Navel Architecture

Hey woim (that's from the Our Gang comedies).

Oh, ok-- I know them as 'Little Rascals'. Barely caught any of that though. You must be a tad older than I or have a thing for older stuff.

I'm trying to think of the oldest shows I can recall. I'd say my favourite as a kid was Gilligan's Island and the 6 Million Dollar Man, which came later... You know, looking back, if Steve Austin lifted a car and had no equally-enhanced line of support from his arm all along his spine to his bionic legs, he'd probably end up breaking something like his spine at some point. AFAIK, all he had was two legs, an eye and one arm.

Do some in New York and surrounds speak that way BTW-- "woim"? (Hot- dog: "Hat Dough-ogg"?)

Would you please post some of your favorite container architecture/buildi=

ng/blog links?

The more specific with construction details and outfitting the better. > Thanks.

As circumstances would have it, I happen to be in Little Italy this afternoon at Starbux. So I've got a bit of the Italian Rico vibe today. ;D I'm right here as I type this:

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While I abandoned my shipping container focus years ago, I've still kept it in my periphery, and have come across many designs, although nothing like the one I had attempted in 2004 (before hard drive crashed). At the same time, and coincidentally, I've also been revisiting containers in some investigations with earth-bermed/"earthship"/buried stuff. (Might you have some ideas as to how they used to construct and especially waterproofed earth-bermed homes naturally?)

In the process, I'm also looking at how wooden sailboats are/were sealed,which apparently includes parrafin wax and bitumen. (I found that they're redoing the Bluenose II:

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Island Boatworks-- one of the outfits that are undertaking the Bluenose-- is one of my favourites with regard to preferred (classic wooden) ocean-going sailboats/yachts:
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Probably closest to the kind of boat I'd like:
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Or maybe a smaller ~35' Farfarer:
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What's your interest in shipping containers? Or are you just politely trying to nudge me on topic? ;)

In any case, of all the container designs I've seen, I still prefer my old design, but I've thought of burying a couple of conventionally- stacked ones into the side of a hill.

But the question is about how metal-- aluminum and iron-- works/could be made to work underground for seasonal thermal storage and against water. I know the containers are waterproof as in if they fell overboard into the ocean, but burying one for decades is a different matter.

I'm looking to relocate to Nova Scotia, so containers would be accessible, as would proximity to Covey Island Boatworks and Lunenberg (Bluenose Drive :)

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Ken; are you at least getting these kinds of Google pano links?

What about this?

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Reply to
Warm Worm
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We prefer to term it 'earth sheltered'. You can charge more for it. ;)

R
Reply to
RicodJour

I'm not a "tad" anything, and haven't been since I was a tad.

Earliest I remember being nuts about - Fireball XL5 (Google it on YouTube) and Batman.

WTF...? Are you implying that the TV show was fiction?

ding/blog links?

Ya gotta stop this Starbucks thing. It's unseemly. Pretty much all good cafes have free wireless these days, and better coffee, and cuter women working in them. And better coffee.

At first I thought you were in Manhattan - you know, home of the original Little Italy?, but I just checked your map link. Maybe Starbucks is the best ya got. :)~

Do you have any record of the design? I don't recall seeing anything. How about posting a picture, SketchUp model or pencil drawing on a napkin? See what you can do - I'd appreciate it.

Plaster, stucco, clay - bunch of ways, traditionally. First and foremost, don't put the thing anywhere there's a high water table, underground stream, flood plain, etc. It's bad enough to drown in your own bathroom, but to drown in your living room looks really bad in the obituary.

Michael Reynolds did some interesting things getting the Earthship idea off of the ground (sounds like an oxymoron), but I haven't heard anything about him in a while.

Google Yakaboo - that's the next boat I'd like to build. It's a sailing canoe. Some naval artichoke from MIT designed and built it like 70 or 80 years ago and sailed it all around the South Pacific. Very cool design. There's some guy Joe something-or-other who runs a boat building school in New England somewhere (or was it Maryland?) that build a replica. He said he learned more about sailing in a week with the thing than in all the years sailing prior to that.

