Proporzione Divina

How to Convert ODT Files into JPG Files Using GIMP

2011-09-18T04:46:00.000-07:00

LibreOffice: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base
http://www.libreoffice.org/

GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program
http://www.gimp.org/

How to Convert ODT Files into JPG Files Using GIMP
Bevin Chu
September 17, 2011
Taipei, China

Did you know you can convert your LibreOffice/OpenOffice Open Document Text (ODT) files (or MicroSoft Word DOC files) into GIF, JPG, PNG, or TIF files, using GIMP?

Say you have an ODT (or DOC) file that you want to convert to an image file, such as a JPG (or GIF, PNG, TIF) file. Say you want to display it on one of your webpages as a visible image, rather than as a downloadable file.

All it takes is two easy steps.

Step 1: Using LibreOffice/OpenOffice Writer, open your ODT file. Export the ODT file as a PDF file using the "Export as PDF" command under "File."

Step 2: Using GIMP, open the just created PDF file. Save the PDF file as a JPG file using the "Save As" command under "File."

That's it. You're done!

You now have a JPG file that will immediately be visible on your webpage upon uploading.

No need to throw away good money for commercial conversion software. No need to risk security leaks by uploading sensitive information to an online conversion utility. Instead, make use of open source software, such as LibreOffice/OpenOffice and GIMP.

Something this elementary ought to be easy to find. But oddly enough it wasn't. I drilled down pretty deep before finally stumbling across this information.

"GIMP, the GNU image manipulation program, is basically the open source version of Adobe Photoshop. These two programs are frequently compared to each other due to their similarities. However, GIMP was not designed to be a Photoshop clone. Adobe Photoshop retails for around $450. Gimp is FREE. This is a very robust image editing program that allows even the beginner to do some pretty amazing tricks."

-- Bright Hub Review

A Note to MicroSoft Word Users: I use LibreOffice because it is Open Source Software. From what I have read online, the process is similar for MS Word.

How to Convert ODT Files into JPG Files Without Additional Software

2011-09-17T03:44:00.000-07:00

LibreOffice: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base
http://www.libreoffice.org/

How to Convert ODT Files into JPG Files Without Additional Software
Bevin Chu
September 17, 2011
Taipei, China

Did you know you can convert your LibreOffice/OpenOffice Open Document Text (ODT) files (or MicroSoft Word DOC files) into GIF, JPG, PNG, or TIF files, using only the software already on your PC?

That's right. No need to download and install specialized software useful for no other purpose.

Say you have an ODT (or DOC) file that you want to convert to an image file, such as a JPG (or GIF, PNG, TIF) file. Say you want to display it on one of your webpages as a visible image, rather than as a downloadable file.

All it takes is two easy steps.

Step 1: Using LibreOffice/OpenOffice Writer, open your ODT file. Export the ODT file as a PDF file using the "Export as PDF" command under "File."

Step 2: Using LibreOffice/OpenOffice Draw, open the just created PDF file. Export the PDF file as a JPG file using the "Export" (not "Export as PDF") command under "File."

That's it. You're done!

You now have a JPG file that will immediately be visible on your webpage upon uploading.

No need to throw away good money for commercial conversion software. No need to risk security leaks by uploading sensitive information to an online conversion utility. No need to even download additional freeware.

Something this elementary ought to be easy to find. But oddly enough unless you happen to search for it under "videos," it isn't. For the record I drilled down pretty deep before finally coming across this information at YouTube, of all places.

In the event LibreOffice/OpenOffice Draw has trouble reading your PDF file, use GIMP to convert your PDF file to a JPG file. See my blog entry: "How to Convert ODT Files into JPG Files Using GIMP."

A Note to MicroSoft Word Users: I use LibreOffice because it is Open Source Software. Based on what I have read online, the process is similar for MS Word DOC files.

