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Wes Honeywell & the Thermostats

Photo by Moja Msanii on Unsplash

Somewhere, in a parallel universe, Wes Honeywell is growing impatient with his current band, Damper-Flapper, led by his old friend Al Butz. There are several problems with Damper-Flapper.

First, most of the sidemen (yes, they are all men), have different motivations. One actually enjoys playing music, a second uses his performance as a magnet for attracting women, a third person meets for his mental health, while the last member attends for the money. The sociopathic bandleader/ music director/ songwriter is solely interested in the band as a means of controlling people.

Second, they can’t agree on a genre. It is an unhealthy combination of blues, country, electro-pop, jazz, industrial rock and surf. They refer to it as fusion, but everyone else calls it noise.

Third, with an average age north of 70, it is becoming harder for band members to remember details like lyrics and chord changes. It is not even possible to introduce new songs, because everyone is stuck in his own personal rut. Illness, both real and fake, is taking its toll at band practice.

Since harmony is not a term that can be applied to Damper-Flapper, Wes has decided to spend less time interacting with this mash and clash of humanity and to spend more time working alone as a musician.

Computers are not high priority for Wes. Fortunately, he knows people who know things, and one of these people in Proton Bletchley. Proton was able to tell Wes, that the heart of every 21st century one-person-band (yes, this applies to the other gender too), is a digital audio workstation (DAW). While laptops are portable, desktop or even rack based machines are preferred. In general, they are faster, run cooler (using less energy and producing less noise), offer greater flexibility such as more RAM, additional drives, and space for better graphic cards (if video is being contemplated).

Wes needs a lot of tracks. His father was a jazz pianist, and played nothing else, but Wes converted early in life to blues. He can perform: (1) lead vocals, (2) backing vocals, (3) lead guitar, (4) rhythm guitar, (5) bass guitar, (6) keyboard, (7) drums, including (8) congas, and (9) saxophone.

Each of these can be laid down as a separate track, while Wes listens to one or more of the tracks that have been laid down previously. The average number of times Wes needs to lay down a track varies with his skill with the instrument: once for congas; fourteen for saxophone, and counting.

The main recording challenge is noise, which may mean that any computer has to be physically separated from studio (a fancy name for Wes’ spare bedroom) pickups and microphones. This is not quite as acute a problem now as it was before, since some fanless (almost silent) computers are able to do vast amounts of processing, compared to earlier machines.

Other hardware considerations had to be taken, but only after some software decisions have been made. One of the first was about which operating system to use, Apple MacOS or Windows? Proton’s standard answer is neither, use Linux. This is because of his support of the Open Source movement.

While Proton is a confirmed open source advocate, he is also a hypocrite. He spends his days extolling the virtues of Open Source software, forgetting some of the serious issues that come with them: the lack of professionalism in Open Source communities, which result in inappropriate products; the lack of resources, financial and otherwise; there are also issues caused by commercial licensing restrictions.

The most notable open source audio products are: Ardour, a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application; Audacity, a sound editor more than a digital audio workstation; LMMS (in a previous life, Linux MultiMedia Studio), another digital audio workstation application.

These programs are probably good enough for most musicians. Yet, there can be a temptation to use commercial products, that could be slightly more refined.

This said, Proton discourages people from using Software as a Service. Adobe Audition, for example, now requires people to edit their music in the cloud. That is, the music is stored and manipulated on somebody else’s server. This means that users effectively lose control over their creations and are dependent on Adobe behaving ethically.

At the very least, software should be installed on one’s own machine, with backup in some physically separate place.

If one is going to use commercial software, Chris Barnatt, futurist, author and YouTuber at Explaining Computers, recommends DaVinci Resolve for video (and audio) editing. The free version, is more than good enough for a one person band. More information is available at Black Magic Design.

Wes has downloaded all of the above, and is testing them out to find out which one feels good, for him.

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Disruptive Technology: HET Motors

The Linear Labs

Andrew Gordon (1712 – 1751) was a Scottish Benedictine monk, physicist and inventor, who made the first electric motor in the 1740s. It is fully described in Versuch einer Erklarung der Electricitat (1745). Most of the basic research on motors was done in the 19th century, with all the major classes of motors available at the start of the 20th century. The one exception was the linear induction motor, that was developed between 1905 and 1949.

Most of the development work on motors in the 20th century falls into the category refinement or enhancement.

In the 21st century, Linear Labs, a Fort Worth, Texas, USA start-up, has raised US$4.5 million in seed capital to develop and commercialize a new electric motor, the Hunstable Electric Turbine (HET) that it claims reduces size and complexity while increasing efficiency, range and torque. Hunstable is the surname of the motor’s developers, son/ CEO Brad and father/ CTO Fred.

Electric motors typically use single-speed reduction gearboxes designed to let electric motors rotate at high, efficient RPMs while the drive wheels spin slower. These gearboxes are heavy, complex, expensive and unnecessary, according to Linear Labs. Their technology radically simplifies the electric power-train while delivering more efficiency/ torque/ power/ range.

Two important terms used below. Rotor = the moving part of a motor, that turns the shaft to deliver the mechanical power. Stator = the stationary part of the motor, that usually consists of windings or permanent magnets.

The HET is a three-dimensional, circumferential flux, exterior permanent magnet electric motor. What this means is that the motor’s electric field is engineered to create motion or, perhaps more correctly, eliminates many design imperfections that restrict motion efficiency in conventional motors. In addition, there are four rotors where other motors typically run one or two. The stator is fully encapsulated in a four-sided magnetic torque tunnel, each side having the same polarity, ensuring that all magnetic fields are in the direction of motion, and contributing to the torque of the motor. There are no unused ends on the coils, that could – potentially – dissipate energy.

