Yeah, they have badly linked documentation from there. Most of their plans are on their wiki, ex: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Power_Cube_v15.6
. The plans assume you have quite a varied set of equipment at hand already, know welding, etc. Youtube searches also help.
This immediately reminded me of Yvon Chouinard quote from 180 Degrees South documentary:
"Taking a trip for six months, you get in the rhythm of it. It feels like you can go on forever doing that. Climbing Everest is the ultimate and the opposite of that. Because you get these high-powered plastic surgeons and CEOs, and you know, they pay $80,000 and have Sherpas put the ladders in place and 8,000 feet of fixed ropes and you get to the camp and you don’t even have to lay out your sleeping bag. It’s already laid out with a chocolate mint on the top. The whole purpose of planning something like Everest is to effect some sort of spiritual and physical gain and if you compromise the process, you’re an asshole when you start out and you’re an asshole when you get back.”
Reminds me of a habit I have which made me end up on tops of mountains occasionally. I guess the algorithm can be called "observable ascent":
1. Look around
2. Find a relatively close high spot that is visible
3. Plan and climb on top of it
4. From the peak, find the next highest spot visible
5. Repeat
Now, the history lesson, all this stuff feels fairly new.
It feels like it's younger than you are.
Here's the history of it.
Vapnik immigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in about 1991.
Nobody ever heard of this stuff before he immigrated.
He actually had done this work on the basic support vector idea in his Ph.D. thesis at Moscow University in the early '60s.
But it wasn't possible for him to do anything with it, because they didn't have any computers they could try anything out with.
So he spent the next 25 years at some oncology institute in the Soviet Union doing applications.
Somebody from Bell Labs discovers him, invites him over to the United States where, subsequently, he decides to immigrate.
In 1992, or thereabouts, Vapnik submits three papers to NIPS, the Neural Information Processing Systems journal.
All of them were rejected.
He's still sore about it, but it's motivating.
So around 1992, 1993, Bell Labs was interested in hand-written character recognition and in neural nets.
Vapnik thinks that neural nets-- what would be a good word to use?
I can think of the vernacular, but he thinks that they're not very good.
So he bets a colleague a good dinner that support vector machines will eventually do better at handwriting recognition then neural nets.
And it's a dinner bet, right?
It's not that big of deal.
But as Napoleon said, it's amazing what a soldier will do for a bit of ribbon.
So that makes colleague, who's working on this problem with handwritten recognition, decides to try a support vector machine with a kernel, in which n equals 2, just slightly nonlinear, works like a charm.
Was this the first time anybody tried a kernel?
Vapnik actually had the idea in his thesis but never though it was very important.
As soon as it was shown to work in the early '90s on the problem handwriting recognition, Vapnik resuscitated the idea of the kernel, began to develop it, and became an essential part of the whole approach of using support vector machines.
So the main point about this is that it was 30 years in between the concept and anybody ever hearing about it.
It was 30 years between Vapnik's understanding of kernels and his appreciation of their importance.
And that's the way things often go, great ideas followed by long periods of nothing happening, followed by an epiphanous moment when the original idea seemed to have great power with just a little bit of a twist.
And then, the world never looks back.
And Vapnik, who nobody ever heard of until the early '90s, becomes famous for something that everybody knows about today who does machine learning.
It is _the_ book on knots, although it does miss knots invented later in the 20th century, like the Zeppelin bend. I was amazed to learn that it was used as a reference book by mathematical topologists. They will refer to a bend in space as Ashley#1024 for example, since all the knots in the book are numbered in a referential fashion.
And after the internet age, when the facts hit the people who were not even aware of it went "Oh shit, did our military really do this to those people?". If it wasn't for internet, most Turks would stay ignorant of the military power abuse in the Southeast, the way a regular US citizen didn't hear about Guantanamo Bay. So what is your point? Should Turkey degenerate more or should Turkey try to improve? If Turkey cannot improve, the few in power will abuse it, and this time even more people will suffer.
Orwellian control of the internet will not make power abuse go away, it will increase it.
Unfortunately they are not roughly equivalent. A solid shell or a ring around a star is not a Dyson sphere. The correct Dyson sphere is composed of many separate orbiting elements. A solid shell or semi-shell is unstable and is bound to collide with the star or just wander away. Yes, the Ringworld is unstable. This was one of Niven's mistakes and misunderstanding of Dyson spheres.
Looking at the orbit of the moon which does figure-8s through the hole in the middle, isn't it conceivable that a sun can orbit that same way? Or rather, the two will orbit each other in a strange non-trivial way.
It would have to be a very small sun tough in order to fit trough the hole and not burn the planet to a crisp. So we arrived at the Discworld, where the elephants carrying the world sometimes have to lift their legs to let the sun pass.
Such a small star would probably have to be kept burning artificially, as the smallest mass still allowing nuclear fusion is around 80 times the mass of Jupiter.
The ringworld has a radius approximately that of the radius of the orbit of earth. A quite large sun could fit easily through such a 'toroidal planet.'
