From the Road

Counting raindrops in Ireland

From the passenger seat of this rented Opal, I watch seagulls contend for strings of seaweed and scraps of bait tossed overboard from a passing fishing vessel, the only one to enter Reen Harbour this Sunday morning.

Two dozen small ships are anchored here, in the neck of this natural safe haven. Some old, rusty buckets that have seen many storms; some new, clearly more for sport and weekend fun than generating income.

Michael, the principal guide of yesterday’s kayaking tour directed my attention to an otherwise elusive, black hulled, single mast sailing boat which is, he shared, simply gorgeous on the inside. The owner purchased the hull in another country and had it towed here, to Castletownshend, Ireland for an overhaul. A master craftsman, he has meticulously refurbished the interior to a degree that was best expressed by Michael as a whistle rather than words.

It is the owner’s intend to sail to Iceland, but recent poor weather has kept him here for a few weeks more. I was shocked to learn of this intent, for the boat appears quite small, with a square stern and equally vertical bow, it does now appear to the layman’s eyes the kind of ship one would take into then open, northern seas.

I slept here last night, in this rental car, after my second guided paddle for the day. Michael, his partner Caroline, and Patrick are passionate about their line of work, as they take customers onto the water two times a day, five, six, sometimes seven days a week. They carefully interweave the experience of exploring this harbour by kayak with history, biology, and a lesson in mindfulness training.

Michael suggests that we let go of all that we brought with us. In a tag-team fashion, Michael continues, “find your child’s imagination again,” for in that place lie the ghosts of history come alive in the silhouettes on-shore and the unknown treasures in the depths below.

We paddled through pockets of brilliant bioluminescence, pockets of phytoplankton that have by day stored the sun’s energy in order to release it again at night. Caroline shared that some 90 percent of the ocean’s lifeforms are able to produce visible light. The reasons for this communication are not yet fully understood.

The wake of a kayak, the twist of a paddle, even the flick of fingertips across the surface of the water invokes a magical light show. Michael snatched a net of seaweed and demonstrated how one could invoke a cacophony of illumination, hundreds of points of light popping on and off again.

We returned to shore just after midnight, but I was reluctant to exit my boat. I could have remained adrift ’till sunrise, content to watch, to listen, to take innumerable more deep breaths. The chilled, salty air of the coastal Irish night drew me into the comfort of my borrowed comforter which this morning continued to hold me tight.

The windscreen is littered with raindrops from the most recent ladened clouds. I have rolled the side windows up and down a few times already in concert with the passing clouds. The sun has shone but for a few minutes, only to retreat again to its own safe haven, a harbour for a celestial body relatively unknown in this land.

By Kai Staats|2019-08-02T16:30:55-04:00July 30th, 2017|From the Road|Comments Off

Faster, easier, better.

What is this fascination with faster, easier, better?

I have heard it said that biology is lazy, that all creatures pursue that which requires the least energy expenditure. Perhaps entropy is the true guiding force, the omnipotent, intelligent designer, the deity which laughs when we grow to despise all but the very softest lap of luxury.

Have we not learned from our ancestors? Civilizations collapse when wealth exceeds labor.

How readily we forget, how easily we fail to recall, it is a challenge which grants us a sense of accomplishment, not arrival to the destination unencumbered.

By Kai Staats|2017-06-10T00:56:07-04:00June 10th, 2017|Critical Thinker, Humans & Technology|Comments Off

When I sell my vision

Research has its moments of upset, intrigue, and thrill.

But for this past six months these moments are lost to the effort of writing.

Proposal followed by proposal, I am a salesman with a briefcase full of ideas. Some new. Some old. Some revised. Some bold. If my visions for a better tomorrow are a good match to your funding of today, then we will enter into a partnership in which I am paid to investigate, experiment, and to play.

By Kai Staats|2017-06-10T00:12:27-04:00May 31st, 2017|Ramblings of a Researcher|Comments Off

Where Superstition welcomes the wary mind

Superstitions, by Kai Staats

As summer presses spring into a cooler memory, I find balance between the increasing heat and discomfort in the city with nights and mornings on the edge of the Superstition Wilderness.

Just one hour from downtown Phoenix, no matter if I arrive at dusk, well after sunset, or midnight, I am always eager to step out of my Subaru onto the rock of the turn-out where I frequently car-camp. The sound of crickets welcomes me to sleep. Birdsong wakes me to the rising run and immediate warmth that it brings.