I don't do polite. :)~

Post some fookin' pictures of it, you tease, or I'll have some of the goombahs in Ottawa whack you while you're sitting in Starbucks!

It's all about coatings and drainage. Spray or rolled on bituminous coating, gravel, geotextile fabric, then backfill.

Why are you looking to relocate?

R
Reply to
RicodJour

:) I guess I should look up words more often before using them.

I enjoyed Batman too and vaguely recall FXL5. I don't think we had the channel it was on, but probably would have enjoyed it too. Remember the original Ultraman or The Starlost? Or Spiderman or Rocket Robin Hood? It's all coming back to me now.

Even these crazy things:

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?v=-sky4JISh-k

Well, you'd think it would have been more plausible fiction. After I sent the email yesterday, I also thought that Steve Austin's pelvis might also sustain fractures from running 60 miles per hour (kind of funny when you think about it). Really his whole body would fall apart around the use of his implants-- which might make for good fiction: We could have him under the operating table every week with a new upgrade! What will it be!? How will it perform?! Be sure to tune in next week!

I also had a thought about which super hero I'd rather be, and thought of maybe The Flash, because he could disable any of the others before they could react.

architecture/building/blog links?

this:

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I couldn't agree more, but drink matcha green tea which isn't always available, and am able to leverage them for discounts. In fact, I dropped into a local tea outfit just before but they wanted an arm and a leg for matcha which would have costed me ~$7 for a drink, which seems ridiculous.

Yes, it could be a better area too. Ottawa's the last town I should be living in. Manhattan would be an improvement. I still have yet to visit NY now that I think about it and would like to soon.

I used to have a record of it from using a difficult-to-model-with open source software, but it should be easy to redo in ACAD. Especially seeing as you had pointed out some 3D container models at Google for me, I'll try to look into it.

Plaster, stucco and clay under the earth? Really? Even without a water table, that seems dubious.

True. I like the added built-in waterproofness of a container.

I actually saw and posted over at Transition Ottawa a documentary about him. It was pretty good. But, and I forget if this was already mentioned, the idea of using tires, concrete and plastic kind of bugs me-- all of which I think he used and still does.

II:

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> Covey Island Boatworks-- one of the outfits that are undertaking the

sailboats/yachts:

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like:

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I've seen it before and even recall the name too-- a lovely design and project and looks like it goes fast.

Frankly, I've been seriously considering classic wind-powered ocean- going wooden boatbuilding and/or boating as a change-of-career/ lifestyle. You can do a lot with a good, decent-sized boat. $15 000 for 15 months at the Wooden Boat Centre, Tasmania, for example. Tough to save, but it would certainly turn a "vacation" or sabbatical into something very practical and interesting.

That particular Starbucks seems to be quite the cop-spot, BTW, but the goombahs have nothing to worry about with me. These days especially they seem to have far more honour than cops.

Interesting, and thanks. Some of that sounds less than natural or local, though, but what the hell, I'll keep it in mind.

:)

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Vancouver's too expensive, noisy, congested, dirty, and earthquake- prone, etc., and I've already lived there long enough. I'm sick of Ottawa and probably the opposite on that personality-test colour-wheel thing than perhaps the personality that may be typical of the government/capital/embassy/bureaucratic town that is Ottawa. As for Nova Scotia, it's got the second warmest winter climate in Canada, I've briefly lived there on two separate occasions, and it's relatively clean, quiet, laid back and friendly. I'm considering Shelburne or Lunenberg, but would settle with Halifax.

You're in Boston, yes?

Reply to
Warm Worm

p://

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Thanks for reminding me - I've gotta make some coffee.

You've...never...been...to...NYC...? LOL!!! Good one! Oh...you're serious. Sorry, and...sorry. It's an amazing place. People don't realize it's hundreds of small villages jammed onto a little island. Everyone's got their local dry-cleaner and grocer and the coffee shop that rules, but getting to any one of those other hundreds of villages takes no more than half an hour or 40 minutes during rush hour. It's a _great_ walking city.

You're on a Mac, right? Don't apologize, everybody has their foibles. :)~ You should check out SketchUp if you haven't already. For most design work it beats the pants off of ACAD, and steals its lunch money. There's a nifty plugin called Sketchy Physics. Check that out and don't say wow...if you can.