Giant CT 102 to Front Wheel Drive Low Rider Conversion

2011-03-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

Giant CT 102 to Front Wheel Drive Low Rider Conversion
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
March 19, 2011

Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike

In previous posts I spoke of converting my Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike into a DIY LWB Mid Racer, Low Racer, or FWD Delta Trike.

An alternative might be the following DIY FWD Low Rider Conversions by Robert Horn, of Englewood, Colorado, USA.

Robert Horn's Super Chopper
http://www.ratrodbikes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=22701&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=0

Very few DIY bike designs are as ingenious as these F'Lowroller variants. They are remarkable for their economy of design, and deserve greater recognition and exposure than they have gotten.

They are clearly superior to many better known DIY bike designs that call for the fabrication of many components from scratch. They require only one donor bike, not two or even more. They ingeniously move the bottom bracket / chainstays / rear wheel to the front, and the front fork / front wheel to the rear. The original handlebars can be reused as well. Waste not, want not.

They are more aesthetically pleasing than many DIY bike designs, which often look very "ghetto." The F'Lowroller variants look futuristic and elegant -- almost like factory prototypes debuted at an industrial design expo by some big name bike manufacturer.

Robert Horn's New F'Lowrollerhttp://bikerodnkustom3.homestead.com/gallery291.html

Robert Horn's F'Lowrollerhttp://bikerodnkustom3.homestead.com/gallery167.html

See: ROHORN Mind Expanding Cycles
http://www.rohorn.com/

Giant CT 102 to Front Wheel Drive Delta Trike Conversion

2011-03-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

Giant CT 102 to Front Wheel Drive Delta Trike Conversion
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
March 18, 2011

Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike

In previous posts I spoke of converting my Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike into either a DIY LWB (Long Wheelbase) Mid Racer or Low Racer

An alternative might be the following DIY Front Wheel Drive Delta Trikes.

These trikes are exceptionally easy to construct. Their front drive / rear steering configuration is simplicity itself. It obviates the need for either the complex steering geometry normally found on the front wheels of tadpole trikes, or the custom made hubs normally found on the rear wheels of Rear Wheel Drive Delta Trikes.

Homebuilt Recumbent Trike, by Charlie Little of Mansfield, Arkansas, USA
http://www.manytracks.com/Recumbent/clittle.htm

Front Wheel Drive Delta Trike, by Bill "Yoda" Irvine of Phoenix, Arizona, USA
http://www.recumbents.com/wisil/misc/eliasohn/bill_irvine.htm

Front wheel drive and three speeds, rear wheel steering, owner uses it to commute five to six miles daily

Minnesota HPVA FWD Ice Racers
http://members.bitstream.net/~dkrafft/icebike/icerace.html
http://members.bitstream.net/~dkrafft/icebike/icerace.html

These ingenious ice trikes simply flip the rear triangle of a DF bike upside down. Presto! Instant FWD assembly for delta ice trike. Equally applicable to delta street trike, such as the ones shown above.

Lean Steer Recumbent Trikes, by Robert Horn of Englewood, Colorado, USA
http://www.rohorn.com/

These are not quite as easy to build. Therefore I would probably not attempt to build them. But they are beautiful looking trikes well worth studying for their ingenious lean steer design.

2003 Version

2007 Version

Giant CT 102 to LWB Low Racer Conversion

2011-03-16T15:45:00.001-07:00

Giant CT 102 to LWB Low Racer Conversion
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
March 17, 2011

Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike
In a previous post I spoke of converting my Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike into a DIY LWB (Long Wheelbase) Mid Racer.

An alternative might be the following DIY LWB Low Racers.

These LWB low racers are constructed with a single length of straight tubing. A number of builders have used 1.5" x 1.5" x 0.125" (3.8cm x 3.8cm x 0.3cm) square steel tubing. This single section of mild steel tubing connects the bottom bracket to the rear triangle, and forms the main chassis of the bike. Relatively little fabrication and welding is required.

On a LWB Low Racer the cyclist is seated very low to the ground, almost as low as on a tadpole trike. The low seating height minimizes injuries in the event of a spill.