With daytime highs at 105F, the nights here remain cool. Boots on my feet by 6 AM, I walk cross-country, navigating between needles, hooks, barbs, and stones easily overturned.

With every step comes a surprise, something new to discover and observe. I join wrens, hawks, lizards, chipmunks, rabbits, spiders and coyotes on the trail. There are homes made among the rubble of old mine shafts, in the hollow spaces of saguaro, and spanning the paths in hope of catching a small passer by. I fetch a light stick to tease a spider from its home, but it retreats back into its den when my large figure looms. A pair of hawks ride thermals, changing direction with effortless adjustment to the feathers on the very tip of their wings. A quick dive and recovered altitude suggests a potential meal escaped their talons, for now.

The only sounds are those of the breeze, a distant jet, and the rustle of needles, leaves, and stones under lizards feet as creatures scurry at my approach, or to stay cool against the warming sun. The aromas of creosote and cactus blooms mix with the ash of last night’s fire and I am, for this morning, at peace.

By Kai Staats|2019-02-18T01:29:46-04:00May 24th, 2017|At Home in the Southwest|Comments Off

The Ultimate Camping Subaru

Your Office in the Woods
When we think of car camping, we often picture a tent or open air sun shade, cooler, cook stove, folding chairs, and mountain bikes atop an SUV or minivan. Car camping allows ready access to beautiful, even if not terribly remote places.

But for me, car camping is what I do when I need to quickly get away from the insanity of the city, even if I continue working. With 4G mobile data, the speeds are sufficient for email, web research, multi-channel conference calls, and the upload of draft film edits. So, why sit in a stuffy office in a stuffy building with stuffy people when you can instead be working from your favourite campsite?

Exactly. So, all we need is power.

To work from the primary car battery is not a good idea. Yes, it functions, but standard lead acid batteries are designed for short, high amperage discharge to start your car, not the continuous drain of a low-wattage cell phone charger or laptop power adapter. While AGM batteries are becoming more common, and deliver both the power to start your car and consistent supply for electronics, concern remains for monitoring your battery to make certain you can start your car again. If you are all alone in the middle of the National Forest, running your car every 2-3 hours might be ok. But if in a campground, the fumes are annoying, the sound obnoxious. Why not go solar?!

This photo essay is how I converted my 2000 Subaru Forester into the ultimate camping car with a continuous supply of 110V power, day or night, supplied by 100% renewable nuclear fusion—the sun.

Parts
Each of the following are available from Amazon, save the battery and 12V power socket which I purchase from a local auto parts dealer:

Renogy 100 Watts 12 Volts Monocrystalline Solar Panel
Renogy AK-20FT-10 10AWG Adaptor Kit Solar Cable PV with MC4 (F/M) Connectors
Renogy TOOL-MC4 Solar Panel Mc4 Assembly Tool
Morningstar Sunsaver TrakStar 15 Amp MPPT Charge Controller 12V/24V
Renogy Solar Panel Mounting Z Bracket Set of 4 Units RV Boat Off Grid Roof
[brand] 12V / 7AH AGM battery
12V power socket with mounting bracket
Morningstar SI-300-115V-UL 300W pure sine wave inverter
Household 110V A/C power socket and toggle switch to trigger the inverter ON/OFF

Design & Planning
What these photos and this essay do not convey is the amount of time spent in measuring, sketching, measuring again, and planning the layout of this project. One does not just drill holes in the roof a car, even a 16 year old car, without some careful consideration.

I likely spent equal time in Ace Hardware, working with one of the helpful employees to find the best way to accomplish the task at hand, as I did implementing each task.

This project required 3-4 hours a day for 5 days, or roughly 20 hours start to finish.

If you can find a way to bring the cables from the solar panel into the car interior without drilling holes, by all means do this. You thereby avoid potential water damage and of course, drilling holes in the roof of your car.

On my prior 2003 Outback Sport, I was able to do this because the solar panel I applied was lower wattage and therefore used thinner electrical cables. With this 100W panel, I stuck with the suggested 10g wire which with its thick insulation was pinched by the opening and closing of the rear hatch. So, drill holes I did.

If you must drill holes, remove all interior panels required to lower (or remove) the ceiling panel, allowing access to the metal of the roof, where the holes will be drilled. In selecting the location of the holes, I took into account the cross bar which I most certainly wanted to avoid, the placement of the panel and where the power leads terminate, and the physical constraints of the water proof adapters employed for the task.