I'm running a design for a friend up to the Providence area tomorrow and having a twofer as she is having a little dinner birthday party for herself with a small group of friends. One of the surprises is that I took some old photos of her family and some photos I took of their house, cropped just the artwork hanging on their walls and some of the family photgraphs, and have them hanging on the walls and sitting in frames on the shelves in the design. Instant wow factor and it brings the scale alive with their loved ones and cherished items.

Ever seen a dry lake bed? Ever see what happens to a dry lake bed when it gets hit with water? It swells right up. They make bentonite clay panels that have been used in waterproofing for a long time. Clay, well, forever I guess.

But of course the main thing is to locate the future building's excavation/fill site correctly in the first place to avoid subterranean water and water runoff from above.

That's one of the reasons that they can be had relatively inexpensively, and still in good condition. The seaworthiness rating is more stringent than the 'waterproofness' required for a house. I'd imagine that must do some sort of blower/compressed air test to check the tightness, but I don't know for sure.

Concrete bugs you...eh, so don't use it. The tires I don't have too big of a deal with. Sunlight and UV degradation is what kills tires. They'll last for many, many decades buried. If you want to go old school earth-sheltered, use stone, or better yet a dug out cave in Cappodocia.

That sounds interesting, but why would you need a 'school' for that? Go to India or Malaysia and work there for a while and help them build your boat. Comfort zones are for buildings, not people.

Bituminous material is as natural as oil. Curare and Botox are also natural. What you don't want to do is poison the environment and create a future cleanup mess, and I get that. A bituminous coating on a steel container that was surrounded by gravel with some geotextile fabric holding back the dirt would last forever in units of your lifetime, and then some, and any future cleanup would be localized and straightforward.

Sounds nice, never been. One day, maybe soon.

Nope. I live on Long Island currently, but I'll probably be locating in the not too distant future.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

I am looking forward to seeing how 8, in his weakened state, deals with the robot tiger that can catch rocket-propelled bombs in its mouth.

I make my own too, if unconventionally. It usually comes out so good, that I can't handle coffee at a shop or with a machine.

I'm sold. :)

I'm on IBM (Dell laptop), but have experience with Mac. I'll look into SketchUp and Sketchy Physics, especially since the former has been praised quite a bit.

Cool. You mean in the 3D design, like image-mapping?

That's good to know.

Funny, but in Vancouver there's some sort of service station (maybe for cars) that uses old cut tires for roof tiles and it looks ok... Actually, here it is:

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While I was at it, I decided to see if I could bum a ride with Google to my old school and at the same time, show you Arthur Erikson, c.

1965:
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What is that? Brutalism? Well anyway, that's the sight/site that greeted me for too many days, and it was rarely that sunny and warm- looking, except when school was out.

Here's the other side. It just occurred to me that I should have taken most of my courses in the summer:

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Cappadocia looks very nice, and they even have a hotel in one of them. I have been back to looking at the Trullis incidentally, to investigate how they might be waterproof with just stone, and noticed that they are built very thick with 2 layers in and out and a middle gravelly filling. Unsure if that alone does it, but it does make me wonder.

That's not a bad idea. I recently came across some info and a pic online of I think in Malaysia of how they use heat and maybe even some fire to bend wood for the boat frames. I'm wondering, though, if I end up coming back with some other kind of yacht technology than something more like a classic Bristol Channel pilot cutter, and how it might fare. ...The more you learn, the more you need to find out. :/ :)

Yes, that's true, it's related to pitch:

