The Economics of Spherical or Round Homes

IS A BOAT A SPHERICAL HOME?

What on crazy earth is AW Lake thinking about now? Spherical homes! What on earth is a spherical home? Is it a yurt? Well no! It isn't.

1. May be more suitable for overcrowded areas
Well, I am not quite sure, but to give you an idea you can visit 'This is London' where the designer Martin Manpuch is well on the way to popularizing such homes as a solution to overcrowding in the London, England region.

2. May be more suitable in windy areas
My curiosity is raised by the resemblance of some homes in Asia, and the Pacific to homes in early Britain, and to homes in Africa. These are round homes and have their very modern counterpart in design efforts. Perhaps they can withstand hurricanes better and may be more suitable on islands or the Florida coast line where there are harsh winds. New construction technologies are emerging.

3. May be more suitable in damp areas
A sphere with a water proof base would obviously have advantages in wet areas. build a home like a tree with roots that go down deep. Lift the home off the ground using the concrete post in the center that offers a way up and down as well as supports the center of the structure.

4. May withstand earthquakes better
The idea of a dome structure seems safer and stronger in earthquakes. The dome that floats or spherical home that floats would survive as the ground sand turned fluid.

5. May be more environmental friendly
A round house reduces the area that loses heat. Try the mathematics. See examples at energy shows.

6. May be more fun to live in
Geodesic domes are a very real possibility. Think of all the ways that homes could be designed. One could even have a slide to get out of the spherical home that no-one could use as an entrance. Kids would love the new atmosphere.

7. May be more economic to build
A dome uses less material to build. It has to do with technology of circles and spheres as in the case of building super tankers. Do the mathematics and see. Round houses served the British community for millenia.

8. May help to reduce unemployment in industrial countries
By building more round houses, we can help create new employment opportunites for design and construction technologies. These new technologies can embody the latest discoveries for environmentally friendly construction.

9. May use technologies intensively and lead to new technologies
There is an interesting possibility of building your spherical home underground. You would need to watch out for roots, but you could let the trees grow and you could pipe in light. There is the possibility of new materials and design. At the very base of the sphere one could have a ballast to hold it in place!

10. May be easier to use in friendly community design efforts
There is a desire of people and communities to return to round house designs and people will fight to see the technology is implemented. What we have is a failure of commercial follow up because the craftsmen are not trained to think in the round. We could perhaps think of designs coming from China where round houses in communities are very successful.

11. May build home owner pride more effectively
Round homes are certainly the preference for those that have the money. They tend to have space and other outdoor living room areas that the home owner can beautify while contributing to the environment planning trees and creating a canopy effect for birds and small animals.

12. May allow personalities more expression
There is something about a round house that is inviting. Its not correct to say that such houses are not possible because there aren't that many around. Would that people demanded more round houses and thought of ways to put their personality into the dwellings that they owned.

13. May use new materials and lead to innovation of new building techniques
This link to experimental design in England does not suggest something very modern, but designs of round houses have improved a lot. What the round house did accomplish were eco-friendly goals and these beat most modern rectangular house hands down.

14. May be easier on the eyes
From very ancient times, our ancestors knew the beauty of round circles and communities of different types of round houses have survived for millenia.

15. May be more energy efficient.
The newer designs for round houses are obviously more energy efficient.

16. May be more robot friendly
Robots can negotiate a round house by going round in circles. They don't get caught in corners! Does that mean that round houses will be the future. What do you think?

17. May be more user friendly
What are round house like to live in? They do fetch a good price because of their rarity.

Accelerated Learning - Better School Grades - An Artist's Approach

WESTERN BARBADOS SHORE

Learning and discovery go hand in hand. Most of us want to discover things and some of us have unearthed ways to do that. The first thing an artist does, and there are many brilliant artists, is assign priorities in the right order. The highest priority goes to you, the learner, the young artist, the one who wants to learn. You need to get to grips with yourself as a person before you can really begin the process of accelerating your learning.

