Fits well on the first try. 

Coming up quickly, the first weekend in June, is the annual Chesapeake Float. A bunch of fine boating chaps I know, mostly from up in Baltimore/Delaware/Philadelphia area, get together for a three day boat camping weekend on the Bay somewhere. Most of them are the usual suspects you heard of here. Most have many years of experience sailing and camping in remote areas on the Chesapeake, and beyond. A good group of folks to know.

One of my long range goals has always been to fit out the Melonseeds for camping. I’m not much of an expedition camper, and these boats really aren’t big enough to be comfortable for very long trips, but there are a lot of places I want to go that would best be done over several days. I like the idea of nosing into marshes and small almost islands to spend the night.

This trip is a good chance to try that out with a handful of accommodating folks on hand in case I don’t get something right the first time. Likely. Plus, they happen to be very good company.

Spent a good bit of time on various custom combinations for shelter. Mostly I want the option of using just mosquito netting to keep the blood-suckers at bay when the weather is good. I want to see the sky at night whenever possible. Given the boats are small, I also want to have as much room as possible to move around, prepare meals, read, etc., without being tormented by flying vermin. Figured I’d rig a tarp somehow over all that for protection if rain threatens.

I actually have a small roll of mosquito netting from an army surplus store I planned to use. Was all set to buy some tarps and figure out a custom system. The more I thought about it, though, the more it sounded like a real tent. So I spent some time looking at all the options already available.

Turns out there are lots and lots of tents available now. I found one for sale at several online retailers for $50 that seemed the right size. I ordered two, thinking if it didn’t work out I wouldn’t be out much money, and I might canibalize  the parts to make something.

Well, as luck would have it, the tent is almost custom made to fit a Melonseed.

It’s a two person backpacking tent. Weighs about 5 pounds, and takes up very little space. The shape almost exactly follows the outline of the deck. The screen house portion is standalone, with a rain fly that can be added over top. Two doors, port and starboard, lead forward. All the loops and ties line up almost perfectly with the scuppers to secure it, the fore and aft ends tying to the rudder and stem. The mast will even line up with the zipper in the fly. Sweet!

Now all I need to do is cut the floor to open up around the cockpit. Then try pitching it from within the boat.

The only real concern is whether it will stand up to a summer thunderstorm and high winds.

Guess I’ll find out, but can’t wait to give it a try. Maybe I should camp out in the yard one night. Terri will think I’m regressing to childhood. Wait, didn’t I do that already?

direct Vimeo link

Art can be so amazing. Really.

“Patterned by Nature was commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (naturalsciences.org) for the newly built Nature Research Center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The exhibit celebrates our abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process, and through our perceptions. It brings to light the similarity of patterns in our universe, across all scales of space and time.

10 feet wide and 90 feet in length, this sculptural ribbon winds through the five story atrium of the museum and is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass. It runs on roughly 75 watts, less power than a laptop computer. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.

The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.

An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.

Patterned by Nature was created by
Plebian Design - plebiandesign.com
Hypersonic Design & Engineering - hypersoniced.com
Patten Studio - pattenstudio.com
and
Sosolimited - sosolimited.com”

In like a lion, out like a lamb.

In March I came across a couple of very cool art projects that use the wind as an active visual medium. Fascinating on many levels, not the least of which is using the invisible to create things visually appealing. The video above uses wind direction arrows, much like you might mount on the top of a mast, to show the constantly shifting patterns of air currents and eddies across a flat plane.

This piece, a web site, does something similar on a continental scale, and as a sailor I find it even more interesting:

April 1, 2012 at 10am. Click on the photo to see a moving map for right now, or click on this link to go to the site: 

Wind Map

It was created by the two person data visualization team of Flowing Media, who now lead Google’s “Big Picture” visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Every hour, wind strength and direction data is gather for the entire US from NOAA. The info is then mapped into a flowing visualization of wind patterns across the country throughout the day.

You can follow weather systems across the continent throughout the day. For example, this is a snapshot of March 22 in the morning:

And the same day only hours later:

As a sailor, especially of small boats, you learn to pay acute attention to the wind. You can’t see it directly, so you look for signs of it everywhere. The turning of leaves and bending of limbs along the shore. Flags flying. Cat’s paws blooming across the surface of the water. Telltales. You feel it in the down on your cheek – which side is cooler? Listen to the sounds it makes passing through the rigging.

Like dim stars, blind to us in the Fovea Centralis when we look at them directly, the wind is visible only when we look away and see it in our peripheral vision. It’s a sort of sensory parallax, where you can only perceive something by looking away from it.

I like that.

 

 

All through the hot summer, the wisteria we planted ten years ago shades the front porch in cool filtered light. You can nap on the swing in a wide tunnel of green. Every Spring it squeezes out a few more blooms, with scent sweet as honeysuckle.

Can’t wait for that first nap.

the logo

the web site

So three good friends and I have this idea we’re trying to bring to fruition. Oddly enough, the purpose of the whole venture to make it easier to bring good ideas to fruition.

The company is called ahyayha – a Cherokee word meaning “to hold in hand.”

team ahyaha, in the ahyayha conference room

The goal is to create a web based platform to raise money for small, local, environmental projects. These are projects that may only cost between $5000 and $30,000 to complete, and build on involvement and support within a local community. It’s an area that receives very little support right now.

Governments and philanthropic foundations are geared to address large, complex problems – problems that require large and complex solutions crossing multiple organizational boundaries. However, there are far more small problems that, cumulatively, can have a greater impact on our world, particularly at the local level.

The structures used by governments and foundations don’t scale down effectively. At the small end of the range, administrative costs of applying for grants, managing the projects, and reporting, can far exceed the cost of actually doing the work. As one foundation fundraiser told me recently, it costs more than $5000 for them just to apply for a grant they may not receive. It doesn’t make sense for them to even consider small projects. We hope to be able to change that with ahyayha.

All of us believe there are many among us who every day see small problems that are easily fixed, who are willing and able to enlist the help of their friends to do something about it. Sometimes people even come up with very good or novel ways to address the problems. We want to encourage and reward those people, help get them started, and make it easier for them to succeed.

The site is still in the early phases of construction. Most of the content contained at the moment is teaser information, but we’ll be adding pages and media steadily. Do stop by frequently for a look:

www.ahyaha.com

On Monday, February 27, at 3pm Mike Collins and I will be on a regional public radio station for a live interview/call in show called Virginia Insight. You can listen to the broadcast locally, or hear it streaming online from anywhere, info here:

They Call Themselves Ahyayha

Here’s the link to the live stream:

http://www.jmu.edu/wmra/wmra.m3u

If you’re on a Mac and your browser doesn’t support live streaming, you can paste the link into iTunes and listen that way:

To connect to the Internet broadcast in iTunes:

• Copy the URL above
• Choose Advanced > Open Audio Stream.
• Paste the full URL into the popup window