Toliet

A friend let me borrow this book, and it has plans on how to build a $25 composting toilet. I´m going to build one in my site to see how it goes.

Gross Domestic Toughness

There should be a new "econometric" : Gross Domestic Toughness. GDT.

Where I live, people do not contribute much to GDP. Most of the food they produce they consume themselves, and a lot of the work they do could be done in 1/1ooth of the time with modern machinery. However nearly everything they do contributes to what I would like to call the Gross Domestic Toughness. Not sure how the formula would work for this one. One example I can give is this : a John Deer tractor produces exponentially more than 1 guy swinging a machete, but the machete swinger is maintaining the toughness production of the country, and could probably be the crap out of the guy working the tractor.

Helping out a nieghbor build his grass roof hut got me thinking about this. I was walking up this hill carrying about 80 lbs of wet straw to this guys house. My neighbor , aparisio, is going to use the straw for the roof of his hut. It will take him and his family about 50 more trips of hiking this straw up over this mountain about a mile and a half to get the roof done. The hut is no bigger than 15 by 20 feet.

I think the toughness idea came to me when i came to the top of the hill and found two of his brothers sucking down hot sugary coffee like it was Gatorade. they had both beaten me up the hill, carrying a much higher percentage of their malnourished body wieght than i was. After cresting the hill and I doing all i could to set down my straw bale without sprawling out and looking like a total wuss, they gave me this look like " what are you tired for, we eat little mountains like this for breakfast" but instead just handed me a gord of the piping hot coffee, which if sweetened to the point where you can feel it rotting your teeth is a great re hydrator.

any ways, for less than 200 dollars, the fam could throw up a roof in 1/20 th of the time and about 1/10000th of the pain, but then who would make up for the lack of toughness that otherwise would not be added to the economy?

Instructables

I love instructables .

One interesting project is a cheap electrical generator.

http://www.instructables.com/id/ERTAINQF18DW99A/

Minimum Input Projects

Living amongst extreme poverty has gotten me thinking a lot about reducing the minimum cost of imputs, in both time and money, for starting projects. What are the cheapest tools you can make yourself? what is the cheapest house you can build? what is the cheapest way to get electricity? The cheapest flashlight? cheapest way to get all the nurtriants you need?

One Minimum Input Project I'm trying to get rolling now is for a photo project with kids at the school. I came across this design for a pinhole camera using 35 mm film and a match box, some electrical tape. If you use some expired film, than the whole project is pretty cheap.

Links:
Flickr photos with Matchbox Pinhole tags

Here's the website that explains the basic construction by the guy who designed it.

Guide to Field Soldering

Instructables comes through again. Im here waiting for a late bus back to site, and found this site on how to solder without electricity.

Go Box electricution

Go Box entry

Go Box House

The NYT wrote about tiny houses, go box in style, although at $24,000 for 120 square feet, not go box in sticker shock. The house I hope to live in soon is 126 square feet, and should cost a little under $250. Look for my wood and tin roof shack in the next New York Times special on little houses.

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This website expresses the views of Ed O'Brien, whom is entirely responsible for its content. It does not reflect the policies or positions of The United States Government, United States Peace Corps, the Republic of Panama, or anyone else.alright, now the legalspeak is out of the way

Go Box Garden Panama

What is the Go Box Garden?

The variables for a garden are :

Time input
Space input

Calorie output
nutrition output

I would also add:

money input
soil improvement/ ecological impact output

Where I live the money input must equal zero.
For my go box project, I would like to set up some small gardens, some double dig plots.

After that is done, I would like to try to find out what the minimum amount of land and time are necessary to meet a family´s nutritional and caloric needs.

Go box Farm, Garden, Meal

What is the go box meal? Where does the go box meal come from? The Go box garden or farm, of course.

But what is a go box farm or garden? Steven Shapin of the New Yorker wrote an article recently discussing how the sucess of Whole Foods is forcing some to redefine what organic agriculture is, and what its aims are. Here is a quotation from the May 15th New Yorker:

A former Nutritionist at Columbia, who went on to grow produce upstate, recalls, "When we said organic, we meant local. We meant healthful. We meant mutually respectful growers and eaters. We meant social justice and equality."

In the article, Shapin also sites Sir Albert Howard writings as the "orgins of the organic movement." His book, "an agricultural testament" is on line here, and might give an idea of what the go box farm looks like.

Both the article and the book have a lot to offer the go box perspective. As i go through the book I´ll probably post more here.

