Missing Technology: Tools for Digital Film Making

Film making is not something you can do all by yourself.  Sure, you can set up a tripod and then stand in front of it.  But if you want actual camera work, and the ability to move within a scene, you need, at absolute minimum, two people.  

What I'd like to see developed is a cheap, programmable tilt-and-pan head for attaching a camera to a tripod.  Something that can produce smooth, perfectly identical camera motions time and again.  It would have to be rather silent, vibration free, and very smooth.  Shots would be programmed with a laptop inside of a 3D virtual environment.  You could chain shots together and, using a remote, have the camera begin the next motion only when you're ready.  

Even better (but more difficult to do) would be to teach the pan-and-tilt head right there in the field exactly what movements you wanted it to reproduce.

Such a system should also have control over the zoom and, preferably, the focus of the camera. This would have to be handled after-the-fact through firmware updates from the more serious camera companies.  It could be administered via the camera's own remote control.  

You could use a projected laser line to define the edges of the shot box.  Because laser light would reflect and possibly polute the shot, you'd want to use it only to rehearse blocking.  

A programmable tilt and pan head would allow you do do complex compositing shot.  You'd just run the same movements on your scenery, or in your 3D CG program, as you did on your green-screen-backdropped actor.  

And why stop there?  Why not have a programmable track system too, based (perhaps) on model train tracks.  You'd need to create a very finely-tuned locomotive.  You'd then put the tracks on specially built workhorses (taller than average).  

Crane shots?  Not exactly.  But a system that simply raises and lowers the aforementioned pan-and-tilt head on a system of smoothly-moving pulleys.  Keep in mind, there is no reason to expect to need extremely long shots with many degrees of motion in them.  Especially on a programmed system, shots should be kept short.  Push the envelope in later developments, perhaps.

I've thought about this as well:  if you could build a sufficiently smooth programmable pan-and-tilt head, why not give it the ability to track a target?  The actor would wear a beacon of some sort.  I don't think that would work all that well.  It wouldn't be able to intelligently anticipate the actor's motion.  It would feel rather artificial.  

How cheap would it need to be to acheive maximum profitability?  $399.  Anyone with a digital camcorder has proven that they can afford at least this much, if not more, at some point in the past.  They are not likely to covet a system that costs more than their camera did.  It needs to be cheap enough that they can purchase it without feeling that they alread need it.  In other words, it should be sold as a toy, not as a tool.  That's not to say that it shouldn't be an effective tool.  It has to be.  It must be presented in the most professional manner possible.  

The Snowball Effect

Time to take a break from forecasting the future of advertising.  

Totally unrelated.

How to build a really big snow wheel.

Start by making a regular snowball.  This will be the seed, or nucleus around which the snow wheel will form.  Make it as large as possile, as long as it's round.  Larger is heavier.  Be realistic.  Now, drive an eight foot long, four-inch diameter PVC pipe through the center.  This is your axel.  Put a rope through the axel.  More on why later.  

Put one person on each side of the axel (only one- they need to be able to move aside if the wheel falls) and two or three people behind the snowball.  Start rolling in onl

y one axis.  The snow wheel's width will never get to be much more than the diameter of the original nucleus.  Go downhill if you can.  If flat ground (an athletic field, for instance) is all that's available, be prepared for a workout.  

As you proceed, you will inevitably find that the wheel gets lopsided.  Periodically stop and reshape for roundness.  As perfect as possile.  Attach a short rope to the axel and use it to measure the radius.  Carve with long knives, spatulas.  Patch the gaps.  Keeping it round will make all the difference later on.  Don't let it get lopsided side-to-side either.  It will fall over and kill someone.  Or break their legs.  Or kill them.  

Once it gets too heavy to push, harness up as many more worker ants as you need using the rope running through the axel.  Be creative!

Long after the snow on the ground has melted, you'll have a monument to your snow-based engineering skills.  

The 100% Subjective Omni-Documentary

There's a movie I've wanted to make for a while.  Nothing like anything anyone's ever dared to do.  And for good reason.  Working title: 70,000.  

*** I'm listening to this album at the moment: http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix ***

I've noticed that if I take a stream of digital images and show them at a rate of about eight per second, that's more than enough time to "see" individual images.  What's interesting is that I can go through the same images, at this speed, and see different images every time.  It's fast enough that not every image is being seen.  

What I'd like to do is collect 70,000 images and turn them into a movie-length slideshow, non-stop slideshow (about 2:26 long).  The idea is that everyone would see the movie differently.

