These are so expensive, you'd think nobody really wants to save the world.

OK, this is an old, old idea of mine that I have never been able to act on.

Now, wise men...wiser men than me anyway...advise to, whenever possible, spend your money on investments that will make money on their own. This is the same idea of saving or investing money. I love this idea....it's so simple and logical and so much common sense.

At the Burrow, one of the biggest expenses is our energy bill. It is bigger than our car bills, bigger than insurance bills, bigger than tax bills. It is the second largest expense, behind only the mortgage and food...if I could just get these people to stop eating....

So anything that I could do to dig into the enormousness of that gargantuan bill, it would be awesomesauce. It would make life so much better! I would reduce my "carbon footprint" which I'm pretty damn sure is way, way large.

This is cheaper, but not nearly as effective.

But more important that saving the world in the short term is saving a significant amount of cash.

I'm very interested in using three different kinds of green technologies. Solar panels, wind turbines and geothermal....unless I can figure out how to use hydrogen power....but I've seen the Hindenberg footage...so I'm leery.

I'd love to cover the roofs of both the Burrow proper and the garage...that's a lot of square footage...with solar panels and place turbines at the peaks of each roof...the question is, how much energy would this produce? How much would that reduce the energy bill? How much would it cost to do? How many batteries would I have to buy to hold all of that energy? Is there still legislation that forces local energy companies to buy my excess energy?

The problem is the cost of batteries and the cost of panels. It would take roughly $20K to "Solarize" my house. At $200 savings a month, approximately, it would take a little over eight years to break even...if I could average $200 savings...and the panels are only believed to have a 20 year lifespan...

A few years ago setting up geothermal heating...which has a system planted about 10 feet underground in the backyard...ran about $15K...again with the potential savings vs cost...this seems difficult to justify...

It is incredibly frustrating that all of the things you're supposed to be able to do to save money and the earth seem to cost so much. Take the Chevy Volt...designed to be almost completely electrical, saving on fuel costs, but priced at roughly $10K more than other comparable vehicles.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist...but it sure smells like a conspiracy.

Raymond Kurzweil wrote a book called, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology in 2005.

Is it coming?  Don't hold your breath.

Wikipedia (the bastion of knowledge that it is) states the following about the work.

He describes the singularity as resulting from a combination of three important technologies of the 21st century: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (including artificial intelligence).
Four central postulates of the book are as follows:

1. A technological-evolutionary point known as "the singularity" exists as an achievable goal for humanity.
2. Through a law of accelerating returns, technology is progressing toward the singularity at an exponential rate.
3. The functionality of the human brain is quantifiable in terms of technology that we can build in the near future.
4. Medical advancements make it possible for a significant number of his generation (Baby Boomers) to live long enough for the exponential growth of technology to intersect and surpass the processing of the human brain.

I've read most of this book. It was given to me by my brother, because he thinks I'm a lot smarter than I really am.  Kurzweil targeted an approximate date of 2045 for the human race's ascendancy into the wonderful world of complete and total wonderment.  He believes that this is the time where our computer technology will completely exceed the powers and promise of the human brain, which will lead to incredible technologies, which will include nano-medicines that will prevent diseases and aging and all that bad stuff, leaving all of humanity to concentrate on art and invention and space travel and...dating twins or something like that.

Obviously, I have my concerns.

First and foremost, let me confess that I am nowhere near as smart as the aforementioned Kurzweil.  He's a genius with a history of prophetic truths.  He is one of the main pioneers in text-to-speech technology and all sorts of other stuff.  The dude is really, really smart...and I'm not.  Also, I honestly hope with all my heart that he's right and I'm wrong.  I pray that he's right and I'm wrong...

But I don't see it.  Will humans one day figure out artificial intelligence?  Probably.  That nano-stuff?  Maybe...I'm not sure.  You see, I've read stuff that says that cpu companies like intel and what not are really having issues making faster and smaller processors, which would be needed if all of this were to come to fruition, because they're having issues with the electrical flow colliding or conflicting or whatever they do at a molecular level--just generally not cooperating, I guess--within the processors now.  In other words, if we're having lots of trouble at the current sizes, how are we going to make them smaller?

Furthermore, and this is the gist of my whole issue, the concept of "nano" comes down to robots being able to build smaller robots who will in turn make even smaller robots who will...you see where I'm getting?  And I have yet to see this done at any level.  Do robots make robots now?  Sure, but they can't keep building smaller ones?  Why?  Because "no man can build a pencil." That's why....no robotic builders exist that can build all of the needed parts to build the next smaller robot...let a lone the next, next smaller robot.

Of course this is also the cool idea behind building massive robot armies...and did that really work out for the Separatists?

Maybe this is short sighted...maybe...but to me it seems the next big logical step if we're ever going to reach "The Singularity."  Prove to me you can do it to one order...because once that kind of thing starts, it would probably increase exponentially until we did have "nano" crap and then maybe there's hope...

Seriously, who doesn't need a protocol droid? Especially one who speaks Bochi! Who doesn't need an effeminate butler to follow you around and complain? To tell stories with cool sound effects? To listen to all your problems? To be really shiny?

I mentioned yesterday that one of my crazy ideas was to make a C3PO. Sadly, this was not a crazy idea I had when I was a kid...it was just last year. Even crazier is I have no clue on how to do any portion of such a highly complicated robot....sorry, "Droid."

Now there are lots of tutorials out there about how to create your own R2D2, but nothing about 3PO? Why? Because it would be infinitely harder.

