"The Stone Age Electronic Calculator" Rereleased

[Cameron]

I have made some updates to the page as well as created a mind map for easy workflow.
http://www.stonecalculate.com/tiki-index.php?page=saec mind map

Here are the updated instructions:
I am trying to make a manual how to redesign the electronic calculator to become sustainable in a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Which means that all things must be made in the wilderness from scratch and be transportable since hunter and gathers were nomadic. This may include smelting ore, building tools, soldering, make copper wire, creating magnets, building generators, building semiconductors etc. Of coarse some of these things might not be needed in the new design but the only way to find out is for those who are willing to collaborate to make it happen. The possibility of designing a working model will not be known unless someone else has weighed out all the possibilities involved in remaking an electronic calculator in this environment, so please don't turn this into a discussion about whether or not it is possible. Although I am sure there were always be an unqualified response like "its impossible". Questions and comments about the feasibility of the project will just slow down the process of the project. It is just a matter of enough people contributing their knowledge to the project. If you really feel like you need to vent about this issue go here.http://stonecalculate.com/tiki-view_forum.php?forumId=12 I promise someone will answer you.

The other question is why should this be done and my answer is because always pursuing a path based on immediate necessity can only provide us with limited knowledge. If we question long term solutions for larger problems there will be new knowledge in it. It is exactly the improbable places and situations that provide real new knowledge.

Do not assume! That hunter gather refers to a time frame it is a way of life. The functionality comes as a secondary to the purpose of creating the manual with an alluring narrative. But somehow we cannot have one without the other.


p.s. an abacus is not electrical, a slide rule is not electrical and a mechanical computer is not either, if you are going to suggest a vacum tube then how to we get it small enough to transport?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pvm4nF1Yb0&feature=related

 

[British Red]

Sheesh

Did you not get the hint last time one of your threads got locked?

Since you seem to be too lazy to do your own research, and your one trolling thread got locked, what on Earth makes you think this one will go any better?

You have done nothing to fill your own site and nothing to contribute to this one.


Red

 

[gregorach]

Oh God, not this again.

It can't be done. You need agriculture in order to have enough productive surplus to allow some people to specialise in order to even begin developing metallurgy, never mind the precision machinery you need to even begin thinking about producing electronics. It's a completely stupid idea, as anyone with even the vaguest notion of what's involved will tell you. You might as well try and build a fusion reactor from pine cones.

 

[Cameron]

Hey! Britsh Red. I thought I would give things another shot the thread went in the wrong direction I realize that now but I am hoping that bushcraft will give me another chance. I have since been active on many other forums and there is alot of interest as well as there are some more permanent members on my site.

I have been talking for a long time to other people about the project and I see myself in a better position to explain myself as well as I have done alot of work on the site. Did you not look at the mind map? I don't want to make a manual per se I want to create community- Not just around the SAEC but around the idea of creating more understanding around what hunting and gather societies could be now if we employ contemporary to technology to them This is a strictly off the grid scenario.

But i never got to get any feedback on the troll comment which is a shame and also a motivation for return.

Bushcraft was one of the first places that I made a post and it was also the forum(even though it did not have alot of members)
Let me get this straight I did not come back for a fight Red.

 

[Humpback]

My money's on 15 posts

 

[British Red]

Look Cameron, there are loads of "off grid" communities out there already, as well as primitive technology communities, survival communities etc.

I have never yet heard them calling out for a silly little arty boy who is too lazy to get of his backside and learn how to do things for himself

I will engage with you when you have published say fifty articles on material you have researched yourself....

Many members here have done far more than that. The community I co founded has thousands of pages of original materials on everything from forging to butchery to firemaking

But then everyone makes the effort to contribute to the community.

Even on this forum, I have published dozens of original pieces of work - from sharpening, to firemaking to water purification.

Why? Because a community is about giving as well as taking. What have you given to this community Cameron? Nothing! You are just just spamming the site trying to recruit people to do your work for you.

I find that repellant

Red

 

[C_Claycomb]

29-03-2009, 02:28
Hey C,

I have recently redeveloped my website and understand you position. I was hoping if you have any authority if you could help me re-release it. I am fairly new at this thing and I do believe it does benefit me in terms of lending creditability to my art practice but I do believe it has great benefits for all of society. I repect your decision to close the other forum and was hoping that you could check out the new site and see if you think it is worth a re-release on your site.

Thank you in advance for any help you could offer,

Sincerely,

Cameron MacLeod

Hi Cameron,

Sorry to have taken so long to reply. I had something written, but it was lost when my browser hung. I saw that Toddy had put your post up in the Resources area, which is what was suggested before and thought that it would probably satisfy your request.