Wikipedia: "Pitch is the name for any of a number of viscoelastic, solid polymers. Pitch can be made from petroleum products or plants. Petroleum-derived pitch is also called bitumen. Pitch produced from plants is also known as resin... Pitch was traditionally used to help caulk the seams of wooden sailing vessels (see shipbuilding). Petroleum-derived pitch is black in color, hence the adjectival phrase, 'pitch-black'... ...The pitch drop experiment taking place at University of Queensland is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. For the experiment, pitch was put in a glass funnel and allowed to slowly drip out. Since the pitch was allowed to start dripping in 1930, only eight drops have fallen. It was calculated in the 1980s that the pitch in the experiment has a viscosity approximately 230 billion (2.3x1011) times that of water... The heating (dry distilling) of wood causes tar and pitch to drip away from the wood and leave behind charcoal. Birchbark is used to make a particularly fine tar. Tar and pitch are often used interchangeably. However, pitch is considered more solid while tar is more liquid. Traditionally, pitch used for waterproofing buckets, barrels and small boats was drawn from pine. It is used to make Cutler's resin."

he environment and create a future cleanup mess, and I get that. A bitumin= ous coating on a steel container that was

uld last forever in units of you lifetime, and then some, and any future cl= eanup would be localized and

Good to know. If a container or two were buried, I'd make it a different design than the one I previously designed.

To Boston?

Reply to
Warm Worm

Bomb shelters might be practical if one of their sides (i.e., sun- facing) was dug out and the walls replaced with lots of glass. As for a place being _completely_ buried? Unsure.

Reply to
Warm Worm

How easily available are they? The thing about shipping containers is that they're all over the place and cheap.

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Reply to
Warm Worm

te:

Understood to all of that, thanks.

Containers are just things being mulled over along with many other things. They seem to also function a bit like legos, so there's some interesting constraints and flexibilities there. If you do a search on this forum, maybe roughly circa 2003/4/5, you might find me/us discussing shipping containers a little.

My inquiries are generally more toward "purist" natural "ultra-local" building techniques/challenges, though, using nothing imported at all if possible-- even milling the wood onsite, gathering reeds/straw for thatching, etc.. I was reading a book last fall in part about earthen floors too and they look and probably perform just as good as other kinds of floors. (If recalled, urine might have been a recommended ingredient for the floor mix, not to mention dung for some kinds of walls). You might also recall my mention of reciprocal roofs, which are supposed to be easy with round logs.

Reply to
Warm Worm

Yep. I unveiled the project during the party. I had the guy go to YouTube and watch it. It was priceless to hear him (I wasn't watching it with him) gasp and start laughing when he ran across the pictures. I'd added some captions and things and it went over extremely well. Too bad more people at the party don't have more money... ;)

There's something weird up with Google Maps in Canada. I don't get any of the tools that I get with Google in the US. Not sure what's up with that, but it's aggravating. I can't grab and move the map, I can't scroll, the zoom is for shit. Do you have any of those problems with it?

Trulli - no s. Trulli is the plural. They're built in a really arid area, so rain is not a big deal.

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last one has a picture of trulli with snow on the roof. I'd never seen that before.

This is probably already gone, but...you never know.

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This place has cheap weekend workshops:

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on the environment and create a future cleanup mess, and I get that. =A0A b= ituminous coating on a steel container that was

would last forever in units of you lifetime, and then some, and any future = cleanup would be localized and

It would be easier and cheaper to just set the containers on piers. There would be advantages to skipping the excavation part (speed of construction, cost, simplified design), and you wouldn't be able to take advantage of the earth-sheltered thing, but the determining factors would be site specific.

Probably not. You really want me to move to Boston, don't you? Maybe you should look into couch surfing. ;)

R
Reply to
RicodJour

What exactly do you mean by confronts?

con=C2=B7front =E2=80=82 =E2=80=82/k=C9=99n=CB=88fr=CA=8Cnt/ =E2=80=93verb (used with obje= ct)

  1. to face in hostility or defiance; oppose: The feuding factions confronted one another.
  2. to present for acknowledgment, contradiction, etc.; set face to face: They confronted him with evidence of his crime.
  3. to stand or come in front of; stand or meet facing: The two long- separated brothers confronted each other speechlessly.
  4. to be in one's way: the numerous obstacles that still confronted him.
  5. to bring together for examination or comparison.
R
Reply to
RicodJour

Ummm, okay - but what do you mean by confronts? Everything 'confronts' something or other, in some sense of the word, to the point where it becomes almost meaningless.

