The Cool Project

Exciting News, I’ve been asked to do tech reviews for the Ocean Foundation and will be putting it all on the website!

Why We Need Technology: Life in the Villages.

Not to long ago our ancestors were, using a more modern expression, hunter-gatherers.  Hunter-gatherer means that our ancestors either hunted their food or gathered it from the surrounding area.  Essentially our ancestors were hunter-foragers.  There were no endless fields with perfect rows of corn or big ranches with thousands of cows being readied for slaughter; We did things differently back in the day- we crept through the bush until we found the lone bull or the bushel of strawberries.  Our hunter-gatherer existence did something incredibly important: it limited our population growth.  Without large populations disease like the flu weren’t rampant or widespread because of low population densities and societies were relatively egalitarian because government structures were not necessary as there was no giant food production, distribution, and resulting trading system to monitor and tax.

Life was definitely more simple, but it could definitely be harder as well.  Most people didn’t reach 40, food shortages and cold fronts posed serious threats and a common cold could be a killer.  Essentially, like all life is, the hunter-gatherer existence was a give-and-take existence.  People got the chance to enjoy simple living with close-knit communities and meaningful relationships and a large amount of independence from a formal government but in exchange were susceptible to the will of nature, disease, and maybe even a bit of cabin fever.

But then somebody decided to plant a seed and everything changed.  Fields of food meant a larger population because there was less of a worry of a food shortage.  With more food and it become specialized other trades like a blacksmith or cobbler could be born because instead of spending time foraging and hunting people could purchase their food and spend their time building and developing new things.  The combination of craftsmanship (which spawned innovation) and a lot of food led to cities and high population densities.  High population densities meant greater communication of ideas, knowledge and education but it also meant the rapid spread of disease and a decline in community.  As I mentioned with more food meant government which in turn led to a great divide in wealth, corruption, and favoritism.  The time of the egalitarian society was disappearing.

Eventually with all this free time, the industrial revolution was born which led to greater population densities and eventually medicine.  Medicine became the answer to the disease that now effected high population densities.  With medicine life expectancies rose and with all the effects of planting a seed in the ground, the quality of life drastically increased, some would believe.  There was less of a worry about health, food, and personal freedom, but a greater burden of social climbing, getting ahead, and what society would call a “great achievement.”  Today, people spend to much time sitting at their desks away from their families, obesity is rampant because of the ability to lead a sedentary life style, and communities are dissolving with the greater push for individuality and less community growth and achievement.  But with technology we’ve been able to answer the problems of the sedentary lifestyle, build online communities, and working from home.  But this is not the technology that TCP promotes, we do not believe that these problems should be solved with technology, but we do believe technology is necessary for many, many things.

Last summer I went to Kenya and Ethiopia for a two and a half week service trip.  What saw me astounded me, both for good and for bad.  But I’m an optimist so lets look at the good first.  I have never met happier people in my whole life than when I was in Kenya and Ethiopia.  I repeat, I never met anyone happier than the people I met in Kenya and Ethiopia.  These were people who didn’t have cellphones, laptops, cameras, espresso makers, cars, running water, heat, or electricity and the hundreds of other modern conveniences we all seize upon in the developed world.  What these people did have,  I realized over time and with much observation, were incredibly tight-knit communities and families with few worries about social climbing, social status, and the accumulation of material goods.  Happiness and fulfillment came from the few things they did have and the little things in life like kicking a homemade soccer ball around or helping to milk the cows or perhaps mending the roof of a hut, or talking to clearly confused and shocked white people like myself.  I was recently reading a book that found a study that showed the happiness levels of those from Masai villages in Kenya vs the happiness of Americans was the same and sometimes higher*.  Please don’t think I’m playing martyr for a technological relapse spawning hundreds of years, I am most certainly not, I am simply laying out fact and observations.