Go Box Cell phone

What is the best cellphone in terms of ruggedness, durability, dependability, efficiently, and effectiveness?

The efficiency variable would have to be defined in terms of initial investment, and battery life.

effectiveness and durability would have to be defined as ability to receive and make calls from areas of varying degrees of , in addition to the easy of use for functions.

Durability and ruggedness would be defined as the ability to drop it in a stram, bounce pass it to your friend across a street, and still make a call. Also, to keep it in your back pocket and not have it get crushed or tweaked out by butt sweat.

Yugo box

Make magizine rocks. Heres a entry on Yugo sculpture art on from thier blog.

Yugo is the no go-box.

Go Music Box

Im headed off to the hills of rural central America, and Im going with my I pod. I decided I needed some kind of case that would keep a low profile, so that the pod doesn't take off.

I saw this design : http://www.retropod.com/. With out a doubt, pretty rad, go box, in that as long as you don't act all hipster advertise it as an ipod in a walkman, it keeps it modest, yet very useful.

I didn't have access to one of those big old walkmans, and didn't have the time to wait to buy one on eBay. Rummaging through my mom's collection of assorted obsolete electronics that she has hoarded away in her basement ( gotta love that yankee pack rat mentality) I pulled out an FM am GE transitor radio, and used the shell to make my case. Not to hard, but here is the step by step in case you're interested:



Here's a picture of the case before cracking it open. The plastice case consists of two pieces of hard plastic, held together by two screws.

I didn't document taking out the circuit board and speaker, but basically all that was required was cutting some wires, taking out some small screws, and using a small flat head screw driver to pry under and break off small plastic tabs.




Here are the two halves of the case side by side.



Once the two halves are apart, I took a Butter Knife to a gas burner to heat it up, then used the knife to melt off the posts that held the screws together. This freed up more space for the Ipod, cardboard, and wires that would come later. The case is not is well put together as it was with the screws, but the cases snap together strong enough, and eventually Ill put some large rubber bands around the body to hold it together.

note: stay away from those plastic fumes, get it done in a well ventilated area.



To protect the Pod from moving around too much and getting scratched by the hard plastic, I cut two pieces of thin pizza box cardboard to the size of the inside of the radio, and mounted them using 3m squares.



I used a controller that connects between the ipod and the head phones, and wrapped the extra wire in the body of the radio.



The controller goes where the 9 volt battery normally would go.


This is a basic design, one hack that would come in handy would be to both weather proof it, and then also have sly opening that would access the bottom of the pod so that it could be recharged without opening the radio case. That will be another post.

Go Box trains

Japan to Test Fuel Cell-Powered Train

Here is an article about new Hybrid and Fuel cell trains.

It'd be great to have them on this side of the Pacific, too. Check out this quotation from the article, JR East sounds like a go box minded company:

"JR East, as the Tokyo-based company is also known, estimates the NE Train will consume about 20 percent less energy than traditional trains. The company has cut overall energy consumption by 13 percent since 1990, despite rising traffic volumes."

Go Box Americar

Here is an example of the third variable, creativity or self expression, being fully realized . The Toyota corolla itself is quite efficient, but the personalized paint job gives it a patriotic character, especially here in the nation's capitol.

Go Box Robotics

This in from our man on the street Dave E., an article on Robots from the New York times:
In a Wired South Korea, Robots Will Feel Right at Home


At first the relevance of Go Box theory in this article was not apparent, until I read this:


"Reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997, South Korea decided that becoming a high-tech nation was the only way to secure its future.

The government deregulated the telecommunications and Internet service industries and made investments as companies laid out cables in cities and into the countryside. The government offered information technology courses to homemakers, subsidized computers for low-income families and made the country the first in the world to have high-speed Internet in every primary, junior and high school."

As the Go Box equation is efficiently + Effectiveness + Creativeness = Go Box quotion, the South Korean government saw they had to 'go box' their economy up to make it more effective, that is to say make it more efficient and educate and empower their people in order to increase creativity. Rock on, South Korea.


Note: As demonstrated above, go box is not merely a noun, but can also be used as a verb. In verb form, to ' go box' is to make something more like a go box, ie to bring it somehow in line with the spirit of a 1980s 4 cylinder pickup truck, or to increase its efficientcy while simultaneously increasing its productiveness.

The Go Box and the Jumbo Jet

Watch what happens when go boxes mix with jumbo jets:

Video Fun with Jet engines

they shot Bullwinkle!

click here

Go Box Self Design

This Nissan Go box has some neat stickers that add a little flair.