It would be a mental marathon.  It would totally exhaust a large percentage of people.  I believe some people would be able to be inspired by it, get ideas from it, and that they could watch it countless times without seeing the same thing twice.  

As a DVD, or Blu-Ray it would have a number of different soundtracks.  It could also be sped up or slowed down.  

From time to time you'd slow the relentless rate and pause on a single image.  Or, you might have several frames from a video.  Enough to capture a tiny moment of motion.  

What kind of images would it contain?  Overall, it would be an homage to existence.  It would

 consist of simple images primarily- things you can grasp quickly.  It would have art work as well as photography.  It would have 

a lot of portraits in it.  It would take you in many directions at once, allowing your mind to pick up on any number of themes at will.  For instance, it would have an almost equal number of male and female portraits, but different people would see more men, or more women, depending on a number of factors- expectation, for instance.

The first challenge is a legal one.  Creative Commons licences would  make things easier.  The best way to proceed would be to include attribution and license information on the image itself.  That way, you could arrange them in any order.  

The next challenge is one of raw manhours.  To find 100 good images a day would be a monumental task- a full time job.  Even then, it would take two years just to collect the images- much less get them ready for presentation.  A team of twenty, each preparing twenty images a day (volunteer, part-time labor- get paid later) would take could bring the gathering time to

 about seven months (including weekends and down days).  

If I get twenty volunteers- or even half that- I'll start.  Your portion of the profits from the DVD sales will reflect the number of hours you spent on the project divided by the total number of hours to complete.  

By the way, eight/second means that, at 24 frames per second, each image would be on screen for three frames.  That allows for a two-frame crossfade with the image that preceeds and follows.  

It would go something like this for images A, B, and C: 

Frame #     1         2         3        4        5        6        7 

Image         A        A         B       B        B        C        C

%                100    80       80     100    80      80     100

Or, from the perspective of a single image (B):

Frame #     1         2         3        4        5        6        7 

Image         B        B         B        B        B        B        B

%                 0        20     80     100     80      20       0

In other words, an image would start as 20% visible while the previous image was 80%.  In the next frame, the proportions would be reversed.  80% while the previous image was now 20% visible.  In the next frame, the image would be 100% visible.  Then the fade into the next image would start in the next frame.  

The Advertising Revolution: How to "Save" Spam

And by "save" I mean "kill."  And by "kill" I mean change it into something that actually works.  For the reader, not for the reprehensible people that engage in unsolicited sending in the first place.  

I won't go into why.  Let's skip to what.  The why will provide itself.

Imagine that the advertising revolution is underway.  You no longer are forced to see ads- on TV, on the internet, even in e-print- for things that simply don't interest you.  Ads are subject to personalized feedback.  Your current interests are respected.  Branding-across-demographics is no longer necessary.  You are now addressed as an individual.  Meanwhile, your spam folder is still full of garbage.  So let's clean it up, once and for all.  Well, not exactly.  

Imagine that every time anyone sent an email to someone they didn't already know, and who didn't already know them (the people in your address book), they had to pay a few pennies in postage. On email.  Postage is charged at two points.  Half is charged for the simple act of sending.  Half is charged if the receiver opts to open the email.  The reader can also opt to refund the charge.  You like receiving monthly specials from REI?  Don't change them for the privilege of sending them to you.  

The first charge acts as a disincentive to fill the world's inboxes and spam folders with offensive, excessive amounts of garbage.  Part of that change goes directly to the email recipient.  You get a lot of spam?  You also get a lot of pennies.  Another, very small part goes to pay for the service.

The second charge is applied when you open the email.   It is also a disincentive to the would-be spammer to send ineffective email.  But it is also an incentive for the recipient to give that spam a change.  Have a few seconds to spare?  Why not earn a few cents checking out the ads you've been sent.  The assumption, of course, is that if the recipient looks at the email, even for a second, the sender has recieved meaningful exposure.  Certainly better than being lost in a spam folder, resented, mistrusted.  Everyone knows you don't follow links in spam, right?  (DON'T FOLLOW LINKS IN SPAM).   

What happens if someone is sending you personal email for the first time? Well, they have the option of charging you postage, just like any spammer.  However, if you respond directly to them at the email they used to send to you, they are automatically refunded.  After that, you must actively choose to change them if you ever want to reverse the situation.  Responding to them refunds the last several charges, or all charges in the past month, or week.  Some length of time.

This would not replace spam filters.  You would still be able to block unwanted email.  You would never be forced to see something you didn't want to.  

Why such a service wouldn't work.  