As often as you dare, for we all have the challenges of others around us, get to a place that you find peace. Probably, this is in your bedroom, assuming that your brother or sister, or your mother will allow you some peace. Whilst alone, just think about yourself for a while. You are the most important person in your world and if you are unhappy or lack peace then you need to seek a way to find both. Being unhappy yourself means that you can do things for yourself to cheer you up. Think of funny things or strange things that you have noticed during the week. Try to see the funny side of them.

Almost every thing has a funny side, no matter how dark it seems. Try to see the irony of your situation. You may be unhappy, but there are many more your age that are unhappier, unless you are the most unlucky kid in the world. Even that is ironical. How could you out of the billions of kids in the world be the unhappiest kid. No, its just not possible, especially if you are reading this blog!

Accelerated learning and learning of most kinds requires observation that can be recalled. If you are truly aware of yourself, your brain will remember that situation and what you are trying to learn because it builds links to your awareness of yourself and what it is that you are learning. You learn least when you are unaware of yourself. Self remembering is at the seat of learning.

Related to the technique of self remembering is the technique of achieving a peaceful state of mind. If your mind is not peaceful, you will not learn as readily. To learn you can have soft music, but it needs to be peaceful or to be harmonious with your mood of learning. You can play load music and learn and be a peace within yourself. Its probably not a good idea if you are trying to learn for exams because your mind will recall better if you were playing the load music and you cannot do that in an examination hall. Its best to study for exams in the quiet of a room where you are not being distracted by TV, by family or pets. You need to create such a place in your home, if possible. If you can't do that, you need to go to a restaurant, library, coffee shop, book store, or some place quiet where they don't mind kids sitting quietly learning, sketching and reading.

1. Mind Mapping and Thinking

The origin of some of my ideas and my sketching of lectures comes from the work of Tony Buzan on mind mapping. Its very useful to learn how to do mind maps. There are lots of free software programs that help you in the process while you are on the computer. The range of mind mapping tools is absolutely enormous, so I won't try to tell you which ones to use, other than to say that you don't need softward to mind map effectively.

I learned how to take lecture notes by use of mind maps rather than normal lecture notes across the page. The mind map lecture notes you need to begin with a notebook that is blank. Instead of writing sentences while a lecture is being delivered, you draw the lecture as a series of mind maps. You begin by understanding what the lecturer is trying to say, and you use the mind mapping method to record the points the lecturer is making. This is a dynamic process and requires a bit of practice, but I found that my lecture notes for lectures given at British and American universities about social sciences, literature, history, physics, mathematics, and computers, were better because of mind mapping techniques.

2. The Law of Associations

Think of yourself as a budding artist. We, all, are artists in our own specific ways. Learning comes by association. If you want to learn something, you need to associate with that who is that is going to teach you, or what medium you can use to teach you. No association means no learning. There are many ways to associate yourself with an instructor, agent of instruction, or technology of instruction. If you want to learn how to drive for example, you associate with a car, with your parent or friend who is older and knows how to drive, with a book on how to drive, with the road, with the parking lot, with the highway, with the signs, and so on.

Associating with someone who already is highly skilled at what you want to learn is the best way to learn if there is any way that you can watch them in action or if they can teach you. You associate with your parents to learn how to be a parent. If your parent is not a good parent then your association with your parent won't teach you how to be a good parent other than by reverse copy catting. In this case you learn what is correct by observing what is incorrect. If you want to learn how to make someone happy, you do this by both copy catting and reverse copy catting. You watch what achieves happiness and you watch what makes for unhappiness. You learn by associating with the process that you wish to acquire skills in or knowledge about.