Leo's Big Low Rider
http://www.manytracks.com/Recumbent/leonardi.htm#bikes

Homba's Long Wheelbase Low Racer Recumbent Bicycle
http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-long-wheelbase-low-racer-recumbent-bicycle/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVqNFPh32w4&feature=player_embedded
http://homsher.com/bike/mantis/img/

Head tube

Head tube

Remote head tube with steering linkage

Remote head tube with steering linkage

View from Cockpit

1.5" x 1.5" x 0.125" square steel main chassis tube, welded to bottom bracket

Seat Back Support

Underside of seat and chain idler

Bolted connection between chainstays and main chassis

Giant CT 102 to LWB Mid Racer Conversion

2011-02-19T18:54:00.000-08:00

Giant CT 102 to LWB Mid Racer Conversion
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
February 20, 2011

Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike

Three years ago I bought a Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike. Now that I am forsaking upright bikes for recumbent bikes, I am seriously considering converting it to a DIY LWB (Long Wheelbase) Mid Racer.

Doing so would put the seat height dramatically lower than it is now, making the bike far safer in the event of a spill.

If I do go ahead, I will convert it to something similar to the following DIY LWB Mid Racers.

Recumbent Share Archive
http://www.manytracks.com/Recumbent/RecumbentShare.htm

Recycled Recumbents
http://sites.google.com/site/recycledrecumbents/home

Atomic Zombies Extreme Machines
http://www.atomiczombie.com/gallery/lwbbents1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GobWsort58A&feature=related

Bill Meacham's Aluminum Recumbent, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA

Louis's Homebuilt Recumbent, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Brian Bolton's Yellow LWB, Canada

Rob Szymanski's Recycle, USA

Steve's Tourmaster, USA

Joey Wallace's Black Widow, USA

Larry's Yellow Bent, Canada

Dan Peterson's Green Machine, USA

The above DIY LWB Mid Racer Recumbents are variations on the DIY Atomic Zombie TourMaster, shown below.

Atomic Zombie DIY TourMaster LWB Mid Racer, Three Views

The Atomic Zombie TourMaster is a variation on the Easy Racers Gold Rush of 1986, which won the DuPont Prize and set a world speed record as the first bicycle to exceed 65 mph.

Easy Racers Gold Rush LWB Mid Racer

The Easy Racers Gold Rush in turn, is a variation on the Jarvis Bicycle of 1902.

Jarvis Bicycle of 1902, possibly the first LWB Mid Racer Recumbent

As the saying goes, "There is nothing new under the sun."

Performer Low Racer COMP Limited Edition

2011-02-19T03:24:00.000-08:00

Performer Low Racer COMP Limited Edition
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
February 19, 2011

Performer has just introduced a new model, the Performer Low Racer COMP Limited Edition
http://www.performer.com.tw/2010/user/product_2.php?wp=05&sno=00377

The company website provides three photos of the bike, but no data.

The photos indicate that it has disc brakes instead of calipers, and a different wheelset than the Low Racer Caliper. The front tire in particular, appears much wider than the 20x1 tire on the Low Racer Caliper.

Update as of March 10, 2011, by company representative George:
Low Racer COMP Limited Edition
alloy frame with alloy fork (carbon fork not strong enough for disc brakes) / SRAM Attack shifter / Shimano XT rear derailleur / Truvativ Elita 52/39/30 crank 170 mm integrated / 11-34 cogset / sealed bearing wheelset / Avid BB5 disc brakes / Kenda K193 20x1.25 (32-406) 100 psi front / Kenda K193 26x1.25 (32-559) 100 psi rear / 1060 gm FRP seat standard / 620 gm CF seat optional 6000 NT
MSRP 42,500 NTD

It also has a slick red, white, and black color scheme, strikingly similar to that on the Giant Rapid 3 Sport Bike, rather than the monochrome color scheme of the Low Racer Caliper.