Who could you trust to administer such a system?  Even if they couldn't see your mail, they would have a record of what went where.  If they were publically traded, they could be bought out and exploited.  A private company would be just as susceptible.  Even a government-regulated service would be subject to iffyness.  

It would be impossible to send completely anonymous email.  You would have to register your email with the service in order to get paid.  

So, the service would need to be optional.  

If you're a private individual that wants to be able to email anyone without a money trail attached, you'd be allowed to do so.  As long as you "paid" with a captcha.  The receiver wouldn't get paid any postage for the inconvenience of reading the email you sent them.  And they'd know it.  The email would be labeled as "anonymously sent" or "postage withheld."  If it turned out to be a piece of traditional, obnoxious spam, it would still be subject to traditional filtering.  The sender would have to solve a captcha for every piece of anonymous email.   

It would still be possible to send millions of emails to millions of people you don't know.  But you'd have to pay for the right to waste their time.  And you'd have to pay the recipient directly. You'd have to think long and hard about whether it was worth the expense.  Not just to send, but to be read.   The quality and legitimacy of spam would rise accordingly.  It would also become far, far less common.  

It would still be possible to send anonymous email to anyone.  You just couldn't do it quickly.  And they'd know it was anonymous.  They'd have the option of rejecting it for that reason, to even block it permanently.  

Let's examine a common scenario.    You receive an obnoxious forward from someone you don't know that well.  Charge them.  You take some of the money they earned from reading spam in their own inbox.  They start to notice that they're losing money.  

How do you administer the system?  For web based email, it's done in server side software.  For HDD-resident email software, it's a download.

Would anyone be exempt from being charged for sending mass emails?  Would the government be able to send email for free?  Perhaps.

Email is a currently a weak system.  Spam is that weakness.  Solve spam and the utility of email will be elevated.  Marginally respectible companies willing to spend money on printing and posting junk mail will have a cost effective alternative.  Trees will survive.  

The system will involve an increase in web traffic.  An extra two messages must be sent before an email can reach your inbox.  One confirming that the sender can afford to send, one subtracting the postage.  Potentially, afterwards, there would be another message.  The total number of messages sent would multiply by four.  But there would actually be a net gain in efficiency because spam volume would go down.    

Salvation for Magazines: The Future of eReader Design

Back to thinking about advertising.

In this post I will ellaborate on an idea I mentioned here.

I subscribe to exactly two magazines.  Wired and Time.  If I were to subcribe to a third, I'd probably go with Popular Mechanics.  Ask me about a fourth and a fifth, and I might not know what to say.  I'm a man of many interests, but few of those interests are expressed in a desire to subscribe to a magazine on the subject.  Instead, the internet is all I need.  Or is that the only way the magazine market, as it currently exists, allows me to think?  

Perhaps there are dozens of magazines that, if I had them within reach, I'd give them a meaningful share of my time.  Biblical Archeological Review, New Scientist, the Economist, Kitplanes, Backpacker, Cinefex... oh, the list could be really very long, if I were willing to shell out.  I'm casually, and perhaps convertibly, interested in plenty of magazines.  I'm not willing to pay any amount of money for 100% of what I can get a reasonable 30 or 40% for free elsewhere. Or at least feel that I am.  In reality, I know there's no replacement for paid writing.  

Unfortunately, there are more and more people that feel this way.  Many venerable, once-essential magazines are gradually dying off.  New magazines arise only by appealing to a broad, shallow interest.  Perhaps correlationally, just as the technology for reaching any conceivable microniche is coming into its own, the previous technology (print) is flattening into grocery store subjects (decorating, fashion, hot rods, guns, and body building).  

I could go on and on about the problem.  I could expound at length on how we got here.  But I'm ready to talk about the solution.

E-readers, like Kindle, are being designed wrong in that they ignore one of the most important ways that writers get paid- not through royalties, but through ad revunue.  They are designed for books.

So I'm about to describe the e-reader of the future.  The one that saves the magazine industry from inevitalbe information age demise.  

The next e-reader must have two screens, preferably a dual-mode, two-layer display: low energy epaper and color OLCD.  One page for text, one for a full-page ad that is present while you read the text.  Color is essential for simulating a vast number of books, not just magazines. A dual-mode display would vastly broaden the available book market at the same time. Textbooks require color.  E-readers for children must have color.  A two-page spread is essential for some kinds of information, some kinds of illustrations.  

It will cost more, but that's of no concern.  A two-screen, dual-mode e-reader can can be sold for close-to, or less than cost as long as a profit sharing arrangement exists in which advertising revenue is added to lost profits.  And the potential revenue is enormous.   