Field weakening is a common technique used to increase more speed, when running at full voltage. In conventional motors this is done by reducing the field flux, by injecting extra current in the opposite direction. Current injection add speed at the expense of torque, and reduces motor efficiency. The HET uses a unique approach to field weakening by rotating one or both of its magnetic end plates out of alignment, meaning that this motor can build extra speed with no efficiency loss. Indeed, overall efficiency increases at higher speeds.

Another challenge with electric vehicles is torque pulsing (cogging) at low speed. This is experienced as jerky acceleration. The HET overlaps power pulses around the stator at low speeds. This provides high, but smooth torque as the motor accelerates. Then, the motor controller changes the motor’s operating patterns by grouping poles together as motor speeds increase. This acts like an electronic transmission, emulating six-phase, three-phase, two-phase or one-phase patterns and allowing the motor to increase speed without changing its frequency, voltage or current levels.

The HET doesn’t cost any more to manufacture than a conventional motor design, or require any specialized tooling – and it can be built without using rare earth metals (if necessary). The stator is easy to cool because liquid can run inside the copper coils.

The resulting HET motor produces two to five times the torque density, at least three times the power density and at least twice the total output of any permanent magnet motor of the same size. It also eliminates the need for DC/DC converters, gearboxes (previously mentioned), which reduces total vehicle cost and weight. Altogether this gives a 10 – 20% range increase, from a given battery pack.

These claims are backed up by comments from independent experts. However, without being an expert in the field one is unable to verify these claims, or to project the path between a disruptive idea its commercialization. Linear Labs says it’s looking to implement the motor in a scooter prototype in 2019, and a car prototype in 2021. The company sees further potential for the motors in other classes of vehicles, as well as multirotor drones, wind power generation and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC).

The most interesting aspect of this disruptive technology is to set it in conjunction with that of of the micro-battery from Bothell, Washington, USA startup XNRGI. These batteries claim to offer 3 – 6 times the energy density of current LI-ion batteries. This can be translated into either 3 – 6 time increase in range, or a significant vehicle weight reduction, or some combination of both.

For further information, visit Linear Labs and/ or XNRGI.

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Industry 4.0: Update

The Trent and Mersey Canal, at Stoke-on-Trent with narrow boat and pottery kiln. Photo: Geoff Maitland

Wedgwood, located at Barlaston, Staffordshire, England is one of the oldest ceramics companies in the world, established by Josiah Wedgwood (1730 – 1795) in 1759. In 1987, it merged with Waterford Crystal. Their assets were purchased in 2009 by New York based KPS Capital Partners, to become WWRD Holdings Limited, an abbreviation for Waterford Wedgwood Royal Doulton. The company was acquired by Finnish Fiskars in 2015.

In March 2019, Wedgwood announced that about 145 jobs (out of a total of 440) would be eliminated. Its reasoning for the firings almost seem poetic, as it looks to “reduce complexity across its operations”. Complexity is something that most companies embrace. If something is too simple, then anyone can do it, and there would be no need for that company.

Josiah Wedgwood was one of the great engineering entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, led the industrialization of the ceramics industry, and played a significant role in establishing rail and canal infrastructure.

Why Wedgwood? Yes, he was born into a family of potters, but so were many others, and they did not develop a ceramics industry. One difference was that Wedgwood contracted smallpox as a child. This left him with a permanently weakened knee so that he was unable to operate a potter’s wheel. Because of this he spent his time on the science/ engineering/ design of pottery products and production techniques.

Other ceramics companies have had similar fates. To mention only one recent example, in April 2019, Dudson, also located in Stoke-on-Trent, announced that it would be shutting down its tableware, glassware and fine china business that started in 1800, and all its 390 employees would be made redundant.

This is a reversal of what Phil Tomlinson wrote about in an article titled, How England’s broken ceramics industry put itself back together (2015). Tomlinson comments on the reversal of the ceramics industry, that: “The first factor is global demand, where particularly US and Japanese consumers have become increasingly averse to purchasing premium wares manufactured cheaply in Asia (especially China) but sold under one of the branded names from the English Potteries. With Stoke wares still perceived to be among the highest quality in the world, the “Made in England” back-stamp is an increasingly important marketing tool.”

One of the major difficulties with Tomlinson’s perspective is that wages for the majority in much of the industrialized [sic] world have stagnated the past forty years. Income has been replaced with easy credit, and manufacturing jobs have been increasingly outsourced. Now, more than ten years after the great (financial) recession of 2008, those credit cards are increasingly being maxed out. The majority no longer have the opportunity to buy products “among the highest quality in the world”, but will have to accept that they belong to the “Made in China” class of consumers.

The world is filled with prophets expecting the emergence of a fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0 as they prefer to call it. Some have even gone beyond to refer to it now as Industry 5.0. Technologies powering this include the usual components found in mechatronics, but with additional buzz words such as artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing and green tech, perhaps more accurately described as green wash.

These prophets are expecting smart manufacturing, as it is also called, to foster the return of manufacturing activities to advanced/ high-cost economies. They are looking at three areas: servitisation, personalization and makerization.

Servitisation: the symbiosis of traditional manufacturing and services.
Rolls-Royce is the poster child, and exemplifies this with ‘power-by-the-hour’ maintenance packages that replaces maintenance (a service), with maintenance-with-a-fancy-name, which is still a service.

The main point with power-by-the-hour, is that Rolls-Royce, as developer of airplane engines, has a greater understanding of their risk, and can manage it better than airlines, who are – essentially – passive recipients of the technology developed by someone else. American farmers, for example, want a right to repair agricultural equipment because manufacturers, such as John Deere, are placing all of the risk onto farmers, rather than taking upon themselves that risk, despite the fact that it is the equipment manufacturers who have designed the equipment, not the farmers.