Giant Rapid 3 Sport Bike Color Scheme

Recumbent Bikes vs. Trikes

2011-02-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

Recumbent Bikes vs. Trikes
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
February 5, 2011

Bikes vs. Trikes

I recently decided to switch from uprights to recumbents. My first choice for a recumbent was a SWB low racer.

Upright Bike, Diamond Frame (DF) Configuration, possibly a Felt

In a previous article I outlined my reasons for choosing a SWB low racer. The primary reason of course, was seating height. On a SWB low racer, one sits only 36 cm or so off the ground, depending on the make and model one is looking at.

Recumbent Bike, SWB Configuration, Performer Low Racer Caliper
http://www.performer.com.tw/2010/user/product_2.php?wp=05&sno=00067

But after I posted that article, a couple of experienced bent riders suggested that rather than switch from upright bikes to recumbent bikes, I should consider making an even more radical switch, from upright bikes to recumbent trikes.

Recumbent Trike, Tadpole Configuration, Performer JC-70 CM Sports Trike
http://www.performer.com.tw/2010/user/product_2.php?wp=05&sno=00059
http://www.flyingfurniture.com.au/shop/product/performer-sports-trike-cromoly-jc-70-cm-27-speed

They suggested that although my injuries might be milder falling from a recumbent bike than from an upright bike, that I should avoid injuries altogether, by switching directly to recumbent trikes.

They may have a point.

Geometry 101a

As anyone who ever took a basic geometry course in high school knows, two points determine a line, and three points determine a plane.

Two points determine a line

Three points determine a plane

What does this have to do with cycling safety?

Why everything.

Bikes: Two Point Support

The reason bikes fall over, is that they are supported at only two points, the front and rear wheel contact patches. Therefore if either of the two contact patches experiences a sudden loss of traction, the bike falls sideways and unceremoniously dumps its rider on the ground.

Please note that I am addressing only falls resulting from a loss of tire traction on the pavement. In a lifetime of bike riding I have never fallen because I "lost my balance." Therefore that is not an issue for me.

As I pointed out in great length in my previous article, "From Wedgies to Bents," a bike rider's injuries will be far greater falling from a "conventional" upright bike, than from an "unconventional" recumbent bike.

This is especially true if the upright bike rider is taller than average in height, and must set his seat at a considerable height above the ground for proper leg extension. My own DF seat height must be set a full meter above the ground. Had I been riding a SWB low racer during my recent spills, my injuries would have been trivial by comparison.

This was true when I wrote it yesterday, and it is just as true today.

Trikes: Three Point Support

But what if one could avoid falling altogether? What if instead of merely minimizing one's injuries from a fall, one could eliminate injuries altogether, by not falling in the first place?

How would one go about avoiding falls completely?

The only way to do so, would be to switch from bikes to trikes, rather than from bikes to bikes.

As noted earlier, the reason bikes fall over, is that bikes are supported at only two points, the front and rear tire patches. Therefore if traction is suddenly lost at either of these two contact points, the bike falls sideways and dumps the rider unceremoniously on the ground.

This can never happen on a trike. The reason a trike can never fall over, is that trikes are supported at three points, at all three front and rear tire patches. Therefore if traction is suddenly lost any of these three contact points, a trike will not fall sideways. The trike may skid sideways, but it will remain upright.

Trikes: Rollovers are Possible

The only time a trike will not remain upright, is when it changes direction so abruptly that it "trips" sideways on one of its wheels and rolls over. A trike cannot fall over, but it can trip over. The bad news is that this is possible.

The good news is that even when it does happen, the recumbent triker is still better off than the upright biker.

The recumbent triker falls from a seat only 23 cm or so above the ground.

The upright biker, on the other hand, falls from a seat a 100 cm above the ground. What's worse, the upright biker's shoulders and head are situated another 50 cm above the seat, i.e., a whopping 150 cm above the ground.

The difference between falling 23 cm and falling 150 cm may mean all the difference in the world.