Associations can come directly by past experience or by sitting down and trying to think what would be a way to associate yourself with something that you wish to learn. As an artist, I do this by taking a blank piece of paper and writing the word me in the center then drawing a circle around it. The circle doesn't have to be perfect, but just enclose it. Suppose I have the goal of my learning to be to get a job that pays me a million dollars a year. To learn how to do that I have to associate with something that is connected to an annual income of a million dollars. As I am doing this I realize that there are sub conditions that I wish to place on myself. The first is that I want to associate only with an income stream of a million dollars that is earned honestly. If I am a young Canadian boy that might mean a hockey player, who plays for the professional league. So, there I am, aware of myself, and writing on my piece of paper the words 'hockey professional.' To accelerate my learning about how to make a million dollar income, I could associate with a hock player who earns an annual income of one million dollars.

There is a problem, or better put, a consequence arising from the law of association in learning that I, as an artist, put forth, and that is that associations also bring about learning of other things very rapidly. By associating with one thing, you associate with another, and you learn about the connections between one thing and another, and you see connections or associations that you would not otherwise see. That is why I think that associating with history and our history is so important to learning.

If you do not associate with the history of what it is you are learning about, you miss the connections that will accelerate your learning, you miss the 'don't do's of learning. For example, if you want to learn how to build a better society, you will accelerate your learning about how you can achieve that goal by actually associating with a better society, but you can also learn by associating yourself with a much worse society and seeing how not to build a better society, by associating with those things that do not build a better society. In this process of association, you need to associate with the events and things of the history that you are seeking to learn about, all at the same time not forgetting to associate with the negative things so that you learn about them as well.

Learning is a very personal thing, and one for which there are other aspects that you need in your achievement of accelerated learning: wanting and sketching; daydreaming and concentration; steps to memory improvement; enjoying your research home work.

3. Wanting and Sketching

When people would ask me what attracted me to painting and sketch, I would say that it is important to want something first. I would visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC almost every lunch break over several years. It was a great way to have a great meal and to se the work of the best of artists. In other words, I associated myself with good art of some of the best artists that have ever lived. In this way, by seeing their work and by copying it, I was able to progress rather rapidly in my skills as an artist. I got so that I felt there was no image that I could not create. Boy was this wrong!

What I have learned is that the world of art is in the galleries, but it is also widely distributed around the globe. There is fantastic stuff being done in private studios that lean towards or away from the electronic arts. To learn how to draw on the computer, I went to Montgomery College in Rockville and then to the University of Maryland. I attend both these university art environments with the female artist Lesley Skeith, who was a perfectionist and a brilliant copiest. Unfortunately, Lesley passed away suddenly from breast cancer in 2002 but before she died, we had worked together many years on many art and computer projects. Lesley had a great sense of humour and an eye for composition that was simple marvelous.

In 2001, I did an oil painting of Lesley Skeith staring at the bulletin board at Wake Forest University, where her son Mark Skeith attended. Mark attained a first rate degree and lived in Japan afterwords learning Japanese. At the time of the painting, Mark was working in the university library and was enjoying the world of pig kidnapping. His fraternity hit the headlines when the kidnapped a pig from a farmer. Mark was fun loving and got himself into many difficult situations before maturing into his new world of diplomacy and international relations.

4. Daydreaming and Concentration

What I was doing in the previous paragraph was day dreaming. Day dreaming is an important tool of the artist and is key to motivation and inspiration. In a day dream, we tend to be aware of things in an independent way that frees us from reality and allows the creative side of our brain a free reign. In our day dreams we travel to places that we would not normally go, and associate internally with impressions, sounds and images that have been captured in our past at times when we have been most aware of ourselves and our wants.

Day dreaming involves the mind concentrating on visual or aural direction and impressions that have been stored up by our brain for future use as in dreams, useful recall, or day dreaming. Scientists really don't know where the brain stores information, or whether the brain is an instrument of retrieval of information that is accessible through time because of channels that the brain 'lays' down between instances of time. There are reasons for thinking that the brain has associations with the quantum physical world. Such research is being undertaken by Roger Penrose at Cambridge University, who was a creative thinker about the role of higher mathematics in art and space. Tegmark a Swedish physicist disagrees with the notion of the brain being active at the quantum. The fact is that at present nothing has been verified in this complex field of study.