First of all, 3PO talks and walks and stuff.

While it's easy to have R2 appear to speak through his beeps and whistles....they're just beeps and whistles. 3PO is supposed to be fluent in 6 million different forms of communication!

R2 rolls on three wheels in his tripod form, 3PO is supposed to walk on two legs, a problem that modern robotics is still trying to figure out...in fact most have abandoned bipedal walking for other more efficient means of locomotion. Like Johnny Five's trac rollers.

But even beyond that...3PO has to be able to think...the Holy Grail of computing and robotics, Artificial Intelligence. And no matter how many big pc's have been made smart enough to kick the best Chess player's collective asses, not a single one has achieved independent intelligence.

So, of course, I decided I could bypass fifty years of research and without any training in robotics or programming, just do it myself....yeah, it didn't work out. Apparently that kind of knowledge and training and more importantly money is required to do all of these things...and I had none of it. Thankfully, the only money lost on this endeavor was for a couple of books on do it yourself robotics...books that I discovered I'm not really dedicated enough to use...or smart enough, probably...so no real damage was done.

I was pretty bummed, but the world was safe from any premature appearance of SkyNet or armies of terminators...so that was a good thing...I guess.

bur·row (bûr, br)So if you have been living under a rock or somewhere without electricity or Turner Network Television, you may not know about the movie "The Shawshank Redemption."

In it's essence, Shawshank is a prison-break movie. Although, the hopeful tale takes twenty some years in the telling, it is still about a man, who changed how he lived, despite his horrid circumstances, and over twenty years, through incredibly patience, he tunnels his way out of the prison. He does this by nightly tapping away at his cell wall with a tiny rock hammer...this way he manages to tunnel through twenty feet of rock over twenty years...

I love this idea. This is my concept of how I'm going to dig my basement...only faster. Hopefully, it'll only take a couple of years...and I won't have to worry about that pesky warden or the other prisoners putting me in solitary or violating me in ways I don't want to discuss.

This idea seems really simple--and, I'll admit, pretty crazy--but it is wrought with potential problems I'll have to thoroughly understand before I make any real headway on it. Some of the considerations include.

1. How do I keep the house from shaking, shifting or just generally falling down and crushing me?
2. How do I keep out water? I imagine the answer to this is a sump pump, which my house already has, but I may need a supplementary one.
3. What do I do with all the dirt? My initial idea was to use all the dirt as extra insulation on the outer walls of my crawl space...I'm also beginning to wonder, if we have a lot of clay in our soil, if I can't use it to make bricks which I can then use to build walls, etc...I've got a lot to learn on this one.
4. What do I do if I run into large underground rocks? Because I'm not dynamiting anything under my house.
5. Geothermal heating? How does that work? Could I use that to my advantage as I get down deeper? So many questions? There used to be a company around here that did it?

We currently do have a Michigan basement, which for those of you who don't live in Michigan, is more of a hole in the ground under the house that used to be used to store preserves or...bodies, maybe. My family is scared of our basement...but not as scared as they are of the crawlspace... Currently we keep our freezer, furnace and water heater down there and that's about all the room there is. I'd like to eventually have enough room to move our washer and dryer down there, but more importantly, I'd like there to eventually be some real living space down there...

But that's just crazy me...me and my patience and my bucket and hand trowel...maybe someday a pick...who knows...

Could you make one?

I don't think I'm a kook...an inauspicious way of starting a blog, I'm sure...but I have a lot of questions about how people would survive if something horrendous occurred in the world. Be it a major natural disaster or man made event or whatever...if things broke down...if a major societal change happened...how would people survive? Could civilization survive?

I'm not saying I expect any of these things to happen, but as I've thought about the possibilities, I've realized that I am not equipped to live in a world without the internet, without the supermarket, without all the niceties that I and my family have come to expect, to take for granted.  I am not a carpenter or a welder or a doctor or a farmer.  I cannot trap or hunt.  I cannot say what plants are necessarily good to eat, let alone which ones might have any kind of medicinal purposes.

This brings me to the old saying, "No man can make a pencil."

No one man can harvest the wood, mine the lead, somehow stick the lead into the wood...and don't even get me started on erasers...In other words, the world has become so intrinsically specialized that only a rare few will know how to survive in the kind of world many fear may come some day.

I work in IT, which I think has bred in me a constant desire to actually SEE some tangible evidence of having done real work every day. Resetting people's passwords and making sure filesystems don't get too full are not exactly noble enterprises in my book.

But sadly, it's the best paying job I can find and I have a wife and three kids to feed, not to mention an old house with a large payment and a lot that needs to be done with it...so I reset passwords....but...for those same reasons....I have to learn to be more independent, more...useful.

So on this site, named for the nickname given to our aging home, I will start to learn these things...cause I have lots of questions:

What plants are edible?
What plants have medicinal purposes?
How would I make rope?
What are the best ways to get clean water?
How do you make cloth for clothing?
How do you harvest yeast?
How would I make flour?
How would I make bread?
How do you brew beer or distill liquors?
How do you make a brick?
How would I make mortar so that I could build with bricks?
How do you make paper?
How do you clean a fish?  How do you clean an animal?
How do you set up snares and traps?
What is the most efficient way to build a fire?
Would it be worthwhile to explore solar, thermal, hydro or wind power?

And many, many more...all with an eye toward being self-sufficient, if not just downright "useful."  And not because I'm counting down to the end of the world, but more so that I can SEE the fruits of my labors and feel safe in my independence.

And I'll blog about what I've learned so that you can be too.