Convenience Issues

Another consideration is convenience. Unfortunately a tadpole trike would probably be less convenient than a SWB low racer bike.

I live several stories up in a multistory condo. I'm not sure how convenient it would be to schlep a tadpole trike up and down a cramped elevator. I suppose I could tilt it up vertically on its single rear wheel, while pressing the two front wheels against the rear wall of the elevator.

This maneuver would probably be easier with a SWB low racer bike than with a tadpole trike. A SWB low racer bike is narrower and lighter. It could probably be tilted up vertically on its rear wheel more easily than a wider and heavier tadpole trike.

It might even be easier with a delta trike. A delta trike has two rear wheels. Tilting a delta trike up vertically on its two rear wheels, while pressing the single front wheel against the rear wall of the elevator would probably be easier.

A narrow SWB low racer bike would probably be easier to ride through narrow alleys crowded with pedestrians than either a tadpole or delta trike. I would be less likely to find myself backed up in traffic on a SWB low racer bike, than on either a tadpole or delta trike.

Further investigation is needed.

Where Does that Leave Me?

So where does that leave me?

Basically it leaves me at "Let's wait and see."

I am still recovering from the soft tissue trauma to my left knee. I am still giving the suspected fracture in my left scapula time to heal. Several months of physical therapy are still required. I have plenty of time to mull over my next step regarding "human powered vehicles."

My decision to cease riding "conventional" DF bikes has already been made. That decision is firm. My days of DF riding are over.

My decision to begin riding "unconventional" recumbents has also been made. That decision is also firm. My days of recumbent riding are about to begin.

The only question that remains now, is "Recumbent bikes, or recumbent trikes?"

Performer Low Racer Caliper, a SWB low racer
http://www.performer.com.tw/2010/user/product_2.php?wp=05&sno=00067

Performer JC-70 CM, a tadpole sports trike
http://www.performer.com.tw/2010/user/product_2.php?wp=05&sno=00059
Similar model, reviewed by Utah Trikes
http://www.utahtrikes.com/TRIKE-PERFJOURNEY.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXwcywqv8yY

Perhaps one of each?

The Most Ingenious DIY Bike I've Ever Seen

2011-02-09T18:08:00.000-08:00

Microbent CLWB Recumbent, by Fred Fincher, USA

The Most Ingenious DIY Bike I've Ever Seen
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
February 10, 2011

Lately I've been surfing the web for DIY bike designs.

I have a 26" diamond frame urban commuter that I would like to convert into a LWB mid racer recumbent, along the lines of the Easy Racers Javelin or Rans X-stream 26.

But as I surfed the web, I stumbled across the above compact long wheelbase (CLWB) recumbent, converted from a diamond frame child's bike.

It has relatively little to do with my own DIY conversion requirements. But it is perhaps the most ingenious DIY conversion I've ever seen, and therefore useful as a source of inspiration.

What makes this particular DIY conversion so ingenious?

1. This DIY conversion makes full use of the existing bike design. Rather than laboriously fabricate new parts in a machine shop, it makes full use of every part already on the bike.

2. The crank assembly, for example, is merely a section of EMT, welded to the head tube. It extends forward along the axis of the top tube, just far enough to accommodate the rider's legs.

3. The seat bottom rests directly on the top tube, and is the exact same length as the top tube. The seat back begins exactly where the top tube and seat tube meet. The seat back supporting struts attach to the existing rear luggage rack attachment points. The seat back, seat stays, and seat back supporting struts form a perfect triangle.

4. The USS (under seat steering) solution is perhaps the most ingenious feature of all. The builder simply welded two pieces of EMT onto the front fork, creating handlebars for direct steering. Because the DIY conversion uses a child's bike that is short in overall length, the handlebars fall directly below the rider's hands. This eliminates the need for any complex steering mechanism. No muss, no fuss.