5. Steps to Memory Improvement

The usual method of remembering something is read, register it in the brain, and recall it from the brain. The recalling is very important and if you have a method of registering information as well as retrieving it you are well a way to getting straight 'A's in many schools. If you use mind mapping methods you will find it is much easier to remember an associated point than one that is unassociated. In schools in Britain, where marking on the curve is prevalent, you may be brilliant, but fail. It's the British way of dumbing down! Memory is not enough in some school systems to get you a pass. You also need to learn how to think and process information. Mind mapping techniques can assist with that as well.

6. Enjoying Your Home Work

When you read your notes that are mind mapped it is amazing to see how quickly you learn and recall information assuming that you have the correct associations. You will enjoy your home work much more when you use mind mapping techniques.

Really Useful Boxes - North American Distribution Opportunity!

THE DARTMOOR STONE MOVER by AW LAKE

You can't image how useful these boxes are. And, they seem to be without a North American distributor despite being offered on the Internet through various distributors. There seems to be an opportunity now for some budding capitalist entrepreneur to get a license to sell or manufacture the really useful boxes for distribution in North America. If you are an artist, you need to check them out. They are a really useful way to transport and store your paintings.

Think Positively in All That you Do - A Gitomer World

DID YOU EAT MY MOTHER ?

One of the most positive individuals to hit the book stands in recent years, deposing Norman Vincent Peale, is an author going by the name of Jeffery Gitomer. What makes Gitomer so absolutely appealing is that he thinks that one should work and that working hard is good for you. It may even help you create a positive attitude in all that you do. Gitomer says that watching the news is not a great way to develop a positive attitude. Turn the TV off and study how you can really help other people.

Canon Sets the Pace for HD Video Cameras

PROTECT SEA TURTLES

In my opinion, Canon seems miles ahead of the competition when it comes to digital reflex and high definition video cameras. Its all the patents they hold and the quality of design of their products. If you have a problem with your Canon camera share it with me, AW Lake. Otherwise I will continue to think that they are the greatest for creating JPG stills and MPEG-2 video files that you can share on the Internet.

Combined with Flash or Shockwave capability using editing 'swf' file creation software such available using Swish Max you have a pretty formidable combination. I now use Canon for all my video needs and have had great success with them. Make sure that when you plug in any video device that you have surge protection. You never know when the lightning might strike, even in winter, but especially in early spring.

If you are thinking of creating video DVDs then buy yourself a copy of the Essential DVD Maker which has loads of tips on how to create DVDs easily and economically. The publication has easy to use images that shorten your learning curve amazingly.

I use my HD Canon video camera to take stills, and it does a wonderful job. Buy the correct card and you have enormous capacity. You may need to buy the HD video film in Japanese camera stores and get the 80+ minute film. The American camera shops may not have HD yet! If you buy a video camera, you will find that the tapes give you probably the best results, and I was told that the hard disk storage cameras are not very good for fast HD work. Ask an expert why, but I think it has to do with storage capacity and throughput.

Even a digital SLR reflex camera can take movies and they are reasonably good. The video cameras will probably have better zoom capabilities and tape is really where its at right now.

A Review of Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you are a stock market investor, this is the book you should be reading if you have not done so already. It would have been easier for you had you absorbed what Taleb has to say many years ago, but now you have had a taste of the negative, you can turn your efforts into the positive. I remember attending the lectures of John Kenneth Galbraith who spoke often of stock market crashes. His ideas were based on a thorough reading and analysis of the 1929 crash. Investing in the stock market is gambling, but it may be the only way that the 'small' investor has to get a portion of the capitalist economic pie. The rewards of investing in stocks and shares can be considerable, but the small investor has always to be aware of the sharks and black holes.

What Taleb does very well is show how self deception can dominate stock market and for that matter credit market advice giving to the point where it absorbs most of the capital of investors who lose almost everything. I might add, in one foul swoop. That's the danger, the risk, the eventual out turn from speculation that is completely outside one's control. We see the Donald Trumps of this world and expect that he has some secrets that he can share. The only problem is that a host of Trump wannabees have lost heavily in the property market. What's Trump's secret you wonder?