The only fair solution to this dilemma is for the equipment manufacturers to lease equipment on an hourly basis, that includes all maintenance costs. This way, farmers can choose a solution, knowing the total costs involved. In other words a ‘power-by-the-hour’ solution for farmers would put the risk associated with agricultural equipment where it belongs, with the equipment manufacturers.

Personalization: Customised products produced in small batches or even as unique pieces which require customers to co-innovate/ co-produce with the manufacturer. The poster child here is Shapeways, which takes control over customer designs, 3D prints them, then uses third party logistics firms to transport products back to the original designer/ consumer.

Makerization involves a situation where local production (a service) is integrated with a global supply chain network to ensure that components (products) are globally available on short notice. To ensure that innovations are diffused, designs and other forms of intellectual property, should be (some would say, have to be) open source. The symbol of makerization is the 3D printer. Originally, this was invented by Chuck Hall (1940 – ) in 1983. He used photopolymers, acrylic-based liquids that instantly solidify when exposed to ultraviolet light. Since then, fused filament fabrication has been the norm, with Makerbot, Ultimaker, Reprap and now Creality becoming the poster children of the 3D era.

For personalization and makerization to work, it is necessary for (potential) consumers to know how to communicate with (potential) manufacturers. This means that they have to know how to draw. Freehand drawing is a minimum. Better still, they should learn how to use Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs, to express their intentions. SketchUp, developed by @Last, bought up by Google, then sold on to Trimble Inc., offers mainstream opportunities, as a web-based application (SketchUp Free), as non-open-source freeware (SketchUp Make), and as a paid version, (SketchUp Pro). The latter two requiring Apple OSX or Microsoft Windows operating systems. Fortunately, the open-source community has both Blender and Free-CAD (along with many other similar products), although both of these mentioned are more difficult to use than Sketchup.

There is also a granularity issue. The product made by one person/ business/ organization, can become the component of another person/ business/ organization. With the use of automated processes, labour costs become less of an issue, and component/ product prices become more standardized. Producers can then choose suppliers nearer to home, but connect with consumers both closer and farther away – at least when they offer a unique product. This offers the prospect of a more efficient form of production, with greater sustainability. See comment, below, about OEMs and tiers.

It is this kind of circular-economy efficiency that presents a real opportunity for advanced economies to pursue more evenly distributed and sustainable socio-economic growth. Enabling manufacturers to access and utilise new technologies in this way will be a key to success. Therefore, developing new industrial policies will be necessary to enable businesses to embrace Industry 4.0. New policies will be needed to bring sectors into the new age, so that they will be able to take advantage of new technologies that are emerging.

Unfortunately, not all sectors are embracing change, equally quickly. The construction industry, especially, is reluctant to modernize. Houses and other building have been 3D-printed, but that information has been ignored, possibly suppressed, by prominent business leaders. Despite this, Building on Demand (BOD) will be part of the future. A weblog post about this topic was written in 2018-07-04. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_3D_printing

A comment about OEMs and tiers

OEM stands for original equipment manufacturer. The OEM is the company whose name/ brand appears on the final product: Tesla is an OEM of electric cars, while Asus is an OEM of computers.

An OEM may produce little of the final product. Much of the time they assemble. In addition they design/ brand/ define product scope.

But to manufacture the product they use tier 1 suppliers who deal directly with OEM companies. These are often major companies in their own right. Panasonic supplies batteries to Tesla, AMD supplies microprocessors to Asus.

Tier 2 suppliers deal directly with the tier 1 suppliers, but not OEMs.

There may be additional tiers, depending on product complexity.

At some point there will be a tier 3/ 4/ x supplier that provides raw materials like steel/ wood/ plastic. This marks the end of the supply chain, except when it doesn’t because the raw material has to be grown/ mined/ or in some way extracted.

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Open Educational Resources

There are only 17 576 three letter combinations of the 26 letter English alphabet available. One of these acronyms is OER, which can mean many different things to many different people. In fact the Free Dictionary lists 31 different definitions: https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/OER

In the context here, OER refers to Open Educational Resources. OERs are educational materials that are in the public domain or provided with an open license or otherwise made freely available. It could include written materials (books), audio materials (podcasts and music), photographs, drawings and other illustrative works, or video materials.

On another level, OERs can also include software such as operating systems (Linux, developed at various locations, including Berkeley CA and Helsinki, Finland) , web browsers (Firefox, developed at Mountain View/ San Francisco CA), application software, such as KiCad (from Grenoble, France) and FreeCad (Ulm, Germany), as well as learning management systems, such as Canvas (Salt Lake City UT), LON-CAPA (East Lansing MI) and Moodle (Perth, Australia).

There is even open hardware, which more often than not consists of technical drawings and descriptions of products that can be made on 3D printers, laser cutters and other forms of automated equipment. While it can be extremely important in certain teaching situations, hardware will not be discussed further in this weblog post.

No matter how much content is stored on a bookshelf, or inside a computer, content only becomes meaningful when it is used. Thus, there has to be some form of Open Educational Practice (OEP) developed to use open content, OER, to support learning.

OpenContent was one of the first manifestations of open materials, which was developed by David Wiley (? – ) in 1998. OpenContent is licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities. The 5Rs found on the OpenContent website as a framework for assessing the extent to which content is open:

  1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)
  2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
  3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
  4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
  5. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend).

See: http://opencontent.org/definition/

Creative Commons (CC) is a global body that provides open-copyright licences, so that authors can give permission to share and reuse creative works, with the conditions the author chooses. CC began life as an American non-profit organization, founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig (1961 – ), Hal Abelson (1947 – ) and Eric Eldred (1943 – ). It engulfed Open Content in 2002. As of May 2018 there were an estimated 1.4 billion works licensed under the various Creative Commons licenses, including Wikipedia, along with over 415 million Creative Commons licensed photographs on Flickr, founded in Vancouver in 2004.