If you meant that there are two different motivations at work, well, yeah - how else could it be? The local source thing is confronting a falsehood of globalism. It's fine and dandy to have access to cheap and/or obscure stuff, but it's not okay to reap your savings out of the backs/mouths/lives of others just because they live somewhere else. Google "ship breaking" to see what I mean.

Some people seem to forget that no matter how piss poor they are in North America, there's always somebody worse off. And at least in the US and Canada, there are all sorts of workplace safety laws and environmental laws that aim to prevent people from poisoning people for profit. Yet, we gladly ship our detritus overseas to poison people on the other side of the planet. To save a buck. Wonderful, sustainable model, indeed.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

I'm sitting here writing this in my finally-finished first-ever sweater I knit, and it fits very well, looks great, and is surprisingly warm! So I can empathise, especially today, with the good feeling of personal achievment... But, yes, about that more money thing...

No problems here. Maybe it's your system/browser?

Thanks for those links, especially the first, with construction-- bookmarked. I want to take a better look at it later.

Gone, thanks... I recently came across another forum and free boat that included someone inquiring if it was still available. I'm guessing you have to be on top of those things when they come out. I've been meaning to join that particular forum (or similar) if it's the same one as the magazine of the same name.

When I have additional time, I'm going to look over that site too. I have a folder on my bookmark bar called, WoodShips. :)

Funny, but my idea from 2004 had a couple of "piers" on one half-side as part of the design...

I dug these out of the bin:

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There may be some description there of initial designs, I haven't time to read all of it.

2003! ...hard to believe 8 years ago.

The original design was not supposed to include excavation, so that's good.

I'm not fussy. Just make it a reasonable area in Boston and suede. ;D

Reply to
Warm Worm

You can pound a lot of crazy edible stuff into flour and make your own pasta. Milk a goat or cow; make cheese and you'll likely have noodles coming out of your ears if you want. Sell your surplus to Kraft.

Reply to
Warm Worm

On-site.

You could whittle door knobs easily enough, and tv's lost its audience to the net, has it? But even so, I suppose we could do the tv sustainably.

True, it seems that the info I get has the onus on the consumer when it would seem to make more sense with it being on the manufacturers, etc..

Reply to
Warm Worm

That's only true if you define economical purely in financial terms. You would not be who you are, live where you live, nor do what you do, if money was your sole criteria. Life quality trumps a dollar sign every time, for everybody. Some people don't realize that, and some people think that you can buy satisfaction, which is patently untrue.

What sort of cheese did you make?

R
Reply to
RicodJour

Everything's limited.

Currently, our economic system, according to many accounts is "uneconomic", given that, for one, it is based on infinite "growth" on a finite planet, speaking of limits, and idiocy.

By comparison, you could say that all other species are more intelligent with their time and resources. (and have possibly a lot more "leisure" time too)

If you suspect that I'm beginning to rethink our species' relative intelligence, then you're correct.

The job and income currently seem like illusions of a sort, such as if they make life-- and not just for us or at this time in human history-- more difficult or problematic than they would otherwise be.

The whole point of income and jobs would seem to be to make life better, not worse. But if you look around you, that doesn't appear to be the case. Life looks worse, or is shaping up to get there big-time. If you think it's better, perhaps it is, but I argue that it is in a sense an illusion, because it is on "borrowed" or "stolen" time.

There appears a growing consensus that we're working too long and hard for too little-- and worse, such as for environmental destruction-- and that most of us dislike our jobs.

be done than a whimsy idea that "I" must be satisfied.

Some notions of 'hard work' seem ill-advised. Much hard work is not worth it.

...I sell you that wall-to-wall carpeting lifestyle in part in order to create another necessity in the form of a vacuum cleaner (and the "cash-cow" dirt/filter bags that you use with it).

...Your boat has a leak, so, and maybe unbeknownst to you, I drill out a hole in another part of the same boat and sell you that plug of wood that you happily pay for (with your so-called hard-earned money) and use to plug the leak.

So the ideas go...

Your Kraft dinner you like to mention, by the way, doesn't come out of nowhere, or without added cost, even if, to you, it seems cheap: Anyone with his head half out of his ass could tell you, for one, that the box and the plastic the macaroni and cheese powder come in come from somewhere, and have to go somewhere after.

