Here are some projects I have worked on:
Here are some inventions & new applications:
1.
Librarybox is an application of an emergency shelter by Vinay Gupta (the Hexayurt Project). It’s a hexayurt with a built in library equivalent to a 200 page book. It can be used simultaneously as a shelter/library or shelter/school in a post-disaster situation.
Bullet points:
- Quickly deployable folding emergency shelter
- Essentially a Hexayurt with pages printed on walls
- Empty wall space for writing, illustrating by teachers and learners
- After disaster, or en-route during war migration, what are you going to do with the kids? Teach lessons in the Librarybox.
BookBoxx / Librarybox is built on the Hexayurt source code (http://hexayurt.com/). This is a structure built of foamboard (Tuff-R, insulation board, R-Max, etc.) walls printed with “books”. 5 of the 6 walls are printed with the rough equivalent of 40 pages worth of 8.5×11” sheets. This adds up to about 200 pages worth of text or images for each structure, with a “blank” 5th wall for a door and for writing, bulletin board, or whiteboard space for instruction or asynchronous communication between readers. One panel section of the roof may fold back for light during daytime.
The BookBoxx is dropped in flat-pack bundles into migrant routes, makeshift or ’slum’ city areas, disaster relief camps, or wherever else they may be needed. For specs, think 6′ folding hexayurt. Several may be unfolded and connecting in a hex-cell formation for a small makeshift school.
This is a shelter, and it is a library. That’s “BookBoxx“.
*More details to follow.
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2.
Globovo
A small generator that uses sunlight to lift an inflated balloon and tug at a springloaded magnet-and-coil to produce a small charge for lighting with LEDs or recharging AA batteries. More details and design specs to come.
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3.
Nine-Symbol Sudoku
This is a variation of sudoku that uses nine non-number symbols. Same rules apply: only one instance of each symbol in every row, column, and 3×3 block. But the symbols can be any consistent set of nine — the first nine Enochian letters, hexagrams from the I Ching, runes, or even colors (light, med, dark blue; light, med, dark orange; light, med, dark green). Might be used with scripts in other language to learn new characters (kanji, Arabic, or cyrillic for ex.)
See “Enochian Sudoku” for example. (IMPORTANT NOTE: seems I’m not the original inventor! I’m seeing lots of waypaths to my sudoku variations thru google searches for ’symbol sudoku’, etc., and those lead to other examples of this idea by other folks. So, I can’t claim any credit for being the first to come up with this idea, but it did occur to me independently. In any case, go create your own symbol variations!)
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4.
Silverhead
A roleplaying game (”of cosmic dread!”) about ‘the visitors’, UFOs, consipiracies, secret societies, etc; but this game is meant to be a) used as an oracle and b) designed in community.
a) The game works as a kind of oracular tabletop theatre.
b) I’ve mapped out the main points of superstructure, but it’s now an open game — wikified for any who may work with it and help grow it into something better than it is now.
http://silverhead.wikispaces.com/
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5.
This came to me in a dream, and it still needs a lot of work. Also, somebody else in the long history of mathematics may have thought this up (or something like it) before me.
In my hypnagogia this morning, a notion came to me about numbers ordered alphabetically. Instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, we’d have: eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, six, ten, three, two…
When I woke up, I wondered about ordering all numbers alphabetically (in any given alphabet based written language), and at first thought it would be impossible… for one thing, we’d have to deal with an infinite series of words. For another, new numbers don’t have predictable names; the names are orderly on the small scale (twenty-four, thirty-four, fifty-eight, four hundred thousand and ninety, etc.), but once you get out into the very large numbers, the names get novel on the front end (googolplex was so named by a mathematician’s nephew… “Graham’s Number” is named after Ronald Graham… etc.). We don’t have a regular system for creating new number names for Large Numbers.
But now I’m thinking that it could be possible to at least describe the structure of how an alphabetical set of all numbers would be ordered if we used a predictable system for creating new number names.
So the system would describe the pattern by which any regularly named numbers are predicted to fit in an alphabetical scheme. It presupposes orderly and predictable naming conventions for yet unnamed numbers.
Any number ‘a’ comes before any number ‘b’. Any ‘aa’ comes before any ‘ba’. Any ‘aaa’ comes before any ‘baa’. Would our base ten system have to become a base 26 system?
aaaazbaqcccccicimnaolveieeesvqp…
comes before
aaabzbaqcccccicimnaolveieeesvqp…
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