Open Content is an invitation to stakeholders, including students, to be part of the teaching process, and the co-creation of knowledge.

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Open Source is not Enough

This story from 2017 explains why it is essential that people understand who controls every product they acquire. In this particular case – about garage openers, an open source hardware solution proves to be more problematic than a closed source solution.

An attractive garage door, totally unrelated to the one mentioned in this web-log post. Photo: http://homesfeed.com/unique-garage-doors/

Denis Grisak started Garadget, which makes an open-source Internet-connected garage opener. He promoted his start up on Kickstarter.

This device uses Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle to open and close garage doors. The garage door is controlled over the internet by a mobile phone app. It also uses existing garage door hardware. The phone becomes a remote control.

On 2017-04-01, April fools’ day for some, R. Martin, a customer who purchased a Garadget opener on Amazon reported iPhone application control problems, and left the following comment on the Garadget community board: “Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iphone app, powered phone off/on – wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here…”

Yes, the language cannot be condoned, but one can understand that the customer is feeling frustration. Soon afterwards, not having gotten a response, he left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon: “Junk – DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY – iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products.”

Grisak then remotely deactivated Martin’s garage opener [sic] and posted the following on the support forum: ” Martin, [NP] The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. [NP] I’m happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I’m not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036… will be denied server connection.” NP = New Paragraph.

This denial of service breaks the trust that is necessary between a manufacturer/ vendor and its customers. I was surprised to find that the company is still in business. It certainly doesn’t deserve to be. The legality of the server disconnection can be discussed, as could potential criminality, if someone were to be injured or killed because of this disconnection. However, we will not be visiting these subjects today.

Instead, there is a basic lesson to be learned by all consumers, and that is not to place too much trust in suppliers. In particular, it means avoiding technological solutions that give over-riding control of a product to someone other than the end user. In particular, control of communications is important. It does not make any difference if the product is open-source or closed-source, if the someone else controls communication.

In its Kickstarter description, one meets the following: “In its core Garadget uses the Photon module from the great folks at Particle and benefits from all the development tools and support materials created for the module[.]” Particle makes cloud-connected microcontrollers, that are powered by Device OS, a proprietary (closed-source) operating system. Cloud is just a funny name for someone else’s server. That puts consumers at the mercy of companies that have a more direct relationship with Particle. Particle may make it easy for a startup to prototype a product. It might make it easy for that same startup to scale up production, Unfortunately, neither of those are particularly important for consumers.

Some Choices

The main reason for writing this post is not to complain about a manufacturer/ vendor, but a way of life where needs are met exclusively by shopping, and where buying something leads to unintended consequences. In this particular case it is the loss of control.

Unfortunately, not shopping is not an option. Twenty-first century people cannot make everything from scratch. At some point a component has to be bought. The size of that component may vary – It may be a property with multiple buildings, a house, a garage, a garage door, a garage door opener, a microprocessor or a … Somewhere, one has to stop, and buy something.

R. Martin lost control at the garage door opener level, and it is here that a solution can be offered. There are several ways to make a garage door opener, including some that make excellent projects for an adult (including teacher/ parent/ grand-parent) and child (12+) to work on together, at school, home or community workshop.

Raspberry Pi is closed-source, but its products offer high value for their relatively low price. Normally, I have a reluctance to use closed-source products. For example, I use Linux, rather than Windows. In this particular case, I want to show that closed-source may be the appropriate choice, because the end-user retains control.

There are several different models of Raspberry Pi as well as several different generations. These instructions are general, and may be adapted to the specific variant used. Part of my crusade is to encourage people to use compute modules, rather than Model A, Model B or Zero varieties. The reason is simple – in most projects not all of the components supplied are needed. Compute module 3+ was launched 2019-01 and will be available until at least 2026. In terms of computing, future proofing does not get any better.

At the Inderøy Tekno-workshop, one of the projects that will be worked on will be a garage opener. Currently, the idea is to combine two different projects, using the following documentation:

https://github.com/andrewshilliday/garage-door-controller

https://github.com/sp1k3ster/home-assistant/pull/1

This weblog post was originally considerably larger when it was originally written: 2019-02-03 with a time stamp of 17:28:20.

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Four Stages of Competence

The Welcome Wall at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), Burnaby, British Columbia. BCIT was actually the first institution of higher education where I felt comfortable. It was here that I realized that I could master business studies and computer science, and – in time – could attain levels of unconscious competence. Prior to attending BCIT part time, I had attended other institutions where I performed sometimes poorly, at other times excellently, but none of them suited my personality. Illustration: BCIT

According to Conger & Mullen, it was Martin M. Broadwell who first described the four stages of competence, which he referred to as the four levels of teaching, in February 1969. The four stages are:

  1. Unconscious incompetence. The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage.
  2. Conscious incompetence. Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit.
  3. Conscious competence. The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration.
  4. Unconscious competence. The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become “second nature” and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned. However, the teaching of a skill, is a skill in itself, subject to the same four stages being discussed here.

See: D. Stuart Conger & Dana Mullen “Life skills”. International Journal for the Advancement of Counselling 4 (4) (December 1981) : pp. 305–319.

Much of my working life has been spent dealing with people at stage one, at least in some fundamental areas of life. Most of the time they would probably be offended to hear this, if they had known about the four stages, and their placement. Fortunately, for them, but unfortunately for society, almost none of them have heard of this conceptual framework, and are impervious to any placement in it.

