Technology for Luddites
Maxwell von Stein’s bicycle invention uses a flywheel to store energy. Instead of braking, he can slow the bicycle by transferring the kinetic energy from back wheel into the flywheel — which spins between the bars of the frame. Then Max can send the flywheel energy back to the wheel when he wants a boost. Watch the video. Thank you, Rasmus.
Related: Job Ebenezer’s Dual Purpose Bicycle, mentioned in the article on pedal powered machines.
Medieval Lives is a BBC documentary series looking at the Medieval world with the intent of finding out what it was really like. The series consists of eight episodes, each of which examines a particular Medieval personality: the peasant, the monk, the damsel, the minstrel, the knight, the philosopher, the outlaw and the king. Via Ran Prieur.
Camelphotos.com has an interesting collection of historic camel pictures, showing pack trains, camels pulling wagons, and some camels working in agriculture and industry. Also of interest is a picture gallery of camels in India today.
“This book represents a first-ever attempt to explain and illustrate how the volcanic material pumice can be processed using simple technologies suitable for developing countries.
In Germany, the first wall-building brick made of pumice and a slow-hardening binder (milk of lime) dates back to the year 1845. That marked the starting point of a local pumice-based building industry in volcanic regions of the Eifel Mountains, where pumice deposits were abundant. As time passed, the material’s market area expanded steadily.
Today’s pumice industry in the Rhineland operates large production facilities and has enough raw material reserves to last beyond the turn of the century at the present rate of production. Pumice, an extremely light, porous raw material of volcanic origin, can be found in many parts of the world, including various developing countries with areas of past or present volcanic activity. In some countries, volcanic ash (with a particle size of less than 2 mm), pumice (with particle sizes ranging from 2 to 64 mm) and consolidated ash (tuff) are traditionally used, on a local scale, as versatile building materials.”
“Building with pumice” (pdf-version), Klaus Grasser & Gernot Minke, 1990. More links: 1 / 2. Thanks to Zeltia González Blanco.
“IN SITU is a documentary directed by Antoine Viviani about the experiences of artistic activity in the city of Europe. At a time when the city seems to be increasingly saturated by noise and information, the film features artistic experiences alternately invisible, monumental, participatory or secret, which provoque our daily glance, and surprise us. IN SITU confronts the visions of these artists from different backgrounds with the input of ordinary people, philosophers, urban planners, architects but also viewers of the film, so as to try to identify what these InSitu experiments tell on our period, our urbanity.”
The film can be viewed in its entirity in English, French or German. Short review here. Thanks to Eva Maori.
“Putting the pieces together, our national battery occupies a volume of 4.4 billion cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 1.6 km (one mile) on a side. The size in itself is not a problem: we’d naturally break up the battery and distribute it around the country. This battery would demand 5 trillion kg (5 billion tons) of lead. A USGS report from 2011 reports 80 million tons (Mt) of lead in known reserves worldwide, with 7 Mt in the U.S. A note in the report indicates that the recent demonstration of lead associated with zinc, silver, and copper deposits places the estimated (undiscovered) lead resources of the world at 1.5 billion tons. That’s still not enough to build the battery for the U.S. alone. But even then, we aren’t done: batteries are good for only so many cycles (roughly 1000, depending on depth of discharge), so the national battery would require a rotating service schedule to recycle each part once every 5 years or so. This servicing would be a massive, expensive, and never-ending undertaking.” Read more: A Nation-Size Battery.