The negative must be addressed as well.  The people we visited were in constant fear of starving or losing their crops to the drought or to wildlife foraging, they had no access to medicine because of a lack of money, access, and a ability to travel.  Women who cooked for us in their huts were susceptible to multiple lung diseases because of poor ventilation and if anyone needed to get anywhere that wasn’t in the village it required a multi-day walks or catching rides miles away from the villages.  Water was filthy and the villagers had no way to clean it.  Life in the villages was beautiful and horrible.  Beautiful because the people gained happiness and fulfillment and enjoyment from the most simple things in life, without the help of modern technological conveniences, but life was horrible because I saw problems that could be fixed with a  very simple application of modern technology.  The cities were worse.  The cities were filthy, disease infected place with no modern public services needed to get rid of them.  The largest slum in Africa, Kibera, located in Nairobi, Kenya and home to over a million people was a horrible place.  No running water or electricity, close quarters, human feces everywhere, and naked toddlers running around.  Kibera was a place trying to live in the modern world but with the access to technology of the stone age, the two do not comply.  Africa is a beautiful place, but it’s a horrible place as well.  Africa is a place of Give and take.

So the point of that whole story was to show how we, as human beings, living the way we choose to live with big populations, need technology.  We need technology to heal disease, to grow enough food, to get things done efficiently, and to connect people with ideas, information, and other people.  These 4 categories are where technology are needed for humans to thrive and be happy.  Those are the 4 reasons I started TCP.  I wanted to promote technology that could change the world for the better, to make us happier and worry free but not the excessive amount that most of us have in the developed world.  We all can be happier, in the developing and the developed world, we just need to choose what technology we need and leave the rest alone.  Studies have shown that the average level of happiness an American feels is going down and rates of depression and anxiety are going up.  Clearly our excess hasn’t done much for us in terms of putting a smile on our faces, so lets simplify things.  With food, health, efficiency, and connective technology, we can make the world a better place, and a happier one to boot.  TCP wants to boost the awareness and use of these necessary technologies and put a bigger smile on every one’s face.

Much Love,

Andrew

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Windbelts: “Harder Problems Make for Better Inventions.” Apparently So.

So, recently a “Quickie” was written about “windbelt technology.”  Here is the full-blown review of the amazing, next-gen wind technology.  Here’s a quick recap of the quickie; a windbelt  creates energy by using the wind to create vibrations which in turn moves a magnet that bounces between metal coils.

Here are the specifics.  A Windbelt looks like a thick, giant, and cut rubber band that is separated by a metal strip by about an inch and has been pulled taut.  Each end is being pinched by a metal box.

The windbelt acts much like anything else that is vibrating- A stationary object bends back and forth with its ends unmoving (relative to the bend in the curve).  In the case of the windbelt, the vibration relies on a natural, reoccurring, and virtually endless commodity: wind.

But getting into specifics, how does the windbelt work?  Wind blows across the “bow” and begins to vibrate back and forth because of the tension of the bow and the force of the wind.  The vibration moves a magnet that bounces between copper wires and creates an electric current that feeds through wires coming out of the end of the windbelt that contains the magnet.

A small windbelt (a few inches to a few feet) generates enough energy to power a light bulb or a radio or a small electronic appliance, and this is why they are so important.  A windbelt, unlike most wind technology, does not rely on a turbine.  A turbine (imagine a fan) is much more inefficient than a vibrating band is in terms of energy generation at this scale.  Windbelts can be scaled from a miniature size to power small electronics to much larger to power, hypothetically, a house.

Windbelts are also amazing because, unlike a wind turbine, (also known as a windmill) the ability to integrate a windbelt into everyday infrastructure has innumerable possibilities.

Different types of Windbelts

Imagine a railing.  The planks that hold the railings up could be replaced with custom-sized windbelts.  Or what about screen doors?  The screens could be replaced with micro-windbelts; the possibilities are truly limitless and in a way that turbines could never find the same level of seamless integration.

Lastly, as I was wondering when I heard about this great piece of technology, who the hell came up with it?  Well, his name is Shawn Frayne, and he’s doing amazing things.  Frayne developed Windbelt technology to fulfill the electrical needs of  rural dwellers in Haiti.  Microturbines didn’t exist and the material needed to build such small turbines would have been incredibly expensive.

So what did Frayne do? Nothing major, just invented a brand new type of wind energy generation technology more efficient then turbines (at least on a small scale) and less expensive to build either.

So there you have it, windbelt technology, check out Frayne’s company Humdinger Wind Energy as well as Haddock Invention.