Take the question, Which is larger – an elephant or the moon? When a person answers, in all sincerity, an elephant, one knows that one is dealing with someone who has unconscious incompetence issues. Note: this incident is from real life, probably a little before 2010. To this day, the person who answered, in all likelihood still believes that an elephant is larger than the moon. Unlike a typical educational situation, I have been unable to deal with this person’s failure to understand fundamental aspects of the universe, which indicates my own conscious/ unconscious incompetence. I will leave it as an exercise, for the reader to decide which.

It is important to make these four stages known, to acknowledge the existence of unconscious incompetence, and its universal reach. There is not a living person who is not unconsciously incompetent about something.

It is also important to encourage everyone to expand their boundaries of their learning. My own favoured approach is to encourage people to learn new and totally different skills, and gain knowledge about different – even unusual – subjects, to try new things outside of their comfort zone, but within the bounds of their ethical standards.

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Constructive Environmentalism

Environmental protection is a more common phrase than environmental defence (British English) = defense (American English). Protection is passive, as in locking something away out of harms way. Defense is active, employing people and devices to deflect attacks, reduce danger and prevent injury.

In many respects, changing the word order of these phrases provides a better understanding of the intended purpose: protective environmentalism in contrast to defensive environmentalism. Unfortunately, while defense is active, it is neither assertive nor positive. Thus, there is need for more dynamic representations. Potential phrases include: assertive environmentalism followed by aggressive environmentalism, and ending up with militant environmentalism. The problem with these last two approaches is that they are too authoritarian, too dogmatic, too insistent – without nuances. Thus, none of them will be used, at least by this author.

Another approach is to use terms related to negative or positive environmentalism, where negative emphasises prohibitions, most emphatically expressed in destructive environmentalism. Unfortunately, this is the mindset of many environmentalists. It is yet another term to be avoided, despite the fact that the environmental movement has far too many adherents telling people what not to do. Instead, my preferred adjective is constructive, as in constructive environmentalism, which involves working actively and co-operatively to promote positive changes.

As an example of constructive environmentalism, it is my hope that Friends of the Earth Inderøy, will focus on five areas:

  1. Education
    1. Information about species (native and otherwise) resident in the municipality, and their impact on the environment and people.
    2. Information about the impending climate crisis, and how it will impact the natural as well as the cultural landscape. It is especially important for provide information about how to mitigate its effects.
  2. Repair and recycling
    1. Bicycles
    2. Clothing
    3. Consumer electronics
    4. Furniture
  3. Local food production/ rewilding
    1. Geodesic dome greenhouse. Norway does not produce enough plant based foods to sustain its population. Thus one of the first projects is to develop a greenhouse.
    2. Hydroponics = growing plants in water. The greenhouse will be complete with suitable lighting, that will allow year-round production of food-stuffs, using hydroponics to reduce water and mineral resources.
    3. Apiculture = bee keeping. There is a need for more bees, as well as family and bee friendly hives, for pollination, as well as the production of honey.
    4. Heliciculture = snail farming. Protein production using snails, and other invertebrates.
    5. Rewilding areas not used for food production and recreation. Living near trees, especially, improves mental health and wellbeing.
  4. Monitoring and communication
    1. Radio communication of environmental data, with monitoring facilities located at Mosvik, Utøy, Kjerknesvågen, Sandvollen, Straumen and Røra, at schools where these are available.
    2. Construction of radio and weather/ monitoring equipment to be used at the six centres noted above.
    3. Air defence. Construction and operation of drones to monitor acute situations. Equipped with sensors and video cameras.
    4. Sea defence. Construction and operation of underwater robots to monitor the environment. Equipped with sensors and video cameras.
    5. Collection of evidence. It is not the role of environmentalists to enforce environmental laws or to police violations. However, evidence that is collected through monitoring can be given to the authorities who have that responsibility.
  5. Transportation
    1. Encourage the construction of pedestrian/ cycle paths connecting residential areas with school/ commercial/ administrative centers. This will promote healthier lifestyles/ more exercise/ better mental health, and reduce dependency on motorized transport.
    2. Construction of pathways through disturbed natural landscapes (de facto cultural landscapes), encouraging exercise and wellbeing.
    3. Construction of raised pathways in undisturbed natural landscapes, to reduce the impact of these human pathways, and to prevent them from becoming barriers to native species and their natural use of the landscape.
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Made without Repression

The Human Rights Logo combines the silhouette of a hand with that of a bird, and a white thumb grabbing the bird. It is intended as a peaceful contribution towards strengthening human rights and as such is meant to be used across cultural and language borders. The Human Rights Logo was designed in 2010 by Predrag Stakić from Serbia.

For the past twenty years, most of our computers have been made by Taiwanese companies, mostly Asus and to a lesser degree Acer. Our first smartphone was also Taiwanese, made by HTC. After that, we have had two Chinese phones made by Huawei and Xiaomi, respectively. Until now, we have not paid much attention to where these products have been physically made. That has now changed, due to the treatment of Hong Kong citizens, threats made to the government of Taiwan, and the increased militarization by China. The time has come to consider whether products made in China, or by companies owned – even partially owned – by the Chinese government, are in the world’s best interest.

If the choice is between cheap consumer electronics made in a dictatorship, or more expensive goods made in a democracy, I will opt for the latter, every time – except when my selfish nature gets in the way of my selfless ideal. Even without human frailty, most choices are a bit more nuanced. Of course, there is also an issue of sustainability, where the climate crisis is a major threat to human survival.

