Attend the Maine Lobster Festival
Attend a TED conference
Most paper brick makers use a steel box section, two pressure plates with holes to release the water, and two overcentre arms to gain mechanical advantage and really apply pressure.
The best paper mix is well saturated and agitated.
I plan to use bleach as a wetting agent.
I have a paint stirrer that fits onto the end of a drill so that will be a low energy (for me) agitation option.
I’ll weigh the paper slush into even sized batches, and use hydraulic pressure (a modified log splitter) to ensure each brick has the same pressure applied to it.
I will split the finished, dried bricks into three batches:
1. Planter box
The bricks will be formed into four walls over a wooden base and filled with potting mix and a selection of spring bulbs.
When the bulbs finish flowering in October/November I will disassemble and see how well the bricks hold up to all that organic matter and water.
2. Small wall
The bricks will be formed into a single wall held together by weak mortar.
The unrendered wall will be evaluated at the same time as the planter
3. Loose bricks on concrete
How well can a set of bricks out in all weathers hold up?
Pictures as the project develops.
Comments welcome!
We all know you can mash paper together to make paper bricks for recycling those stacks of newspapers.
What if you used them like bricks and made a compost bin from them – or rendered them to make a garden. or a garden wall. or a house.
how long does it take for a natural paper brick to break down?
You might think vermin might pose a problem, but haybale homes are commonplace now, with a bit of render on the outside. Why not paper? They are excellent insulators.
I’m going to experiment some more.
There’s something very cool about parabolas. What I really want is a solar furnace to heat water and incinerate weeds.
Rob over at cockeyed made a “light sharpener” with a ton of mirrors.
I thought I’d take a simpler tack and start with a parabolic trough. Because it focuses light along a single line rather than a single point it’s not as lethal as a dish – but initial results are just swell.
Step one was to work out the size parabola to use. Most materials come in 600mm or 1200mm wide so I figured I’d go for around 600mm wide. I wanted the focal height to be 50mm so just used a standard calculation of
x²/4p where p = focal height.
In retrospect this made a reasonably thin parabola and I think a more shallow trough wouldn’t require the same degree of critical alignment with the sun.
At 300mm out from the very bottom of the parabola, the height is 450mm.
| focus point | 50 |
| x | y |
| 25 | 3.13 |
| 50 | 12.5 |
| 75 | 28.13 |
| 100 | 50 |
| 125 | 78.13 |
| 150 | 112.5 |
| 175 | 153.13 |
| 200 | 200 |
| 225 | 253.13 |
| 250 | 312.5 |
| 275 | 378.13 |
| 300 | 450 |
Step two was to mark out a pattern using these dimensions. I plotted out the parabola on a piece of 3mm MDF we had lying around.
Next I used the pattern to mark out some flooring board and got my partner to cut 3 identical “negatives” of the pattern.
Step three was assembly – hang the whole thing together with some fence palings. Luckily I have a good friend in the engineering trade and I was able to source some mirror stainless. We screwed this into place and put a length of black PVC tube through the focal point – attached the hose and started it up. Unfortunately the PVC tube melted and disintegrated before I got to take pics of this step. Now before you think I’m a complete idiot - I do realise that it was going to get very hot and plastic melts – but I was running cold water through the pipe and it was after 6pm at night… I thought it would last the 10 mins or so I wanted to run the test for. Nevermind – I took the meltdown as a complete success!
We found a length of copper tube and replaced the PVC pipe:
I’m going to paint this black in the future. Now with the trough angled at the sun that copper tube got VERY hot. Too hot to touch. Excellent.
We hooked up the hose with a very makeshift fitting:
and angled it towards the sun again.
Experiment One: I first turned the tap on at a dribble – the water was VERY hot – so hot that it was hard to let it dribble over your hand.
Experiment Two: Turn up the tap to a slow stream – the water was tepid. By this time the water coming out of the tap was pretty cold, but after racing through the parabolic heat sleeve – it’s definitely warm.
Upcoming experiments -
Build a tank to hold the water and pump it through the trough in a circuit.