Advertising on such devices should be subject to a voluntary feedback model like the one I described in an earlier post.   People appreciate the ads in magazines.  Don't feel shy about putting ads in front of people- as long as those ads are for things your readers are interested in.  

New e-readers should always have wireless capability, netbook capabilities, but must be usable far from any available network.  They should operate in a low-power, black-and-white mode.  If you are interested in an ad, you simply tap it to see the full-color version.  Ads should be allowed to animate, or force you to see full color, only during the first few seconds after "turning the page."  I mean one to three seconds max.  Constantly moving ads are annoying and distracting. You should be able to click on an ad- all the way through to a purchase decision- without losing your place in the article you're reading.  The ad page is also a browser, or an Adobe AIR interactive document, or an order form.

Naturally, this dual-screen e-reader should fold.  You should be able to fold it closed, to protect the screen and hide what's inside, or fold it open, so that it can be read one-handed.  The button for turning to the next page should be only on the right side.  Turning back, only on the left.  That way, you must look at both pages before you can advance.  

Not every page of text would  be opposite an ad.  Sometimes you would have two-pages of text, or a two-page illustration.  Sometimes you'd have two-page ads.  It should balance out.  

Instead of flipping through a magazine, you could have a visual table-of-contents.  Each page of the magazine, including the ads, would be visible in miniature on a page that is cached for fast accessibility at all times.  The ad page could be used for this.  It is good to encourage the reader to interact with the ad page (which would, most often, be the right hand page).  The reader should feel good about the ad page.

You'd still pay for subscriptions.  But you'd pay a lot less than you do now.  No paper, printing, mailing, or mail-based subscription service charges.  More timely, targeted ads. Transparent, instant feedback.  In fact, some magazines could be distributed free to the consumer.  

You could also have an ad-royalty model in which writers get paid a bonus for the revenue generated by the ads that accompanied their writing.

Magazines themselves would become more sophisticated.  There is no reason you couldn't have interactive flash illustrations, embedded video, or links directly to related material built into the magazine articles of the future.  The same is true of books.  

The window of opportunity is rapidly closing.  The chance to employ the existing two-page magazine model will not always be available.  We will outgrow it.  There is already a well established alternative model- the internet advertising model (banners, sidebars, embedded text ads)- to compete with.

How would google feel about controling the print advertising market as well?  I imagine they'd be willing to invest in the technology that allowed them to do that.

As a consumer, reader, and technology user, wouldn't you rather have a dual-screen solution? 

As a magazine publisher, wouldn't you rather not die?  

As an advertiser, wouldn't you rather have a full page ad instead of a sidebar, or a banner?

E-readers need to evolve in this single, essential, non-negotiable way.  Once they do, all previous e-reader innovations will become instantly obsolete.

As a technology designer, wouldn't you rather make a sale than a footnote to history?  

A New Method of Acheiving Lift

Yesterday's post about how to actually build a Cloud Nine.

Ways of achieving lift. Plus one that's never been used.

Rocket lift. One of the oldest forms of lift. Stay on one side of a long-lasting explosion and you will find yourself flying.

Airfoil lift. Again, very old. Kites use this. Essentially, a combination (to a relative degree depending on airspeed, wing chord, wing loading, etc) of downward deflection and an upward-pulling low-pressure area above the wing. Used in gliders, powered aircraft, ekips, rotorcraft, frisbees.

Hotter than air lift. Relatively recent invention. A form of lighter-than-air lift. Heating normal air lowers it's pressure relative to the surrounding air, making it lighter. Requires a heat source. Is highly dependent on the relative temperature of the surrounding air. Doesn't work well in warm weather.

Light gas lift. More recent still. Helium or hydrogen has a lower molecular weight than the air thas surrounds it. Doesn't need extra heating, works regardless of relative temperature. Economical for use or large airships. Low cost way of staying aloft for a long time.

Accelerated air lift. It's debatable whether this deserves to be a category of its own. Like rocket lift but works by moving the air, not by controlling an explosion. Insects use a version of this. Insects (with the exception of butterflies and their ilk) don't use airfoil lift.

Eh, okay. Electrostatic lift. Electrically inducing an ionic flow. Check youtube.

And then their's one more that has never been exploited before.

Low-pressure lift. It's a form of lighter-than air lift. Instead of heating the air to lower its weight by lowering its pressure, or simply using a lower weight gas to begin with, it is possible, though very difficult, to achieve lift by lowering the pressure.

Essentially, by removing air from the lift volume, you make the lift volume lighter. But you can't do that with a balloon. A balloon would just get smaller, equalizing the pressure difference as it did. You need a rigid wall. The more air you remove, the more rigid it needs to be.