In this post, one of the first questions to be avoided is, what is a democracy? Instead, I will simply use the Democracy Index, first published in 2006 and compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Despite its British (read English) bias, it measures 60 indicators (proxies) in five categories, from which it scores/ ranks/ categorizes 167 countries. The four regime categories are: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. For further details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

South Korea is the highest ranking flawed democracy, at #21 on the EIU Democracy Index, immediately below Costa Rica, but higher than Japan (#22), and the United States (#25). Taiwan is ranked at #32, between Belgium and Italy, and is also regarded as a flawed democracy. China is ranked at #130, and is classified as authoritarian, although not as bad as Saudi Arabia at #150, or North Korea at #167, the worst on the list.

A more long-term trend analysis of democracy is MaxRange. It offers a dataset spanning 1600 to 2015 that has over 90 000 country-year observations, and from 1789 over 600 000 observations in its monthly format. These rank political regimes on a 1 to 1 000 scale. A Swedish language summary concludes: 1. Democracy does not grow out of nations but spreads between them. Thus, all types of non-democracies can eventually become democracies. 2. Muslim countries are slower than others to embrace democracy, but this only applies during the post-Cold War period. 3. For the entire period 1789 to 2013, prosperity plays a much greater role than religion in democratization.

In an accompanying MaxRange video, mention is made that while established (strong) democracies are becoming less robust, because of political polarization, corruption and constitutional violations, more countries are transitioning away from dictatorship towards weak democracy. Between 2006 and 2014, this trend was strongest in countries in Africa and Asia, but weaker in Europe and the Americas.

Human rights are more complex. In part, this is because these rights can come in conflict with each other, and with the exercise of democratic rights. Again, I will avoid detail, and try to look at a bigger picture.

Kenneth Roth, in his essay, The Dangerous Rise of Populism: Global Attacks on Human Rights Values, appearing in Human Rights Watch World Report 2017, states: “Human rights exist to protect people from government abuse and neglect. Rights limit what a state can do and impose obligations for how a state must act. Yet today a new generation of populists is turning this protection on its head. Claiming to speak for “the people,” they treat rights as an impediment to their conception of the majority will, a needless obstacle to defending the nation from perceived threats and evils. Instead of accepting rights as protecting everyone, they privilege the declared interests of the majority, encouraging people to adopt the dangerous belief that they will never themselves need to assert rights against an overreaching government claiming to act in their name.” (p. 1)

Todd Landman, in Democracy and Human Rights: Concepts, Measures, and Relationships (2018) argues that despite many achievements, there remain tensions between conceptualisations of democracy and human rights over the degree to which one includes the other, the temporal and spatial empirical relationships between them, and the measures that have been developed to operationalize them. These tensions, in turn, affect the kinds of analyses that are carried out, including model specification, methods of estimation, and findings. He concludes that greater care is needed to specify, conceptualize and operationalize measures and inferences used in addressing democracy and human rights.

Human Rights Watch World Report 2019, writes the following about South Korea: The Republic of Korea (South Korea) is a democracy that generally respects civil and political liberties. However, it maintains unreasonable restrictions on freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and foreigners—especially refugees and migrants—continued to be a major problem in 2018.

The 2019 report does not have a chapter about Taiwan, and it doesn’t seem to be specifically mentioned in the chapter on China. Wikipedia reports the following: “The human rights record in Taiwan is generally held to have experienced significant transformation since the 1990s… [It] has a multi-party democracy. The 2000 presidential victory of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) … followed more than 50 years of rule by the Kuomintang (KMT) and marked the first transition from one political party to another in the Taiwanese history. This followed gradual democratic reforms since the 1980s and 1990s…. Freedom House rates Taiwan as among the most “Free” nations in Asia, with a 1 in both Political Rights and Civil Liberties (scale of 1-7, with 1 being the highest). This represents a significant improvement, as the 1973 rating was 6.5, rising to 2.1 by 2000.

The Human Rights Watch Report 2019 states the following about China: China’s growing global power makes it an exporter of human rights violations, including at the United Nations, where in 2018 it sought to block participation of its critics. China again ranked among countries singled out for reprisals against human rights defenders, and in March successfully advanced a Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution on a retrograde approach that it calls “win-win” or “mutually beneficial” cooperation. In this view, states do not pursue accountability for serious human rights violations but engage merely in “dialogue”; moreover, there is no role for independent civil society, only governments, and a narrow role for the UN itself.

In terms of the climate crisis and sustainability, Greenpeace USA has written The Guide to Greener Electronics, an analysis of 17 of the world’s leading consumer electronics companies in terms of their environmental impacts, and where work still needs to be done. On a scale ranging from A (best) to F (worst), Fairphone is ranked best in the class with a B. This is followed by: Apple (B-); Dell, HP (C+); Lenovo, Microsoft (C-); Acer, LG, Sony, Google (D+); Asus, Huawei (D); Samsung (D-); and, Amazon, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi (F).

In terms of democracy, products produced in South Korea are preferable to those produced in Taiwan. Yet, the reverse is true if human rights are the focal point. In terms of environmental considerations, there appear to be no real winners, with the possible exception of Fairphone. Despite this, I will be looking much closer at where products are made, the human rights situation in those countries, and their democratic index ranking.

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Tripp-Trapp

Two Tripp Trapp chairs: One 30 years old (left) and another that is new (right).
The owner’s name proudly engraved on the back of the new chair.

One of the great appeals of the Tripp Trapp chair is its use of wood, which offers its own warmth and aesthetics. So much better than plastic! On Thursday, 2019-06-13, we assembled our third – and probably last – Tripp Trapp chair. The other two chairs were purchased when our children were about six months old, in 1984 and 1989 respectively. They are now about 35 and 30 years old.

This iconic adjustable wooden chair for children was developed by a local (Norwegian) furniture designer in 1972 for a local (Norwegian) furniture manufacturer. When we bought the first chair, we were living in the same county (Møre og Romsdal) where the chair was made. Both the first two chairs were made by Norwegian workers in Norway. By purchasing the chairs, we felt we were supporting the local economy.

