
Welcome to my home page.
Formal qualifications:
Because of the way Yahoo groups work you'll have to join the group even if you only want to read my articles (linked from the groups home page), but that's easy and free and you can unsubscribe again afterwards. I put the articles there because I ran out of free space on my own website. But you will also find lots of useful information from other swimming ponders from all over the world in the Messages section.
I am available as a consultant to help you design your sustainable home and its energy, water and waste systems, including site selection, photovoltaics, wind turbines, micro-hydro, batteries, rainwater collection and storage, on-site greywater and sewerage treatment, pest control, climate control and permaculture gardening. I can teach you how to design them yourself or I can design them for you (in cooperation with you and your architect or draftsperson).
I have developed a computer model of rainwater collection and storage which takes historical meteorological data interpolated for a given location, supplied by Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Bureau of Meteorology at The SILO Data Drill, and uses it to predict the performance of various tank sizes and roof areas. Here's an unpublished article I've written on it: Rainwater Tank Sizing.
My friend Eddie Matejowsky and I have been doing some research into solar refrigeration.
Here's my critique of The Healthy House, a book by architects Sydney and Joan Baggs.
And a description of my experiences of The
Trouble with Composting Toilets.
The Flame Tree Project -- a plan to save life on Earth, by some friends of mine.
Zometool
I helped them design the green struts that became available in mid 2000. Here's the last of my green strut designs that I made a drawing of, but my final preference for the cross-section was for a kite shape, not the keystone. I made a spreadsheet that rotates a 3D image of the strut. This became the precursor to the musical rotating 4D dekany you will find in the unusual musical scales section below. In the end they chose Baudoin and Vienne's rhombic cross-section. By the time I proposed the reduced "toe" to relieve the visual impact of the kink, prototype tooling had apparently already gone too far. But at least George Hart and I managed to convince them to make the length set that is now called "whole greens". Baudoin and Vienne insisted that the correct length set was the one now rightly called "half greens", which George Hart and I can see no need for.
I find the "Green Line (Starter)" kit to be of doubtful value, partly because it contains these unnecessary and confusing half-green struts and partly because it contains unnecessary medium and long blue-greens and not enough short blue-greens. Even with two Green Line kits you wouldn't have enough short blue-greens to build a small truncated cuboctahedron. You need 48, not 24 as it says in the back of the (otherwise excellent) Zome Geometry book. The Green Line kit also has extra white nodes that you may not need, or you may prefer to get some coloured ones instead. If you already have the "Creator" kit I recommend adding 48 of each length of whole green (G0, G1, G2) and 48 short blue-greens (Gb1). Although these are not listed on the website they can be bought separately for US$44 (as opposed to US$70 for two Green Line kits).
If you don't already have the Creator kit, the Advanced Math kit is
the way to go. The only problem with the Advanced Math kit is that it doesn't
have any short whole greens (G0). I recommend adding 48 of these (at US$9.60).
I also recommend the bundle with the Zome Geometry book.
Transputers and Occam
Reconfigurable computing
From 1994 to 1996 I was hired as a consultant by Interval Research Corporation to investigate the possible application of the following topic (boundary mathematics) to this topic (reconfigurable computing). It turned out that boundary maths had little to offer in this area. I'm glad I was at Interval in the early years. Here's a story written about it just before it was shutdown completely in April 2000: Think Tanked.
Here are some of my other computer science papers:
Learning Logic Functions Explicitly by Back-Propagation
in NOR-Nets
To dissect a mockingbird: A graphical
notation for the lambda calculus with animated reduction
(The following is still awaiting conversion to HTML)
Symtree modelling for black-and-white image compression
For an introduction to boundary notations for logic and arithmetic visit Jeff James' and Dick Shoup's Laws of Form website. This site also carries the Laws of Form bibliography, originally compiled by myself. This is a bibliography of works that reference or are related to a seminal book in the field of boundary maths, Laws of Form by George Spencer-Brown, 1969. Also see Randy Whitaker's Laws of Form page.
Check out the website of my friend Tom McFarlane for some original thinking on integrating relativity, quantum mechanics and mysticism with the help of boundary maths.
Here's a website relating to the author who has most helped me to understand
the world on all its levels, Ken
Wilber.
Some of my personal beliefs are described in my article Children and Religious Beliefs.
Richard Bach on mysticism and religion: the Pageite wars.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus
logico-philosophicus.
I was an editor of Nonviolence Today magazine from 1985 until it ceased publication in 2000.
Here are some articles I have written for Nonviolence Today:
Emotions and Aidex
A Paradox of Nonviolence and its
follow-ups: Reply to Brian Currie, Paradox
Lost
Conscientious Objection to Military Tax
Conscientious Objection to the Military
Use of my Taxes and the related article by Dr
Mark Hayes: Who Breaks a Butterfly upon
a Wheel (including my reply).