With Cloud (see previous post), which requires a rigid wall to begin with, it would be possible to to pump a few percent of the air out of the inside of the volume. This would put positive pressure, pushing inward, on all parts of the structure simultaneously (though not equally- an approximately 17% difference from top to bottom due to differences in atmospheric pressure).

Each percentage point of air removed from the interior would translate into more than a hundred tons of additional lift.

This method can also be used in concert with light-gas lift and hot-air lift.

But it's a risky approach because, if you breach the envelope, you lose the extra lift. Instead of relying on low-pressure lift at all times, it could be used as an emergency back-up plan. Powerful pumps could quickly remove some of the air to boost altitude. It would be used as a first resort- particularly in areas where dropping a hundred tons of water might not be particularly neighborly. It could also be used after water ballast had already been dropped, as a last-resort emergency maneuver.

Actually, low pressure lift is an old idea. Otherwise known as vacuum lift, it dates to 1670 when a brilliant Jesuit priest named Francis Lana conceived of an airship held aloft by airtight copper spheres from which the air had been pumped out. To make a copper sphere strong enough, however, would require making it too heavy to fly. In fact, no such metal is strong enough on the scale Lana had in mind (about seven meters in diameter).

By building extremely large, and by lowering one's expectations of acheiving near-total vaccuum, it's actually conceivable.

A Completely Serious Approach to Building a Flying City

A city of ten thousand.  That flies.  And really can't do anything but fly.  And I'm serious.  Totally.

The idea belongs to Buckminster Fuller, what he called a Cloud Nine.  The idea, in a two-sentence nutshell, is that the larger you build a geodesic sphere, the lighter it is relative to the volume of air it contains.  Heat that air a few degrees warmer than the surrounding air and you have a rather large hot air balloon.  Every time you double the diameter, the volume of the air is cubed.  In other words, if you build bigger, the economy of scale rises geometrically.  If you build a Cloud that's a mile wide, the payload capacity would be in the thousands of tons.  And the amount of usable space is also massive- a whole countryside in fact.  You run out of payload much faster than you run out of space.

The principles governing flight are straight forward.  There's no debate that such a thing would fly if it could be built.  What Fuller never mentioned was how to do that- how to build one.  And that's what I'm about to address.

A geodesic- or, rather, preferably, a tensegrity sphere- is not strong enough to support its own weight until a complete ring of its structure is completed. 

*** A geodesic uses nearly identical rigid components to form all the parts the structure.  A tensegrity is much more complicated, is flexible, and effeciently isolates compression and tension forces into specialized structures.  High-compression struts for compression, high tension lines for, well, tension. ***

And even then, a completed ring is only strong perpendicular to the plane of that ring.  Nowhere else.  Furthermore, if you are building a sphere, you can't build from the bottom up because the bottom is a mere point and then grows outward.  You'd have to build some very large scaffolds- scaffolds more extensive than all the architecture found on some entire continents.  It would be like building a upside down pyramid.  Only magnitudes larger.  And you can't start with a hemisphere because you would then need to lift the whole structure up to put the lower half under it.  It would be unthinkable to produce the mechanical force needed to do such a thing.  You might be able to use the structure's own buoyancy to do this, but you'd be subject to intense stress from wind and weather as you did.  Billions of pounds of force even in good weather. 

Until a sphere is complete, in all axi, it is extremely fragile.  Imagine the difference between an eggshell that has been cracked, and one that is intact.  An already-cracked egg shell can't withstand even a few dozen grams of pressure without shattering further.  An intact eggshell, on the other hand, can withstand many pounds of equally-applied force (as you may notice, I mix SI and English units at whim.  Totally intentional).  

A mile-wide sphere cannot be built strong enough to stand up to normal stresses before it is completed.  To build it strong enough would make it too heavy to fly.  It is an almost intractible problem.

Fuller imagined one solution.  You would build the sphere entirely in orbit and then drop it, gently, slowly, into the atmosphere.  By the time we have the freight capacity to build such a structure in space, we'll be far more interested in building space stations.  Such a system, while technically feasible, is very unlikely to ever be employed.  We'd have to run out of places for space stations first.  

My solution is accessible today.  

What is needed, put simply, is a mile-high system of "cranes."  What I mean by cranes- that is something you'll have to bear with me on.  But cranes strong enough to support the weight of the incomplete, unskinned sphere.  At least the part that doesn't support itself.  And a way to protect the incomplete structure from the weather.  Basically, virtually, a construction hangar.  But I said "accessible today" didn't I? 

