpedoes the scheme’s whole raison d’etre, though.  If you’re usually going to vent ~half of it then why not vent all of it and skip out on the deployable parafoils complication entirely?

Cheat #2: Gain weight along the way back by scooping up water from a lake or ocean.

The bummer about water-scooping is that it’s dangerous.  The snorkel could clobber a person, boat, fishing net, sandbar or iceberg.  Ergo, it’s much more expensive to do as a robotic UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle).  A UAV can go from point A to point B with no problem as long as both points are up in the air, but to buzz the surface takes skill.

As long as it works, though, water-scooping is always a possibility when delivering cargo straight from a ship or barge.  There are probably a number of instances where this ability to operate “port-less” would be a big winner.

OTOH, if the route is entirely over land, with no bodies of water handy, one would instead have to dig long water-filled trenches somewhere handy for the blimps to scoop from.

So yeah. I’m a little bummed that the water-scooping complication is turning out to be necessary, but I don’t think it’s a show-stopper yet.  More later.

Posted in inventions/schemes, videos | 6 Comments »

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