2004-01-13-1656Z


I decided against building a dome. For the simple reason that I don't need one. There's nothing I need other than what I can quite easily carry with me, and my Hennessy ultralight hammock is sufficient for shelter almost all of the time. So I don't need a permanent building either for storage or for a place to sleep.

Yesterday I got a couple of brilliant ideas, let me share them with you. Take a 1-oz gold coin, melt it down, and pour the liquid gold into a small-diameter (say 1/4 inch?) steel or aluminum tube to solidify. Then force it out of the tube somehow and cut it into pieces of various thicknesses. Weigh each piece on a scale like the ones used for gunpowder. Stamp each of the small coins with the weight in grains and fraction of an ounce. You'd never need to have "small change" because the coins aren't identical weight. Want to buy something worth $1.50? Give the vendor a coin worth $6.00 and he gives you back one worth $4.50. If everybody who wants to participate in a gold-based economy carries even a tenth of an ounce worth of these coins around, it should be very easy (if a little tedious) to come up with exact change for anything. I was thinking 100 pieces of 1/100 ounce each but maybe they would be too thin. It will take some experimenting I guess.

The other idea is for a very simple humanoid robot. All these complex, expensive designs require gyromotors to keep the damned things upright. How about a very lightweight design, inflated with helium, with very small servomotors and aluminum tubing allowing it to walk around. Sure, it won't be able to do much useful work. But it could walk and potentially talk, and it would be more humanlike than any of these designs I've seen on Slashdot lately. Realistic? Sure! People have sex with inflatable dolls don't they?

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