We know quite well that it is impossible, using current building  techniques, to build anything other than a radio tower anywhere near a mile tall.  Such towers have never been built.  Also, a radio tower is an extremely poor analogy for a crane.  A tower needs only to support its own weight, and can be held in place by tension lines.  A Cloud-building construction crane would need to support hundreds of tons of weight. 

So, next, we examine natural topography to provide the placements for our cranes.  A fjord in Norway, some spur of the Grand Canyon, a valley between two peaks.  A strip mine in Siberia. Somewhere must work, surely.  But it's not as easy as it sounds.  While there are many places with a mile of relief, such places rarely appears so abruptly as to afford the ideally-shaped pocket we'd desire.  We could compromise.  We could build something smaller- give up the economy of scale that allows for a complete flying city- or we could attempt to use a place with mere half-mile relief to build the lower half of a sphere and rotate it 180 degrees so that it becomes a semi-buoyant dome, half-a-mile above ground level.  (A mechanical near-impossibility).  We could then race to complete the lower half.  In any scenario, we would have to imagine running suspension bridges across a huge space.   Cables, gondolas, cranes- a massive collection of complex infrastructure.  Tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in tools.  

In any event, such an approach is not the answer.  That is not the way to build a mile-wide sphere.  

*** A mile wide anything is absolutely unheard of.  We build ships that are over a thousand feet long.  We build skyscrapers.  We build warehouses.  But we don't build anything anywhere near a mile in size- unless it is completely resting on the earth, like a warehouse.  Even then, the mile scale is unexplored.  A mile-wide structure is not an incremental increase in scale, it is a massive leap forward.  It is a magnitude higher.  A leap for which few analogies exist.  I can't overstate how audacious it would be to work at this scale. ***

The answer is far simpler, more efficient, and- most importantly- cheaper.  And it is available today, using existing technology.  In fact, the only thing that really stands between a Cloud and reality is the will to build it.  Such a structure could even be profitable to build.

There is another place- besides canyons, fjords, and craters- that offers a mile difference between top and bottom.  Furthermore, it is a place that allows you to operate from the top down.  In fact, it requires that you do.  It is also a very calm, predictable place.  And it is a naturally protective environment.  It is the "virtual hangar" we need.  It also can be used as a virtually weightless environment as long as you plan to use it as such.  

I'm writing, of course, about the ocean.  I've even picked a place: just to the west of the Yucatan Penninsula, north of Cárdenas, Mexico.  

You start on shore, building flat rings that are carried by track into the water and then towed to your building site.  You tow the rings with powerful barges. You build the rings with the capability of varying their own buoyancy, like chains of unmanned submarines.  You then lower the scaffold rings into the water. You overlap the scaffolds, like meridians on a globe.  You control the process like slow-motion marionettes, cables running from surface to depth.  

You then begin to build on the scaffold, at the surface.  You use a combination of shallow-depth and just-out-of-the-water construction.  As you complete a section, you rotate the incomplete sphere- by pulling the appropriate control cables from the construction ships.  The scaffold assists by varying internal buoyancy.  At this point, you are building only the framework of the sphere.  The skin will be added after the structure is complete, strong, and the scaffold has been disassembled and towed away- ready for reuse.   

Using a similar, roll-as-you-go process, you put the skin on next.  I'm leaving a lot of detail out.  The skin would start as a single surface.  A second layer would be added much later. 

And here's the hard part (not that everything else is easy).  

Using the rotation method you attach uninflated buoyancy bags to the outside of the sphere, especially the upper half.  Each unit has a large amount of compressed air inside tanks that self-detach when depleted.  You then begin to pump heated air into the top of the dome- the part just beneath the water.  At this point, you are putting a massive amount of stress on the skin.  You reinforce the topmost portion accordingly.  

If you can do this in cold weather, there is a significant lift bonus.  You also use all available construction barges, and perhaps a fleet of other ships, and you haul outward and upward. Water drains out of the bottom as the sphere gradually emerges from the water.  At first, it is being lifted on external buoyancy, provided by the underwater float bags, by the ships, and by a small amount of mechanical leverage (possibly working against anchors set in the sea floor).  As it inches upward, it relies increasingly on its internal buoyancy- the same force that will allow it to fly.  

If the sphere can be built large enough, light enough, and with the help of supplemental buoyancy, it rises from the water.  The completed structure flies free of the water, is moored to the construction ships, and, by varying its altitude to take advantage of prevailing winds, is "supersailed" toward land.  It may be the weather doesn't allow it to go where you want it to.  Worst case, you release it and fly it around the world, delivering building material with airships. Up to this point, the structure is far more efficient than necessary.  It would actually be prudent to carry millions of pounds of water ballast. 