I used a multipurpose hole saw which adapts to a drill bit. Let is spin at nearly full speed, press lightly, and be ready to catch the whole contraption before it punches through if you did not remove the interior panel. Else, you may accidentally drill through that too.

I experimented with a number of water tight fittings at the hardware store before I discovered these nifty right-angle adapters which have both a removable plate for helping the wire make the bend, and a water tight fitting which when turned, closes around the wire at the end. The silicon rubber ring is a separate purchase. I had to ask the manager to look when the clerk was unable to find what I needed. Ultimately, they had the right one to both fit over the threads of the threaded fitting and seal to the roof of the car. I did not use any adhesive, and it is 100% water tight against the car wash, garden hose, and weather.

Of course, you want to select the hole saw to match the diameter of the threaded nut as close as is possible.

You will also note that I used a metal hack saw and 120 grit sand paper to reduce the depth of the threaded nut to a minimum profile so as to not press against the upper (hidden) side of the roof panel, allowing the thick solar cable to bend over the widest arc possible.

The final installation is both professional in its appearance (if you consider plumbing parts on the roof of your Subaru to be professional), low profile for minimum air resistance, and water tight (see above, left). Once the cables are routed above the ceiling panel and down the interior of one of the two rear beams, you are ready to replace all the interior panels.

The mounting of the solar panel will be specific to your vehicle. I found a way to use the existing roof rails (above, right) in which I drilled holes and inserted bolts from the bottom up. Using lock washers, I was able to fit thread dowel nuts onto the bolts, creating a surface onto which the panel brackets rest. When the wing nut is tightened, the panel is completely snug, not the slightest vibration.

All of this took a significant amount of careful measurement, so take our time, check all measurements twice, and do it right the first time.

Mounting the panel itself was a bit tricky. I used the brackets ordered along with the panel, but in a way they were not intended. Designed to attach to the side of the panels, I drilled new holes along the ends, again carefully measuring so as to fit perfectly to the bolts which press through the roof rails. The only messy effort is the need to make the holes in the mounting brackets slightly oblong so as to accommodate the angle of the panel when it lowers onto the bolts.

The hinge serves two functions: to allow the raising and lowering of the panel for work on the wiring or cleaning the roof without removal, and to angle the panel to face the sun. I now carry a short wooden stick which readily props the panel to approximately 45 degrees. Eventually, I would like to attach a metal “kickstand” with a set of angles built-in.

The final product is solid, low-profile, and even allows for full use of my roof rack, unobstructed.

In the rear-left (driver side) cargo pocket I drilled holes to route the positive (+) and negative (-) electrical cables from the panel into the interior space, to the AGM motorcycle battery. The charge controller is mounted to the wall of the pocket (which was a bit tricky, given that no glue would stick to the vinyl). I used T-nuts designed for wood working, applying 3 small screws per T-nut but careful to not strip the forced threading in the thin plastic wall of the pocket. Again, this is specific to my installation. The new 12V power socket was affixed using the same T-nuts and a total of 6 small screws, 3 per T-nut.

In the rear-right (passenger side) cargo pocket I mounted a standard, household A/C socket and toggle switch connected by 18g wire to the Morningstar 300W inverter mounted on a slab of wood (cut to fit neatly in the bottom of the plastic bin) just above the spare tire. The wire from the inverter to the socket is standard 14g as required in home wiring.

The end result is A/C power from either side, or both, whenever I need it.

The AGM motorcycle battery is ample (without the sun up) to provide one full charge of my Apple PowerBook Pro. Seems low, but when I run the numbers it makes wattage sense. It is incredible how much power is stored in Lithium-Ion batteries but at 1/10 the physical volume of the AGM. For now, it serves its purpose perfectly, providing power to get through the evening hours and into the night with my laptop and cell phone charging, a low-wattage LED work light. By day, I have all the power I need.

I now have a completely separate electrical system which leaves my car’s primary battery to start the car. Should it ever die, I simply run a cable from the original rear power socket to the new socket I installed, positive-to-positive, negative-to-negative (parallel wiring) and I can charge the dead battery from the rooftop solar PV panel.