Build an oil tank and run a copper coil inside an old water cylinder to act as a heat exchanger. If this works it might be worth hooking it up to a pretank before our instantaneous water supply.
If nothing else, this awesome free hot water will be great in the greenhouse this winter to heat the nutrient mix.
Have you built one of these? Any pointers?
This test is based on the Turing Test.
The world is full of experts. In this world where information is king, the IGE is perhaps more kingly than a true learned expert. Still, I hate those sanctimonious troublemakers who pretend they know it ALL when all that have is the search engine preview paragraph.
Here’s the test:
Ask a question that’s beyond the ordinary person’s realm of knowledge
“Hey does anyone know what Dostoevsky’s first published novel was?”
The question may be asked face to face, but forums and email are also fine.
If the answer does not look like a copy and paste from the web and is entirely undiscernable from a true expert’s answer then you’ve got an information hero on your hands. It doesn’t matter whether they googled the answer or brought it up from memory – they passed the test.
Other scenarios:
They leave the coffee break room and return 5 mins later with an opening line of “Hey you know how earlier you were talking about Dostoevsky?.. Well his first novel was “Poor Folk”. “Is that so?” you ask. They smile, nod and take a drink of their coffee. “Is that the one he wrote in the form of a series of letters?” The smile fades, they shrug noncommitedly and leave the room. (Fail)
Google your question. See if their reply matches any of the top 10 hits. (Fail)
They mispronounce key terms while trying to sound like an expert (Fail)
They start their email with “Oh yeah, I know all about that” (Fail)
I’ve been thinking about multiliteracy.
I first started thinking about IT Literacy but developed my thinking broader than that – involving all the interrelated aspects.
Take word clouds for example. They are commonly used on the Internet both to display tags, or prominent words from a site. Here’s one on “Academics” from Wordle.net (Click to open and view larger)
To understand this word cloud there are multiple levels of understanding required. Some of the elements of this image have semantic meaning and other elements have only visual meaning.
Do the words have an order or a position on the page that is important? No.
Usually words are arranged on a page – like this one – in an order suitable for forming sentences. In the example given above, the words are a kind of list – but not. In “web speak” this collection of words is called a cloud. Some users seem to intrinsically know that the words should be read individually but for others it’s a concept that needs to be explained.
Are the spaces between the words important? No.
Words can sometimes be arranged artistically so that the dark or white space forms a kind of image. Sometimes in this setting the actual words have no meaning at all, other than as a form of media with which to “paint” or “create”. Take this example here:
In this case, it is the pattern that is important. The words simply fill the space – but the size and orientation of the words does not matter. The shape could provide an alternative meaning. For example:
seems to be an oxymoron. What is really being said here -
- I love to hate you?
- I hate to love you?
- I pretend to love you but inside my secret is that I hate you?
- You may think that I hate you, but really I love you?
A certain kind of shape/text pattern congruence/incongruence literacy must exist to explore these deeper questions.
Returning to the first example of the tag cloud there are other questions too:
Are the colours of the words important? No.
The colours could be used to define multiple categories – so all words of the same colour belong somehow together. In this case they are not, but spurious understanding could develop from attaching meaning to the colours that was not intended by the creator. Visually though the colours are important, in that they negate the need for so much white space as contrasting words are easier to pick out and read.
Are the size of the words important? Yes!
Literate readers must negate colour, placement, order and pattern in the example - but should understand that size is important. In this case, the size of the words on the page indicates the popularity of that word or phrase. The more often a word appears in a page or site, then the larger it appears in the tag or word cloud. It may indicate that the word is important – but it may also indicate that it’s often used.
Other meanings:
In order to be fully literate, a reader should understand that the word cloud is a representation of underlying data. When viewing the above image, it might need to be explained to users that the image was not created by typing words into an image programme, but that a long list of words, or a blog, or wiki or website was fed into a programme and that the most repeated words were visually represented in the cloud. Sometimes the words also appear sideways and upside-down. Likewise, there is no semantic meaning to the orientation of words, other than for visual interest.
I’m sure there are other aspects of this word cloud that might be interpreted in ways that I haven’t considered – please comment me to add your thoughts.