Over time, much of the water ballast is replaced with useful payload. The first task would be to develop an on board airport with a one-mile airstrip (at the equator). Once completed, you can visit it at any time using more conventional aircraft, though jet airliners might be out of the question.  Then you build the essential infrastructure. Repair systems, onboard generators, safety systems (lifeboats). Then you build a city. Resorts, estates, offices, schools, and retail space.

Naturally, it would rotate, which might- through a combination of active and passive systems- be used for minor navigation. For the most part, however, it would navigate using the supersailing method. Keep in mind that Cloud would not be a form of point-to-point transportation.  It would be a moving destination. A supranational sky island.

*** Though it would be far less interesting, Cloud could also be anchored in place.  It would then be the ideal site for a massive wind plant- far more than enough to meet its own needs.  *** 

Cloud would, before all else, be a real estate investment.  Individual apartments would be spacious, with walls built of lightweight materials.  Residents would pay based on the weight of the structure and furniture payload, not the number of square feet.  Condos would range from around a million dollars to more than fifty million- possibly far more.

Cloud would operate a research university.  It would be a magnet community for innovators and luminaries.  It would grow some of its own food, using aeroponics. It would have a cold indoor lake which could be dropped, in the form of sudden rain, to add emergency lift- one of several systems in place to provide aggressive course adjustment.

Perhaps the largest part of its economy would be based on tourism.  It would carry a small fleet of air taxis- possibly hybrid airships- that would visit local airports, shuttling visitors back and forth. It would be possible to BASE jump indoors. The views- both internal and external- would be like nothing else on earth.  You could play golf at ten thousand feet.  

If necessary, it would be capable of "landing"- resting gently on the water, or open land. The base could be built in such a way as to provide a soft buffer zone that would allow it to land in forests with minimum mutual damage. In the event of catastrophic damage, it would also be repairable in flight- as the internal air volume would be sub-divided into a number of sections, like the sections of an orange. The loss of one section should be within the surplus margin of lift available by other means (releasing ballast, super-heating, adding hydrogen, cloud seeding to reduce local external temperatures, and one other) The loss of two sections would cause Cloud to gently land. It should be made capable of surviving a 9/11-type collision with an airliner. For safety sake, it would be illuminated on the outside.  From fifty miles away, it would be as large and visible as the full moon. You could display video on its surface to audiences of millions, broadcasting the sound via radio.  

There is also the potential for Cloud to become the first example of a previously unexploited method of achieving flight.  A mode of lighter-than-air lift that has never been used before.  But I'll have to write about that later (see next post).  

I don't seriously expect Cloud to ever be built.  It is, first-and-foremost, a thought experiment. I've thought of it as the organizing principle for an introductory physics-and-engineering textbook for high school and college students, as well as a "picture book" for younger children.  Possibly the same book.  The kind of book you keep for life.  The kind of book that inspires you to dream big, the way Buckminster Fuller inspired me.    

The Future of Oceanic Power Generation

Years ago I "invented" a method for harnessing sea slow-moving ocean currents.  This is a quick overview of the idea and its drawbacks.  

Ocean currents may move at only 3 kts but represent one of the most energy-dense potentials on earth.  Only fossil fuel deposits and geothermal hotspots have the potential for being denser.

A single current, such as the Gulf Stream, may represent the solar input of many thousands of square kilometers of open ocean- concentrated at the surface and transformed into motion. Currents vary in location and intensity, but to a lesser degree than wind and (except in desert areas) solar. They are far more constant than tides and waves.

I calculate that tapping a small part of the kinetic energy of contained in an area fifty-by-a hundred miles, and given a 3 kt average speed, would supply our entire planet' s energy needs.  And that assumes a sparse distribution of the generators described below.  To do the same thing with wind or solar would take up over a hundred thousand square miles of suitable territory.  

Tapping ocean currents could be done with negligible effect on the currents themselves.  How do I know this? Because the total energy available is extremely enormous. It's equivalent to somewhere in the vicinity of 1 it 1.5 million square kilometers of solar-collecting capacity. Any perturbation would be proportional to the percentage of the whole that is being tapped. Granted, this is something that would require further study. Even if extracted energy is minimal, a potentially nontrivial amount of local turbulence may be generated, which might confuse some of the less navigationally talented pelagic species. Fortunately the system described below would generate very little turbulence. Certainly no more than a bit of bad weather.