Well, you need to read Taleb's book and you will begin to understand how those investing also hedge. Hedging is when you take the risk out of investing realizing that you are not an expert investor or adviser, but part of a largely random process that can be terribly destructive of valuation of capital and almost everything else.

In the UK, the individual in the civil service who mailed a package containing a disk with people's private information thought that he knew the mail system, that it was secure. The upshot was that the individual took a risk and almost everyone in the country, almost 25 million people, lost big time. It would have been better for the government to install a fail safe system of auditing so as not to risk people's private information. This is what hedging is all about. Its about making sure that you are not exposed to risk. You carry on your business. You make money. But, you do not take unnecessary risk.

In foreign exchange operations, CLS Bank, does this very task of eliminating certain kinds of risk. FX dealers hedge their currency positions all the time so that their banks are not exposed to unnecessary risk. When I worked in Barclays Bank we were put on courses that showed us how to build a currency book and maturity ladder that got you where you wanted to be, largely without risk taking. That's the way money remains with you.

This is what the IMF SDR valuation is all about. Smart countries follow the SDR valuations of their currencies so as to avoid risk, avoid Asian financial implosion! What do you think China is doing? If it followed the advice of the US authorities it might be taking unnecessary risk so it has to monitor the value of its currency against all the major currencies. This way it avoids the rsik of an implosion and disasterous surprise and gradually moves in the direction it needs to move. Look at the Chinese exchange rate. Is is moving in the right direction? This is a question that you need to ask in a period of wild speculation in oil as a commodity.

Knowledge Creation Using the Internet

The Internet is not just a means for disseminating information, it is also a vehicle of knowledge creation. In our highly scientific world, we need verification of results of studies and experiments before we consider them to be valid. The Internet is a means by which the results of studies can be directly validated. A person in one lab can actually watch another person conduct an experiment. There is no longer a need to wait to see an experiment performed. Everyone can watch it being performed. This is knowledge creation. Its not technology creation necessarily, but it is knowledge creation, and it is occurring very rapidly and it can occur even more rapidly.

When I did my first studies of technology transfer in the early 1970's, the process of knowledge creation was laborious to say the least. Today, what I did then can be performed over the Internet. It is now possible for a researcher to interview heads of research over the Internet. Wow! Now that is a change.

The Psychology of Handwriting

Your handwriting can reveal many things about you that you are probably unaware. The science of handwriting analysis has progressed significantly. Practitioners of analytical techniques offer their services at a price, so the science has grown up from a past time to a full fledged approach to seeing within human personality. The fact is that everything that we do can be analysed forensically. The results may not be accurate or they may hit spot on in ways that get to the deeper sources of illness and physical conditions as well as personality traits. One has to be careful with claims that handwriting analysis is all powerful. It is still a very young science.

I remember my father, a minister of religion, who visited the sick in a local insane assylum telling me in the 1960's that handwriting analysis was being used to understand mental illness. He said that they were experimenting with a therapy to reach the deeper parts of the brain by training 'mentally ill' people how to improve their handwriting. Apparently, just the training in handwriting arts could result in more organized thought and behaviour at very deep psychological levels.

A french Canadian student of psychology who I worked with in a summer job at Weston's Bakery in Longueuil, Quebec who would tease me that every motion I made could be analysed by a trained psychologist and that I was forever giving off clues about my weaknesses that a trained person could understand and use to recommend therapy, i.e. that I was strange and need help.

Your handwriting does let others know whether you are under stress or likely to be ill.

You too can Draw and Paint Pictures

As a post graduate university level teacher, I am only too aware that everyone should learn how to draw and actually do drawings and sketches on a regular basis. There are many places to learn and you cannot begin too soon. Drawing, like singing or public speaking, may actually save your life or enable you to live longer, so don't ignore it. This is because drawing requires certain parts of your brain to think. Not only do you have to visualize, but you have to link that visualization to motion in your hand, nose or foot, if you draw with your toes.

