DIY Bike Design
posted by jim | February 28, 2009
Okay, you’re the type who sees a bike and needs to change it! Take a look at this blog on all things bike design @ bicycledesign.blogspot. Find others showing off their passion doing the same.
DIY Bike Repair & Bike Tools
posted by jim | February 28, 2009
Need to work on your bike? Park Tools offers a bunch of cool information on repairing or upgrading your own bike. There tools and these guides might even give you courage to try something you haven’t done before-they did me.
Go to their Tool List and choose from: the essential, beginner repairs, intermediate, or advanced. It’s not as user friendly as it could be. You will have to visit a couple of pages and closely for their guides, but it’s well worth the effort.
Utopian Economics Vocabulary
posted by jim | February 27, 2009
Asceticism
The adjective “ascetic” derives from the ancient Greek term ask?sis (practice, training or exercise). Originally associated with any form of disciplined practice, the term ascetic has come to mean anyone who practices a renunciation of worldly pursuits to achieve higher intellectual and spiritual goals. Via Wikipedia
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the manner of life, practices, or principles of an ascetic. |
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the doctrine that a person can attain a high spiritual and moral state by practicing self-denial, self-mortification, and the like. |
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3. |
rigorous self-denial; extreme abstinence; austerity. |
Via Definition.com
Bio-Survival Tickets (see also Money)
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed “anomie” or “alienation” or “existential anguish” about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call “money.”
Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn’t look for survival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. “You can’t live without money,” as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.
Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or even ostracism, were sufficient punishments to enforce tribal conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as Shakespeare’s day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal (“Banished!”cries Romeo, “the damned use that word in Hell!”)
In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security; exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio0security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror. -Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising p. 30
Convivial Society
In a society in which power-both political and physical-is bounded and spread by political decision there is place not only for a new flowering of products and characters, but also for a variety in forms of governance. Certainly, new tools would provide new options. Convivial tools rule out certain levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike. But the adoption of a convivial mode of production does not of itself mean that one specific form of government would be more fitting than another, nor does it rule out a world federation, or agreements between nation-states, or communes, or many of the most traditional forms of governance. I restrict myself to the description of basic structural criteria within which the retooling of society can be achieved…
As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom.
At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional élite. They transfer power to politicians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver this future. They accept a growing range of power levels in society when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs. Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares…
The conditions for convivial work are structural arrangements that make possible the just distribution of unprecedented power. A postindustrial society must and can be so constructed that no one person’s ability to express him- or herself in work will require as a condition the enforced labor or the enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another.\-Ivan Illich
Convivial Tools
Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
Hand tools are those which adapt man’s metabolic energy to a specific task. They can be multipurpose, like some primitive hammers or good modern pocket knives, or again they can be highly specific in design such as spindles, looms, or pedal-driven sewing machines, and dentists’ drills. They can also be complex such as a transportation system built to get the most in mobility out of human energy-for instance, a bicycle system composed of a series of man-powered vehicles, such as pushcarts and three-wheel rickshas, with a corresponding road system equipped with repair stations and perhaps even covered roadways. Hand tools are mere transducers of the energy generated by man’s extremities and fed by the intake of air and of nourishment.
Power tools are moved, at least partially, by energy converted outside the human body. Some of them act as amplifiers of human energy: the oxen pull the plow, but man works with the oxen-the result is obtained by pooling the powers of beast and man. Power saws and motor pulleys are used in the same fashion. On the other hand, the energy used to steer a jet plane has ceased to be a significant fraction of its power output. The pilot is reduced to a mere operator guided by data which a computer digests for him. The machine needs him for lack of a better computer; or he is in the cockpit because the social control of unions over airplanes imposes his presence. Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
Some institutions are structurally convivial tools. The telephone is an example. Anybody can dial the person of his choice if he can afford a coin…
At its best the library is the prototype of a convivial tool. Repositories for other learning tools can be organized on its model, expanding access to tapes, pictures, records, and very simple labs filled with the same scientific instruments with which most of the major breakthroughs of the last century were made.
Dematerialization- (see also ephemeralization) This is a twist on the idea of ephemeralization. Think of being able to download the plans for the electric car you want and being able to “print” it out. Manufacturers don’t produce products, but produce reproducible (and we hope, hackible) plans. Imagine a whole collaborative community that usurps corporate producers just as there is open software and may be made appropriate (hacked), products may become open and appropriate (see appropriate technology). More practical to today, you can print out non-material plans for patterns of clothing, furniture, etc. or download music, movies, pictures, and produce or play them where you need them. Today there are 3-D printers that can produce 3 dimensional objects.
Buckminster Fuller coined the word ephemralization. He described it this way: “The principle of ephemeralization shows we can accomplish more and more functionality with less and less energy, material and time investment, “we are now able to do so much with so little that we can provide for the basic needs of 100% of humanity without disadvantaging anyone.” Another more common way of stating it is “doing more with less” or at least doing the same with less. The compact fluorescent bulb uses less energy than the conventional light bulb, the personal computer uses less material and has more power than the original room load of processors that used to crunch the numbers—that’s not to say this process doesn’t have its own unintended consequences, but that’s another story.