By Kai Staats|2018-03-27T16:42:31-04:00May 23rd, 2017|From the Road, Humans & Technology|Comments Off

SIMOC – Visions of a village on Mars

“Some stories only make sense in retrospect, the looking back giving foundation to where we now stand. This is the first of what will hopefully be a series of essays to describe the path from a Good Sam’s campground in 2011 to in some way, helping develop the first community on Mars.” –kai

It starts long ago, beneath a stair case in the basement of our family home in Columbus, Nebraska. Friend Jason Zach and I covered the underside of the stairs with plywood, cardboard, a dead monochrome CRT, and myriad electronic components, wires that stimulated Radio Shack switches, piezoelectric sirens, and LEDs and wires that went nowhere. In that spacecraft, we journeyed across the galaxy, venturing to the shores of distant planets whose inhabitants had never before seen humans. Jason was an expert marksman, never afraid to attack. I was keenly interested in obtaining samples, studying the cultures, and welcomed Jason to cover my back.

Many years later, while camped at a Good Sam’s, in Seabrook, New Hampshire on August 2011, I returned to that child-like sense of belonging to a distant place and time. As described, I believed I gained some insight as to how isolated communities might evolve on space stations, Mars and asteroid outposts, even among the stars.

Later that same year, I returned to Holden Village, an isolated village in the Cascades of Washington State. In those months late in the year, the retreat of summer saw the last of the guests depart down the sixteen miles to Lake Chelan. Those of us who remained, counted by dozens, shifted our daily routine from that of a more finite task to general support of the village. Files had to be stoked in order to heat the buildings, snow shoveled, and the water driving the hydro-electric generator kept from freezing, else the electricity would fail.

In those crisp, cold, mostly dark winter days that followed, Holden was a true Village. While a hierarchy of command remained, we became more egalitarian, sharing in the responsibilities of maintenance, even survival should a heavy snow storm bury the pathways and building exits or make impossible a medical evacuation. It was then that my interest in village (communal) living was again stimulated, and the journey to Mars re-ignited.

For five months in 2012 I worked as a photo journalist and documentary filmmaker in Palestine, where a sense of isolation from the world was applied not a mountain village, but the confines of geopolitical boundary that has the power to contain people from birth to death. I witnessed first-hand how the skilled craftsmen and capable artisans were the backbone of an economy of trade and negotiation in place of the familiar currencies of exchange. I learned how much individuals depend upon each other, especially in the challenging times.

I was building a sense of what it meant to live with the challenge of an isolated environment.

On an isolated ranch in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado in 2013, I lived for six months—up to six weeks without face-to-face contact with another human being. In those months I gained from the challenge and ultimate reward of true isolation; a chance to discover who I am without the influence of others, without opportunity to attribute my success nor place blame on the actions of others.

In 2014 I joined MarsCrew134 at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) as the seventh member of an isolated, Mars analog crew. We lived for two weeks in the confines of a simulated Mars lander, a two-story vehicle just large enough to contain individual sleeping quarters, two airlocks, kitchen and crew commons, toilet and shower, lab, and minimal storage. We departed the structure only while wearing a spacesuit, the visor scratched and needing replacement; the radios dodgy at best. The crew came from six countries, representing seven nationalities and more than a dozen languages spoken. It was not always easy, and at times far from fun, but we made the best of those two weeks, focused on our research, data collection, and surviving the simulation. We came away friends for a life-time, even now traveling far to see each other again.

It was then that I became invested in a study of village life. In part because I realized that is where I felt most at home; in part because at least for the first generation, that is how humans will once again live when we finally place boots on Mars.

This week I submitted a proposal to the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) for the research and development of a mathematical model of a scalable, isolated model of an off-world community (SIMOC).

Now we wait …

By Kai Staats|2017-12-21T15:46:40-04:00May 21st, 2017|Ramblings of a Researcher|Comments Off

Over the Edge

When we live in fear, we see only failure.
When we fail, we protect ourselves.
When we are protected, we feel afraid.

And we spiral down,
  down,
    down,
      until we have pushed the one thing we hold dear

        o
       v
      e
      r

      t
      h
      e

      e
      d
     g
     e

By Kai Staats|2017-05-09T01:27:19-04:00May 9th, 2017|The Written|Comments Off

DIY

Today I spent the entire day working with my hands. This is the first time I have done so in many years, for without a workshop and tools, my creativity has primarily been expressed in the digital world of film and computer programming.