Taking this into account – do we need a wider view of IT Literacy to include “multiliteracy”??
By the way, if you have an interest in discovering and illustrating patterns in data, then Neoformix is an excellent site! Take a look and see whether you can intrinsically understand the semantics of the graphs, or whether some of your multiliteracy needs developing.
I was inspired to make a batch of Kiwi Biscuits when I happened upon a US blog post outlining that woman’s desire to try the recipe. Unfortunately her batch didn’t work out as well as she’d hoped. I commented her blog and Shelley sent me a lovely email. The local ingredients used may have been a factor in the unsatisfactory batch so I told Shelley I’d make them as I remember them being made back in my childhood.
Here’s the recipe as it appeared on the blog:
Kiwi Biscuits:
100g butter
2 Tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
3/4 cup of chocolate chips
I followed the recipe exactly – except that I used a little more butter (see image below) and I only used 1 teaspoon of baking powder not 1 tablespoon. My practice is always to use 1 teaspoon of baking powder to 1 cup of plain flour unless I’m making scones and then I use 1.5 teaspoons.
Here are my ingredients:
Here’s a closeup of the chocolate chips I used although I only noticed afterwards that it’s a little blurry.
You can see that they aren’t in a “Drop bud” shape – although you can now buy those in New Zealand – but back in the 70’s these were the only kind of chocolate chips you could buy. They put identically shaped but smaller ones in the orange chip icecream – but I digress.
Here’s a close-up:
So I added a little over the 100grams of butter – just through force of habit really. I’ve noticed that sometimes I don’t cut it straight to the bottom so it usually works out about right. If you’re a real stickler for perfection then just weigh it.
and here’s the butter and the sugar ready to be mixed
You can see I used a Kenwood mixer for the job as it takes some time to really get the butter and sugar to cream the way they should. I’ve seen a lot of people stop when the butter and sugar is mixed like this:
To my mind that is only half the job. I like it to be like frosting – soft, smooth, velvety and with no visible sugar crystals:
So now I added the 2 tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk:
then the cup of flour – this is just plain flour although I believe it’s also called “All purpose flour”.
At this point the mixture does bind up into a crumbly mixture
but continued mixing for another minute or so binds it all together as the butter does it’s job.
Now it’s time to get the mixture out of mixer and allocate licking rights to a lucky child (or expectant adult).
The chocolate chips are the last ingredient to go into the mixture.
and the whole bowl gets a quick stir with a wooden spoon
Now comes the fun part. With little bit of flour on your palms to help the mixture from sticking, roll small balls – about the size of a large marble or gobstopper and put them onto a baking paper lined tray.
Press down on each ball with a fork dipped in flour (so it doesn’t stick). This gives Kiwi Biscuits their distinctive shape.
Here’s the tray ready for the oven. I cooked them in a fan oven for 17 minutes on 150 degrees Celsius which is about 300 degrees Fahrenheit. (I set the timer for 15 minutes then did them for another two minutes when I thought they weren’t quite golden enough).
You can see that as they baked they spread out and I possibly didn’t leave enough space but I don’t mind the odd one a little misshapen.
Take them off the tray and put them carefully on the cooling rack. At this point they will be very soft so you’ll need to support them with an egg/fish slice. They will harden and cool in about 10 minutes.
Here’s a close-up of the finished item:
This is a crisp, buttery biscuit which is light to taste and excellent dunked in a cup of coffee or hot chocolate – but that’s just my personal preference!
If you decide to give this recipe a go, please comment my blog to let me know how it worked out.
I should say that the original recipe gave as an alternative a substitution of sultanas for the chocolate chips – but who would do such a thing?!
I was so excited at all the new rose babies that appeared from seeds that I’d hybridized that I was unable to bear the thought of tossing any to the compost. Some roses in particular looked small and uninteresting on first flowering.
After a few months however, one rose in particular has really established an identity for itself. It’s now about half a metre tall with masses of gorgeous pink cup-shaped flowers. The flower size has increased from minature sized to patio rose size.
This lesson in giving roses time for the growing before deciding whether to “hold em” or “fold em” has been an interesting one!
Lovely cup shaped white.