“Ephemeralization, which constantly does more with visibly less–as does, for instance, the one-quarter-ton communications satellite outperform 150,000 tons of transoceanic cables–has not as yet been formally isolated, recognized, and discussed in print as such by any economists. Until economists recognize it, ephemeraliztion cannot be popularly comprehended and be adopted in public policy formulations.” -Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivian
Malthusian Catastrophe- Thomas Malthus (1766-1834).
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote and had published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Essentially, Malthus attempted to suggest that human population growth outstrips food production. The catastrophe occurs when population collapses. Malthus’ ideas were an important influence on Charles Darwin’s theories of Evolution. Malthus wrote in response to certain Utopian writers.
Money-
A medium of exchange is a good which people acquire neither for their own consumption nor for employment in their own production activities, but with the intention of exchanging it at a later date against those goods which they want to use either for consumption or for production. Money is a medium of exchange. It is the most marketable good which people acquire because they want to offer it in later acts of interpersonal exchange. Money is the thing which serves as the generally accepted and commonly used medium of exchange. This is its only function. All the other functions which people ascribe to money are merely particular aspects of its primary and sole function, that of a medium of exchange.
Prosuming
During the First Wave most people consumed what they themselves produced. They were neither producers nor consumers in the usual sense. They were instead what might be called “prosumers”…A more revealing way of thinking about the economy, therefore, is to think of it as having two sectors. Sector A comprises all that unpaid work done directly by people for themselves, their families, or their communities. Sector B comprises all the production of goods or services for sale or swap through the exchange network or market…the production of goods and services for the market mushroomed to such an extent that Second Wave economists virtually forgot the existence of Sector A. The very word “economy” was defined to exclude all forms of work or production not intended for the market, and the prosumer became invisible. This meant, for example all that all the cleaning, scrubbing, child-rearing, the community organizing, was contemptuously dismissed as “non-economic,”…prosuming involves the “de-marketization” of at least certain activities and therefore a sharply altered role for the market in society. –Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave p. 252-262
Radical Monopoly
[T]ools can also be made overefficient…They can upset the relationship between what people need to do by themselves and what they need to obtain ready-made. In this second dimension overefficient production results in radical monopoly…By radical monopoly I mean a kind of dominance by one product that goes far beyond what the concept of monopoly usually implies. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition. Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image—practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river traffic in Thailand. That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly. What cars do to people by virtue of this radical monopoly is quite distinct from and independent of what they do by burning gasoline that could be transformed into food in a crowded world. It is also distinct from automotive manslaughter. Of course cars burn gasoline that could be used to make food. Of course they are dangerous and costly. But the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way. Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake. This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man’s innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel. –Ivan Illich
DIY Downloadable Sandals from Old Tires
posted by jim | February 27, 2009
Ready to Roll
DIY New Clothes from Old Materials
posted by jim | February 26, 2009
Downloadable underwear from old T-shirts
Download the pattern and turn your old T-shirts into underwear. The pattern comes in jockey or boxer style. More DIY clothing ideas @ SuperNaturale.
Household- DIY Design Ideas
posted by jim | February 23, 2009
Okay, you’ve scored that end table or that funky wutz-it from Freecycle or Craigslist, but it’s not quite as perky or fitting in with the rest of your décor as you originally planned? Breathe some life into it or get some redesign ideas with re-nest: abundant design from new homes, apartment therapy for your hip apartment, or ohdeedoh: home. design. children for ideas for your Nursery or Kids Rooms, the kitchen. inspiring cooks. nourishing homes, unplggd: smarter homes. fewer wires. You’ll find some wonderful ideas to get lost in all day and loads of DIY stuff.
From How to makeover your whole home and recycle @ re-nest.
The Electronic Cottage
posted by martyz | February 20, 2009
So maybe this isn’t exactly what Alvin Toffler had in mind when he spoke of the Electronic Cottage (or maybe it was). You can build these yourselves for less than half the price AND they’re mobile. This isn’t the smallest house that Tumbleweed Houses makes and they do make larger ones, but just consider the ephemeralization possibilities here: imagine a laptop on that desk; next to it an iPhone; and Amazon’s Kindle next to that; all vacuumed up by your Roomba, iRobot : the world at your fingertips: the Electronic Nomad. Of course this scenario may interest you even if you don’t like the electronics. Small is beautiful, simple. There are many Synergies to having a smaller house: no—or a tiny—mortgage; less stuff to electrify-solar is cheaper to use and might be all you need. Less cubic space to heat and cool, less to hold you down and away from what you really love doing. And, okay, here is where I get totally, Electronically Utopian—gardens using robots to pump out beautiful organic veggies. I don’t mean walking, talking droids hoeing and raking, I mean, water and pest monitoring robots that could easily work on a small scale in a small space. The (now) annual Solar Decathlon in Washington D.C. is both an inspiration and a fount of ideas for me on small homes and energy efficient spaces and appliances. Click on them to find out information.
Hello world!
posted by martyz | February 19, 2009
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