Yarning - A Verbal Art

Yarning

Telling a sea yarn is an ancient skill and pasttime. We have many of the stories that were told by the many boys and men sailing seas during the four hundred years leading up to the twentieth century. Mariners continue to spin yarns as the while away hours and days.

Spending many months on the waves of vast oceans with many hours confined to vessel with a group of sailors provided an environment in which the imagination grabbed hold. The many hours of sailing would pass into days, the days into weeks, the weeks into months, and occasionally the months into years before a sailor was reunited with his family.

Often, the best yarns were about actual events on board boat. A vessel at sea was a dangerous unpredictable place. In the West end of English Channel storms coming off the Atlantic would regularly blow up suddenly bringing waves over twenty feet.

Inevitably, there would be monster storms with wave over thirty feet, and occasionally during and after the hurricane season, there would be waves within waves within waves within waves within waves, coming from a multitude of directions. In a hurricane there would be a depression, there would be waves coming from one direction for a period and there would be waves coming from another direction for a period all caused by the devastating force of unbelievably strong winds that set currents in motion all across the Atlantic to die down, no one knows where.

The job of the Captain was to use his complete authority in order to have all stations of his command operating smoothly and as a concerted team. In rough weather, the slap of the large waves against the sides of the vessel often tipped it violently forward and back, and from one side to another.

The larger the vessel the greater could be the opposite motion as a wave left a clift edge over which the ship would tumble, not always straight down, but frequently at an angle.

A sailor would develop sea legs that would adjust his balance automatically to the motion of the boat, however, his body could not know the complex patterns of the sea waves slamming the ship up and down, over and about.

My Own Yarn

I once sailed the Atlantic in the proud vessel, the Empress of England. This cruise liner had sailed from Montreal many a time and was used to the waters of the Eastern seaboard. My voyage in 1968 was from the St. Lawrence seaway port of Montreal to the mighty port of Liverpool, England.

It was November 1968, and a hurricane was dying out in the Atlantic. On shore, no-one could guess what was happening hundreds off miles out to sea. The hurricane had not touched land and people breathed a long sigh of relief. A similar event hit the Atlantic in 2000. Another, in 1991. People use the analogy of the monster or perfect storm to describe events in their work.

My experience was that of monster waves as tall as skyscrapers hitting the vessel at half hour intervals. Easily as tall as the vessel itself, the waves made one feel that one was in a rowing boat instead of a huge ship. Our captain wisely allowed the waves to hit the vessel from the side and not head on, as the USS France was doing to its regret. In any event, he probably had no choice because of the difficult of shifting direction of such a large vessel, even with half an hour intervals. Every half hour for about three days, the ship would tip on its side about 30 or more degrees.

On impact of the wave, everyone sitting in chairs on one side of the lounges which were the width of the ship would slide the ships width to the other side. The vessel would then right itself by tipping in the opposite direction, and people would slide backwards to the opposite side. For each wave there were about five such reversals of direction until the ship regained level balance.

I was fortunate that I did not suffer from sea sickness. Nor did I fear the storm because I trusted the Captain and the ship. I was able to run around and help passengers get to their rooms, or pick them up off the floor.

One passenger at night in an outer edge cabin, was tossed out of his bed by a sideward hitting wave that caused the ship to turn on its side. He was thrown onto a cubbard door at the foot of his bed. As the ship turned on its opposite side, he was tossed back into bed. Immediately, the ship adjusted again its balance by tipping in the opposite direction on its side and the passenger was thrown out of his bed onto the cubboard door once again. The ship corrected itself and the passenger was thrown back into bed, but this time the cubboard door flung open and all its contents flew onto the bed with the passenger. As the ship again righted itself, the passenger was thrown back towards the cubboard door, but this time it was open and the passenger ended up inside the cubboard. The door of the cubboard closed behind him and he was knocked unconscious as it slammed his head. The following morning, he was found locked inside the cubboard sleeping soundly.