5. The DIY conversion requires only a single donor bike. No need to accumulate two or even more donor bikes before beginning the conversion process. Everything on the single donor bike is used. Nothing is wasted.

6. Because the DIY conversion uses a child's bike, the completed bike is low to the ground. This makes it safe in the event of a spill. The rider sits a mere foot or so above the ground.

Recumbent Highs and Lows

2011-02-07T17:34:00.001-08:00

Barbara Buatois and her Performer Low Racer, at the Finish Line for the 2010 Race Across AMerica (RAAM) in Annapolis, MD

Recumbent Highs and Lows
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, Republic of China
February 5, 2011

I recently penned an article on recumbent bicycles, entitled "From Wedgies to Bents." In it I explained why I was abandoning traditional diamond frame bicycles, and moving to recumbents.

In this article, entitled "Recumbent Highs and Lows," I share my personal views on the relative merits of high racers, mid racers, and low racers; and explain why the SWB low racer is the recumbent of choice for me.

Recumbents are commonly classified according to two criteria.

The first is bicycle length. Recumbents are classified as either short wheelbase (SWB) or long wheelbase (LWB).

The second is bicycle height. Recumbents are classified as either high racer, mid racer, or low racer.

In theory, 2 x 3 = 6 configurations are possible. In practice, only three configurations have gained commercial appeal.

Those three are:

SWB high racers such as the Bachetta Corsa
LWB mid racers such as the Rans X-stream
SWB low racers such as the Optima Baron

SWB High Racers

Bachetta Corsa, SWB high racer 700C/700C, seat height 26.25" (67 cm)
http://www.bacchettabikes.com/bikes/performance-bikes/corsa

The frame of the SWB high racer is simplicity itself. It is a perfectly straight tube. One can hardly get any simpler than that. As a result, the SWB high racer is as light as it can possibly be. The chainline is also as straight as it can possibly be. It is any wonder SWB high racers such as the Bachetta and Carbent have so may devotees?

Alas, they are not my cup of tea. Why? Because I have no desire to fall a full 67 cm before hitting the concrete pavement below.

LWB Mid Racers

Rans X-stream 26, LWB mid racer 559/559, seat height 20.5-21" (52-53 cm)
http://www.ransbikes.com/Xstream_26-N.htm

Next to the SWB low racer, the LWB mid racer is my favorite bicycle configuration. The LWB mid racer positions the rider's buttocks close to the ground, but by keeping his back relatively straight, positions his head reasonably high off the ground, providing him with an excellent view of the road around him.

I would buy a Rans X-stream 26 in a flash, if only it would fit into my condo elevator. The biggest drawback of the LWB mid racer is its sheer size. LWB mid racers are 8 feet long behemoths! If one wants a LWB mid racer, one really needs to live on the ground floor or have a garage.

SWB Low Racers

Optima Baron, SWB low racer 20"/26", seat height 13.5" (34 cm)
http://www.optimabikes.com/optima-baron.html

For me, the SWB low racer is the most desirable of all bike configurations.

The biggest obstacle to sustained speed on a bicycle is air resistance. The SWB low racer configuration minimizes air resistance. That makes the SWB low racer the fastest of all bike configurations, bar none. For sheer adrenaline pumping speed, nothing else comes close. Not just downhill, but even on flats or gentle rollers. Except when climbing, the SWB low racer simply leaves other bikes in the dust.

But for me blinding speed is merely icing on the cake. Some SWB low racer owners barrel down steep mountain roads at speeds approaching 100 kph. I have no intention of doing anything so reckless.

For me, the main attraction of the SWB low racer is not maximum speed, but maximum safety, specifically during a fall.

As I noted in "From Wedgies to Bents," as long as one rides a bicycle, one will eventually fall. The question is not whether. The question is when.

And when one falls, the severity of one's injuries will be directly proportional to one's height above the ground. The cyclist who has positioned himself low to the ground before he falls, will minimize his injuries when the eventual fall occurs.

