Compact living

There have been a number of conversations about SpaceX's new super launcher  ability to send someone to Mars. 

Would you spend 8 months to 2 years in here without going mad ? 

One of the primary problems is radiation and space. Basically the Space X capsule isn't that big for 2 people for up to 2+ years ( 6 months or so if landing). The basic assumption is a larger capsule would be OK. So I wondered if you had a capsule which appeared to have more space. I was proposing to do this in three ways. Firstly physically using walls moving like old archive shelving you find in libraries. This creates walls that move. 

If you want to see the effect then have a look at this Hong Kong apartment. 

Pretty cool and you get the idea. Perhaps with lighting changing automatically the it would be possible to give the 'effect' of different rooms and hence a larger space. 

The second effect would be trompe l'oei - an old roman method to use perspective to make space seem bigger. 

My vision was to have moving floors ( the dragon capsule is taller than a person so the head space goes to waste). The floors move up and down  would stack like cookies in a packet. The walls would be covered curved OLED screens. They would give the effect of more 'space'. 

The cabin would track the heads of the 2 crew  and generate a head centric depth illusion. The screens would be touch displays so they could be used as instrument panels and act as lighting. Hopefully both illusions might help keep the crew sane enough to get to Mars and back.

 Hopefully by being in such a compact space the crew could have denser shielding than that offered by a flexible inflatable habitat as currently proposed. 

Sky Stack semi-invisible chimney

Sky Stack semi-invisible chimney

Do you think they could do this for wind turbines to make a semi- invisible wind turbine ?

LuminAR | Fluid Interfaces

LuminAR | Fluid Interfaces
I recently had a MPhil student looking at these kinds of interfaces. I said this was the laptop for the desktop that is typcial table user interfaces.

l.

Barcode Room: The Optimus Prime of apartments

Pretty coo

Airborne Wind Turbine Could Revolutionize Wind Power | EarthTechling

Cool stuff.

Airborne Wind Turbine Could Revolutionize Wind Power | EarthTechling

Potential order-of-magnitude enhancement of wind farm power density via counter-rotating vertical-axis wind turbine arrays

Fascinating paper using turbines to funnel wind to each other. By using several vertical turbines they manage to get more power per square meter ( the limiting factor for how much power we can get is how much land area we are willing to throw at using it).

Sky wind turbines

More high altitude wind turbines.

nifty ladder mill paper.

The Laddermill work in progress -

Bill gates on high altitude wind power

Bill Gates of all people has been making some intereasting incursions to the global engergy crisis [here]