So, yes, the major problem isn't a lack of available energy. It's that you need large devices with broad cross-sections in order to tap remote current energy efficiently enough to make it pay off.  If you build a bladed turbine, you'll be forced to work with a circular cross section.  Because currents are fastest at the surface, and drop in speed with depth, it seems that ideal placement of a turbine would be close to half-in and half-out of the water- thereby allowing for its widest part to encounter the fastest speeds.  

Unfortunately, moving blades in and out of the water would cause added drag at the air-water interface.  An individual blade would only provide power half the time- unless the wind was right- and would be vulnerable to forces in directions other than the current itself- which would cause enormous stress.  Furthermore, differences in air and water properties, as well as in speeds inherent to both, would dictate a design compromise away from optimum.  

To build a bladed turbine large enough, one would have to build it incredibly strong.  Strength equates with weight.  Weight cuts into efficiency.  Weight adds to cost.  

A bladed turbine would need to be  fully submerged to remain economical in its design. Being fully submerged, it would still encounter a speed gradient that would cause significant axial stress requiring a rather robust design.  A bladed turbine would be inherrently inefficient in such a setting. It would have to be small and numerous. Again, too expensive, both in deployment and maintenance.

A bladed turbine is not the answer.

My solution doesn't use a turbine at all.  It uses paired drogue chutes designed with high-aspect-ratio shapes optimized to put the bulk of the cross-section inside the fastest part of the current (right near the surface). Each chute would very large- thousands of square meters- and be attached to one end of a long semi-buoyant cable- potentially many miles long- that would, in turn, be connected at its center to an anchored barge containing a gearbox and generator (I mix units, that's right).  While one chute is open, the second one would be closed- deflated so as to provide minimal drag as it is drawn opposite the direction of the active, open chute. If the two chutes were at the opposite ends 20-mile cable, and the current were traveling at 3 kt, and the chute was moving at 1.5 kts, it would take almost 6 hours to complete one down-current run.

When the open waterchute reaches the end of its run, it is closed- using a simple system that is nonetheless too complex to describe without the use of schematics- while its paired counterpart is opened.  The closed chute is pulled back toward the barge while the open chute goes down the current in its place.  

It's a process that would need to be actively controlled.  As the chutes pass each other, for instance, they cannot occupy the same area of the ocean.  The closed chute must be steered away, which is accomplished with a dynamically controlled rudder attached to the cable itself. 

The chute and its cable is also a hazard to deep-drafted ships.  Beacons and active navigation information would be in order. 

The greatest obstacle isn't in the design and operation of the chute system, but rather in the anchoring of the barge itself. 

I believe, however, that there will come a time when deep sea oil exploration rigs will outlive their primary use.  The setting of anchors in the sea floor is a new potential market.  As oil becames scarce, the need for alternative energy sources increases proportionally.  

What impact would these waterchutes have on sea life?  Well, for one thing, they are moving too slowly to trap anything.  They can be equipped with deterrents that would protect larger lifeforms, and holes large enough for smaller ones to escape through. 

Another obstacle is that such a system doesn't generate power constantly.  The longer the cables, the higher the duty cycle.  However, it can never reach 100%.  Running multiple systems in tandem won't solve the problem completely either.  Different units are bound to operate at different speeds, causing the down-cycle to arrive at different times.  Sometimes it would average out into smooth power.   Sometimes it would cause significant drops as multiple systems encounter simultaneous downtime.  Such factors could be managed actively by scheduling reversals at less than full extenstion. 

And then there is the huge problem of transmitting power from sea to land.  Power lines could, conceivably, be run along the bottom of the ocean, or suspended at reasonably serviceable depths.  Running power lines above the water is a special design problem but has the benefit of allowing the lines to be uninsulated.  Either system may be more practical, depending on the individual circumstances.

Another obstacle is that ocean currents rarely exist close to where the power is needed.  Fortunately, most of the world's population at least lives within a hundred miles of the ocean. Current farms could be built in many places around the world.  Industries can also locate to where power is cheapest.

Such a system may well be the cheapest, greenest power source available on a global scale.  It has an extremely high per unit cost due to the fact that it is only efficient at a large economy of scale.  That cost translates, in turn, into a huge amount of power generation.  Each one may be equivalent of an average-sized hydroelectric dam, or over a hundred wind turbines.  

Will such a system ever be built?  I doubt it.  The obstacles are too great.  The system would be too expensive to bring online.  Only if we are desperate to be able to tap ocean currents would such a system be explored.  Other sources of energy are bound to be far cheaper up front.  It's an option though.