Fitting a globalized world, the company producing the chair is now owned by a Belgium investment company, itself fully owned by a South Korean investment company. The new chair was made in Romania. Today, I feel I am helping a foreign billionaire increase his wealth.

The name Tripp Trapp is derived from the game tripp-trapp-tresko (Norwegian) = Tic-tac-toe (American English) = noughts and crosses (British English).

Furniture design inspires myths. In the case of Tripp Trapp, it is that Peter Opsvik (1939 – ), the designer, couldn’t find a chair that could position his son at table height. Tripp Trapp was Opsvik’s response to that situation.

Years ago, we visited Opsvik’s Cylindra workshop in Sykkylven, to see his exhibition of sculptural furniture. They lacked the functionality of the Tripp Trapp, and seemed pretentious. I was not impressed. In fact, none of Opsvik’s other designs appeal to me.

The Furniture Museum, in the same village, Sykkylven, was much more interesting, for it put into perspective how and why the furniture industry developed. Two words explain it all: poverty and necessity.

The furniture manufacturer, Stokke AS started as Møller & Stokke, a partnership, in 1932 by Georg Stokke and Bjarne Møller. It was located near Ålesund, which became the locus of the Norwegian furniture industry. In 1944, it was converted to an aksjeselskap (AS) = limited liability company. Bjarne Møller sold his interest in the company in 1955, and the company changed its name to Stokke Fabrikker AS = Stokke Factories Ltd. Since 2014, the company has been owned by NXMH, an investment company based in Belgium, fully owned by NXC in South Korea. NXC is the largest shareholder in NEXON Corporation, a Korean video game publisher.

Tripp Trapp did not sell well in the beginning, but a news segment on Norwegian television in 1974 sparked interest. By 2016 Tripp Trapp had sold more than 10 million chairs.

The Norwegian Wikipedia article on the chair reports that it has been the subject of over 500 cases where other companies have made almost exact copies of the Tripp Trapp chair. One hundred and thirty of these cases have been tried in court, with Stokke winning most cases. The Supreme Court in Norway, along with other courts in Denmark and Germany, have stated that the Tripp Trapp design is an intellectual property. This means that royalties will have to be paid on the chair for the life of the designer, plus 70 years. Even if Opsvik died tomorrow, it means that this chair design will remain out of the public domain, until 2090.

Tripp Trapp has a distinctive design that is characterized by two boards (a seat and footrest) that can be placed at different heights so that the child can sit on the chair at the correct height to the table with feet firmly planted on the lower board. Since both boards are adjustable not only in height, but also depth, the chair can be adjusted to accommodate the child as s/he grows. The chair has a height of 790 mm, occupies a depth of 490 mm and has a width of 460 mm. It will support an adult weighing up to 110 kg.

All our Tripp Trapp chairs have been made from solid as well as laminated beech components. The chair is also available in natural and painted beech in numerous colour combinations, as well as in ash and oak. This last chair also had a name, Trish. engraved on its back.

The rationale behind purchasing this chair is that a dining room/ kitchen table has a fixed height, so that it is the chair that has to be adjustable. The reason the table is fixed, is that multiple people have to sit around it. In other circumstances, a table/ desk/ working surface just has to accommodate a single person. In this situation, the sitting height of the chair can be adjusted so that the user can have her/his feet comfortably on the floor. Then, a height-adjustable, sit-stand work surfaces can easily adjusted to accommodate user anatomy – elbow height especially – allowing for varied work postures, when sitting or standing.

In 2013, together with Danish furniture manufacturer Evomove, Opsvik launched a new chair he claims is described by consumers and test panels as the world’s best high chair, Nomi. Unfortunately, I am not sure that this chair is suitable for an adult. It is totally unappealing, regardless of its ergonomic and other claims.

The Nomi chair just doesn’t seem appropriate for an adult. The massive amount of plastic used in its construction, gives a vastly different aesthetic, compared to the Tripp Trapp chair. (Photo: Evomove)

At a price of almost NOK 1 900, (USD 200) in beech/ ash or NOK 2 100 in oak, for the basic model, the Tripp Trapp chair is not cheap. However, used chairs abound. There are currently 48 of them on offer in Trøndelag county on the most popular website, at an average price somewhere around NOK 500.

The most basic model of the Nomi chair is even more expensive at NOK 2 200. Its price is an outrageous USD 380 at Modern Natural Baby in Ferndale, Michigan. I could not find any Nomi chairs for sale, used.

A Timeline

We ordered the Tripp Trapp chair on 2019-06-04 at 16:45. This is acknowledged by Stokke in a separate email.

A message arrived saying that the chair had been sent, complete with engraving on 2019-05-05 at 17:20 (24 hours 35 minutes later). Oddly, Stokke was using UPS to send a parcel in Norway. This is the first time that I have ever had something from Norway sent by UPS.

A request for an evaluation of our purchasing experience arrived on the same date at 21:15 (3 hours 55 minutes later). What sort or evaluation are these people expecting? We had not yet received the product.

A reminder for this evaluation arrived on 2019-06-07 at 09:12 ( 35 hours 57 minutes later). Again, what are these people expecting? We still had not yet received the product.

An e-mail arrived saying that UPS has attempted to deliver the product on 2019-06-12 at 08:50 ( 6 days 15 hours 30 minutes after being sent). It is a very interesting email, since Trish was on scaffolding on our house painting, at this very moment, and there was no sign of any delivery vehicle anywhere.

Despite both Stokke and Bring as well as the Norwegian Post Office registering our telephone number and address to send out an SMS, no SMS or email was received to say the chair is ready to be picked up at our local postal pick-up point. Why did you ask for this information if you are not going to use it?