In my parents’ driveway and garage, the same driveway and garage where I spent every evening and weekend through high school and college tinkering, inventing, and building, today I worked to mount a 100W solar PV panel to the top of my Subaru Forester and install a battery, charge controller, inverter, and A/C power strip. Another day to complete the project, it was a welcomed respite from time at my computer.

The kind of satisfaction that comes with dirt beneath the fingernails, a scraped knuckle or two, and the taste of sweat when the sun hits noon cannot be duplicated in any other way. My brother joked, “Oh?! Are you going DIY now?” knowing full well how much I scoff at that term.

I find the return to Do It Yourself a much needed counter movement to the automation of just about everything. Yet at the same time, I find it somewhat humorous that simply doing things on your own—from the repair of a washing machine to the preparation of food now requires a 3-letter acronym. Funny. Sad. Interesting too.

My grandparents’ generation knew nothing of automation, outside of the vehicles they purchased with parts manufactured and assembled. Everything they consumed, save bread, was grown on their land. All buildings constructed, repaired, maintained with their own hands. No one was hired to do the work. And no one was rewarded for a DIY job well done. It was the norm, the necessary foundation on which everyone involved in agriculture lived.

My parents’ generation did not desire to work as hard as their parents, to be encumbered to physical labor in the same way. Packaged, disposable goods combined with increasingly sedentary jobs in city centers reduced not only the time spent, but the skills associated with doing it yourself.

And now, come full circle, we recognize what was lost in that transition from too much physical labor to too little, for the kind of gratification that comes from having accomplished something on your own, with your own two hands, cannot be replaced by purchasing the equivalent product. It never will.

By Kai Staats|2020-08-15T13:59:02-04:00April 15th, 2017|Uncategorized|Comments Off

How to Install TensorFlow on OSX 10.11

If you are coming to OSX from Ubuntu, the installation of applications can go smoothly, as Apple intends, or leave you beyond the threshold of frustration, in a dismal state of frustration, rage, and despair. The instructions at the TensorFlow website are correct, if everything goes as planned. But as noted, “Since a native pip installation is not walled-off, the pip installation might interfere with or be influenced by other Python-based installations on your system,” for me, this became a real problem.

I tried pip, then virtualenv, then Anaconda only to find that none of these worked, for various reasons I won’t go into here. The key issue with pip was that the ‘Collecting …’ stalled, it would hang there, for minutes, even hours (as I waited, and waited, just to make certain). When I canceled the process (CTRL-C), I noted a lockfile in the process output.

It was not until my associate Iurii M. had time to assist me, that he discovered a work-around, using pip with the ‘–no-cache-dir’ extension in order to force it to bypass the locked file (which we never did locate). Then, the collection just worked, as it should, and for the most part, it was installed and running in roughly 30 minutes, including the time required to open an NVIDA developer account and obtain the CUDNN license.

So, here’s how the installation of TensorFlow on OSX goes …

Install Homebrew
$ brew update
$ brew upgrade
$ brew doctor
$ brew install python

* always run brew and pip from user session, not root
Upgrade pip install:
$ pip install -U pip
Install TensorFlow
* use pip with cach disabled (to keep terminal from stalling):

$ pip install –no-cache-dir -I tensorflow-gpu
Install CUDA
$ brew install Caskroom/cask/cuda
Install CUDNN (from NVIDIA)
https://developer.nvidia.com/cudnn

$ Download cuDNN v5 (May 27, 2016), for CUDA 8.0
Unzip & Install
1. select location for unzip
2. move items proper location:
  mv -v lib/libcudnn* /usr/local/cuda/lib
  mv -v include/cudnn.h /usr/local/cuda/include
Test TensforFlow
$ python
$ import tensor flow

By Kai Staats|2017-09-05T07:03:12-04:00April 6th, 2017|Ramblings of a Researcher|Comments Off

Who is driving whom?

I am greeted by an orchestral movement with the press of the power button.

I press the pedal and I am warned to apply my seatbelt.

I loose my hands from the wheel to momentarily scratch my chin,
and the wheel corrects, keeping me from collision.

I shift into reverse, and the beep is profound.

I come too close to the curb,
and the dashboard is alight with an immanent sound.

I am safe. I am safe. I am … safe from myself.

And I wonder, who is driving whom?

By Kai Staats|2017-04-10T11:17:30-04:00March 29th, 2017|Critical Thinker, Humans & Technology|Comments Off