Taking the Eco-Dome to Darfur | Hacker News Reader

Taking the Eco-Dome to Darfur

paulgraham.com

15 pointsrms7 comments

Reminds me of this shovel designed to fill sandbags:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHBpn3OQH7o

I think the arguments for it were that it protects your lower back, it lets you work alone without needing another person to hold the bag open, and it's much faster, which is important if there is going to be a flood.

http://hexayurt.com is our approach - open source design too (well, patentless-and-published, rather than "in a patent pool" so technically it's public domain.)

The key is thermal rejection. Sandbags absorb the energy slowly, so it's thermal buffering. Hexayurts have a shiny outside, so they just reflect the heat off into the ground.

Thermal performance is surprisingly good. We're talking to the Netherlands Red Cross about field testing right now (I just came back from a meeting today.)

The other thing we do is infrastructure, and you can read more about that here:

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/TIDES%20-%20Hexayurt%20Infras...

The general term for the pictured style of building is "earthbag" construction. It's been around for a while now; depending on what you fill the bags with and how you frame the building you can even tailor the properties of the walls to fit your needs.

Might be a nice idea, but somehow I am glad that Germany (where I live) wasn't rebuild in that way after WW 2. That also makes me question the project a bit: is the problem really that ordinary houses are too hard to build in the respective regions, or are there other problems that prevent people from getting the act together? I suspect the latter.

In the case of Darfur, they have at least one well known problem: the Janjaweed/Sudanese government. Think Arab Nazi's on horseback.

My general feeling is that a "Guns for Darfur" charity would be the most useful.

(Note: Godwin's law only applies when invoking Nazi comparisons in non-genocidal situations.)

Has anyone actually set up a charity for arming genocide victims? It could obviously backfire in a really nasty way -- maybe the difference isn't that Tribe A is more evil than Tribe B, but that Tribe A is better-armed.

I haven't seen anyone suggest arming at-risk ethnic groups outside of Cryptonomicon: (http://www.innternet.de/~peter.patti/stephenson-neal-crypton... , search for 'HEAP'; there's a description somewhere in there).

What's the worst that can happen? Genocide? It sounds worth the risk. Possible genocide is better than certain genocide. Note that neither the RPF (in Rwanda) or the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) did much retaliation after they ended their respective genocides (to take two recent examples).

Plus, there is deterrence when two parties are evenly armed.

"Lets go kill the darkies, loot their village and rape their women."

Sounds awesome. I hate those darkies, and who doesn't like loot and booty?

"Lets get into an evenly matched gunfight with the darkies and, if we survive, loot their village and rape their women."

You know, I agree the darkies are a pox on this world. But I'm not liking the sound of 'if we survive.'

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