The chair was picked up at Co-op Extra in Straumen on 2019-06-12 at about 19:00.

A notice was received by snail mail saying that the chair could be picked up. This was delivered 2019-06-13 at about 9:00.

The chair was assembled 2019-06-13 at about 12:00. The instructions provided were adequate. Immediately after this, the chair was in use.

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Bespoke Furniture

New, inexpensive Ikea Poäng chairs and footstools, that have not been able to create sustainable employment opportunities for anyone living locally, or anyone I know, personally.

Back in 1978, newly wed Patricia and Brock wanted to buy furniture for their New Westminster apartment. Despite Ikea opening its first store in Canada in 1976 in nearby Richmond, we decided not to buy two arm chairs and a three-seater sofa there or from any of the other assortment of furniture palaces, emporiums or warehouses to be found in Greater Vancouver. Instead, we found a small, custom furniture workshop on Hastings Street, in Vancouver, and a man who could make furniture to order, or at least to his fairly unique, minimalist design. The result was no more expensive than the equivalent to be found at Ikea.

In 2019, not so young Patricia and Brock are contemplating acquiring replacement furniture for their living room. They have only had their current sofa set for about eleven years, but it is showing its age. The set was about twenty years old, when it was purchased used for about 10% of its new price. We never actually owned new living room chairs or sofas in Norway, until May 2019, when on impulse we purchased two Poäng chairs, from Ikea in Trondheim. These chairs cost about NOK 800 (USD 93) each, while the footstools cost about NOK 500 (USD 58) each. Further information about the Poäng can be found here.

Our standard living room chair purchase is a used high-backed Siesta chair, and we would pay about NOK 500 for each of them. This chair was designed by Ingmar Relling in 1965. These are becoming harder to find, at least used, and people are wanting to sell them not so much as inexpensive seating, but as examples of exclusive mid twentieth century Scandinavian furniture. Of the four we have purchased in the past, two have been given away to people who had a pressing and immediate need for furniture, while the other two have been relocated to another room in our house. The new price of our version of Siesta chairs is NOK 14 900 (USD 1 700) each. Even the footstool costs NOK 6 250 (USD 700). See here.

One of the advantages of living in a well regulated society, is the ample availability of statistics. There is a population register that records the official addresses of everyone in the country. SSB (Statistisk sentralbyrå = Statistics Norway) is able to report that the population of Inderøy was 6 804 at the beginning of 2019. Incomes and deductible expenses are public knowledge, as are many other statistics about people and their spending habits.

From the collected statistical information and other data, SIFO (Statens Institutt for Forbruksforskning = State Institute for Consumer Research) annually constructs a reference budget, which uses empirical data to show how families spend their income. A standard family consisting of 4 people spends NOK 620 each month on furniture. Almost the entire furniture budget for a year would be needed to buy a single Siesta footstool. It takes almost three years of this family’s furniture budget to buy a single Siesta chair with footstool. In other words, this type of product is beyond the economic capacity of most families, at least if it is to be purchased new.

If we combine this information with the reference budget, showing spending on furniture at NOK 155 per person per month, it means that the municipal population is spending about NOK 1 054 620 a month, or slightly over NOK 12 million a year. This is not a huge amount, and probably explains why there are no furniture stores in Inderøy.

Both the Siesta and the Poäng chairs use laminated wood as the foundation of their design. These chairs are light weight, flexible and springy, and extremely comfortable. I suspect the Poäng chair is less robust than the Siesta chair. Peter Opsvik’s Tripp Trapp children’s chair is yet another example of one using laminated wood. While I would enjoy experimenting with laminated wood in my workshop, it requires more sophisticated equipment than I have at the moment, and time to experiment, at least initially. This is not quite the time, as other higher priority projects require my attention.

Instead, I will find the time in 2020 to make a simple, three seater sofa designed specifically to accommodate people who have short upper legs. Most contemporary sofas have an excessive seating depth, that make it uncomfortable for people with short upper legs to sit. In addition, it will also be designed to fit people with short lower legs. This will be done by making the height at front edge of the cushion lower. The budget for the three-seater sofa is NOK 4 000 (USD 465).

Other adjustments may also be necessary, so my first priority is to make an plywood seating mule, where all seating dimensions can be adjusted to find the most comfortable and appropriate seating for any given person. The budget for the seating mule is NOK 1 000 (USD 116).

An aside: My suspicion is that sofas are not designed for not so much for sitting, as for snoozing, and that this is the reason why the seating depth has increased.

Opinion 1. There is no reason why residents of Macomb, Michigan or Prince Rupert, British Columbia or Charlottenberg, Sweden or anywhere else should have to rely on (large) corporations to provide themselves and their families with furniture.

Opinion 2. There is no reason why underemployed residents anywhere should have to remain underemployed, when such a large percentage of their nearby population are regularly buying furniture, and enriching large corporations, with head offices far away, such as in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania (Ikea’s USA headquarters), Burlington, Ontario (Ikea’s Canada headquarters), Delft, Netherlands (Ikea’s World headquarters).

Ikea is a franchised brand and the owner of the brand is different from its operators, so there are several head officices. The Ikea brand name is owned by the company Inter Ikea Group, they are the franchisor of the Ikea concept and is located in Delft in The Netherlands. The various Ikea stores are operated by different retailers. Ingka Group operates about 330 of the 420 stores. It is located in Leiden in The Netherlands.

Opinion 3. To retain a larger proportion of income in a local community, that would otherwise go to is to large corporations, one can start a furniture workshop with separate facilities for wood and textile work, train people in the skills needed to make furniture for themselves and/or for others, and suitable furniture designs. It should also be a place where furniture can be refurbished.