"Mollison: ...In 1974, I built gardens that I thought were pretty good and I independently evolved deep mulching systems, I say independently, because about 7 seven years after that, about 1982, an American came by and said, 'Oh you're using Ruth Stout's method' and I'd never heard of Ruth Stout and it was many years before I actually got her book, closer to the 90s.

Vlaun: That was one of the first garden books I ever read back in the

70s . . .'the No Work Garden Book'.

Mollison: Ah, great.

Vlaun: . . . her book and the Nearings' 'Living the Good Life' They were the two people I read back then.

Mollison: I remember reading a book rather like the Nearings'. It was made in England . . . I've forgotten the guy who did it . . . and I thought it was a lesson in rotten hard work for very little result. It was sort of like a ground-down peasant primer. (laughs heartily) Just what I didn't want. I grew up like that, I grew up on farms on which you worked 18-hour days, hard work, and I thought, there's got to a better way. I ignored this in Scott Nearing and John Seymour. He wrote a book, in which you're trying to do everything. He called it practical self-sufficiency...

First of all, I think that's a terrible concept: self-sufficiency. You make your own cheese; you skin your own pig; you make your own gloves from the pig's ears, you know, it's a shocking idea. We are absolutely interdependent. I want somebody else to be making my boots while I feed them, you know. And somebody else again to make my fishing rod, car, bike. Self-sufficiency is a stupid idea. You can go a long way to feeding yourself or perhaps all the way, but beyond that, it's pretty stupid really. You have to have something to make money: photography, writing books. Me, I write books. That's my income. But I can easily feed myself."

Reply to
Warm Worm

A truism...but true! ;)

Is it? Of course people have to put a roof over their head, food in their mouth and clothes on their back, but I don't know that earning more to afford stuff people don't need makes them any happier, more satisfied, more fulfilled - whatever you want to call it. There's an old saying - if you want your kids to turn out well, spend half the money on them and twice the time. Most things in life are like that.

They are inseparable. You determine what needs to be done - there's an I (read you), you provide the motivation - another I (so far you have the full complement), and you are the judge of what is hard work or whimsy - two more Is. For a total of four eyes, 'scuse me, four Is (IIII)...you don't wear glasses by any chance, do you? ;)

Not even close to being in the majority. Everyone is a minority. Every single person is a minority of one.

We definitely don't think alike, but that's fine with me. I like you. That trumps some wacky idea that people have to think or act alike to get along.

See a doctor - he'll clear up that cheesy dividend and help lighten that wallet for you.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

Funnily enough, I have one of Seymour's self sufficiency books sitting next to the toilet...errr...in my office annex. Just picked it up yesterday. Good info for the most part, glosses over some things and is really heavy into others.

His idea of self sufficiency is a stupid idea. No one ever said that everyone _had_ to do every single thing for themselves. Even mentioning that makes me want to poke him in the eye. One person living totally alone in the middle of nowhere might be self sufficient. If there's just one more person, say a spouse, kid, whatever, the division of labor will naturally arise.

It's the ability to do any and all things that is the important part, or at least to understand what is involved in doing them, and is the part that should be taught in schools. That would go much further to breaking down the artificial barriers in the world, and expose kids to a much wider variety of life and work so they could make up their own minds about what is attractive to them and start charting their own destiny at an earlier age.

R
Reply to
RicodJour

I'd like to see a picture of the sweater. How long did it take you to make it? How much actual working time, and how long overall from start to finish? A girlfriend of mine is an uber-knitter/crocheter/ budding-felter. The felting thing is very cool. I'm going to make me some boots.

Vista/Firefox - never saw the problem with any of Google's stuff before. When I take the lat and long you posted and plug it in to the US Google, it's all hunky dory.

r

I'm going to take a better look in person in the next year or two, max.

I have another book out on the history of containerized shipping - it's been just over 50 years since they were invented. Did you ever look into a refrigerated container to build with?

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a wide temperature range!

It'll be micro. Not the suede, the couch - don't want you overstaying your welcome. :)~

R
Reply to
RicodJour

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