I have had a look at your new site and I admit that it still makes no sense to me. I am an engineer, so to me the task of creating a manual to go from stone-age to computer age is a technical exercise. I can see no art in it, even less than I can see in some of the things on display in modern art galleries. Perhaps you consider it art if it merely generates discussion? If that is the case, and if you merely have to show your tutors that your project has generated discussion, even if it hasn’t produced any useful technical output, then I believe that you are being duplicitous (lying and deceptive). I am not saying that you are, but it is easy for someone with a technical perspective to see it that way.

This is why, I believe, you had so little serious interest from the members here. This site is full of practical minded people and like me, they look on your stated aim as a technical project of almost mind boggling scope and complexity.

While I do not write instruction manuals as such, I do write technical reports, repair schemes and assembly instruction to accompany technical drawings. I have some idea of what it takes to write instruction detailed enough to allow even a reasonably experienced factory fitter/technician to produce parts and assemblies according to a new design.

The task that you have outlined would take hundreds of thousands of man hours, if anything that is low-balling it. Lets say that you get some folk to contribute, maybe each one spends 5-10 hours writing up some section or other, say about how to go from stone age to bronze age. Bearing in mind that many students can stretch such a subject to an entire thesis its probably insanely optimistic that 5 hours work will encapsulate all the knowledge that is needed. So these people have invested all this time in the project, what happens when you finish your course. The project won’t be over. Will you keep supporting it, updating the site, encouraging people, organising, paying the bills? For how long? In five years time will you still care? What happens when/if it all bogs down? All those people who have made inputs early on will have wasted their time. You might say that they haven’t, but if they have all joined up with the expressed purpose of completing such a manual, and it isn’t completed, how are they to feel?

Technology builds on technology. It isn’t enough to have someone from a modern engineering factory tell you how they make semi-conductors. You need someone to tell you how they made the machines that made the machines, that made the machines, that made the machines that made the semiconductors. Certainly you can imagine that with a manual for advanced knowledge you would be able to leapfrog some of the developmental steps that have actually been passed through, but there is a limit to how much of that you can do, and you need experts to tell you how far you can go.

Imagine being shot back through time to the Napoleonic War. You know that artillery would be WAY more effective using brass shells, mercury fulminate primers, picric acid propellants, rifled barrels, oil filled recoil dampers, pneumatic tyres, optical range finders and mechanical ballistic computers – among other things. You could even have a manual telling you how to make such a gun, the shells, the propellants and the aiming system. It still wouldn’t help anyone win the war. The metallurgy, tribology (lubricant technology), bearings technology, chemistry, accuracy of measurements and general infrastructure would not be capable of producing the design, even if you turned up with the 500mm high stack of blue-prints.

The people you talk to today, who may be very enthusiastic, may well spend the time needed to populate your site with information about how circuit boards are etched, and how copper is mined and refined, but it will all be done with the technology that is available today. Most people don’t even think about the number of technological layers needed to supply even their most basic wants in the Western world. So in several years you will in all likelihood have a patchwork of data points; a scattering of information, but no clear thread that will truly bind it all together. So much of how people did things in the passed has been lost that it isn’t even a matter of just finding the right person (though that won’t hurt). There will be a lot of hypothesising about how someone might be able to do something to short circuit the path that has been taken, or to do something important which makes a bridge from one endeavour to another, but having listened to amateurs try to figure out the solutions to problems before now, I can tell you that there will be a lot of incorrect assumptions and unworkable schemes.

So you see, I think that as a technical exercise it is doomed. I do not see that it has a point, or will be useful to the world at large. For instance, you would probably need fewer man hours to work out solutions to the problems of energy consumption, pollutions, sewage treatment or public transport, all of which would be of more immediate and lasting benefit, but maybe a little too prosaic? The Calculator might help you with your course, but if that is the only reason you are asking people to give up their valuable time, I think it rather selfish.

Regards

PS. You may quote me on any of the above, if you so wish.

 

[C_Claycomb]

Oh, and the thread is locked and you are banned pending decision by fellow moderators. You have a perfectly good thread in the Resources area:
http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=39794
but here you are again trying to drum up support for your project.

If they lety you back, and you want to have input from folk here, my advice would be to take part in bushcraft related discussions, place a link to your site in your signature and have a readily locatable reciprocal link back to BCUK on your site...and not persist in trying to push this issue until people have got to know you better.