The SWB low racer may be the most practical configuration for many condominium dwellers, who must schlep their bicycles up and down building elevators.

A Fundamentally Flawed Automobile Design

Imagine that you had designed a performance sports car that contained a fundamental design flaw. What would you do? Change it and eradicate the flaw forever? Or would you persist for the next 50 or so years in making the best of the bad design?

You would have probably gone for the first option. If you had gone for the second then you would probably now be producing a car like the Porsche Carrera 4S - for indeed, that is exactly what German performance sports car manufacturer Porsche did.

Stemming from the Porsche's first sports car, and the first car Porsche produced in it's own right - the Porsche 356 - the Porsche 911 has maintained the basic "rear-engine, rear-wheel drive" layout concept that is a basic flaw in any car design, let alone a high performance sports car.

From "Porsche - A Performance and Sports Car Legend"
http://www.germansportscars.com/porsche.htm

The "classic" rear engine, rear wheel drive Porsche is a fundamentally flawed automobile design.

The engine should never have been positioned behind the rear axle in the first place. A tail heavy, rear engine, rear wheel drive automobile is like an arrow that has been launched backwards, with the fletching in front, and the arrowhead in back. The arrowhead naturally tries to get out front, and will do so at the very first opportunity.

Oversteer, the bane of tail heavy, rear engine, rear wheel drive automobiles such as the Porsche, VW Beetle, and Chevrolet Corvair

A Fundamentally Flawed Bicycle Design

By the same token, the conventional upright bicycle is a fundamentally flawed design. The conventional diamond frame bicycle positions the rider vertically, in an upright position, above the pedals, maximizing the risk of injury in the event of a fall.

Conventional Upright Layout is Vertical

         /head
           |
           |
    seat/buttocks
         |
       |
pedals/feet

Sabrina Bianchi, Second Place Finisher in 2010 RAAM, on a Diamond Frame Road Bike, possibly a Felt

By contrast, the recumbent, an inherently safer design, positions the rider horizontally, in a reclining position, behind the pedals, minimizing the risk of injury in the event of a fall.

Unconventional Recumbent Layout is Horizontal

pedals/feet --- seat/buttocks --- headrest/head

Barbara Buatois, First Place Finisher in 2010 RAAM, on a Factory Custom SWB Performer Low Racer Recumbent

Bicycles: Mechanical Analogs of the Horse?

So how did the upright layout for bicycles come about in the first place? Why was the rider positioned vertically, above the pedal, diamond frame style, instead of horizontally, behind the pedal, recumbent style?

Mongol Warrior

A good guess would be that primitive bicycles were mechanical analogs of the horse. Their designers probably had mental images of horses and riders dancing in their heads. In fact, primitive bicycles were referred to as "hobby horses." In China, bicycles are colloquially referred to as "tie ma" or "iron horses."

Pedestrian Curricle, better known as a "Hobby Horse"

It is not surprising that early bicycle designers put riders astride their creations in the same position as equestrians astride their horses.

That said, other bicycle designers were already "thinking outside the box." This early recumbent, circa 1902, was obviously the direct ancestor of today's Easy Racers and Rans LWB mid racers. Not all bicycle designers were mental prisoners, trapped within the upright bicycle paradigm.

Early Recumbent, circa 1902, designed by one H. Jarvis

Easy Racers Ti-Rush LWB mid racer, note the uncanny similarity to Jarvis' design

Time for a Fundamental Change

The rear engine, rear wheel drive Porsche, and the conventional diamond frame bicycle, are fundamentally flawed vehicle designs that ought to be replaced by fundamentally sounder, inherently safer designs.

The rear engine, rear wheel drive automobile layout should be replaced by the front engine, rear wheel drive layout; mid engine, rear wheel drive layout; or other, more fundamentally sound layout.

The conventional diamond frame bicycle layout should be replaced by the LWB mid racer layout; SWB low racer layout; or other, more fundamentally sound layout.

From Wedgies to Bents

2011-01-28T08:12:00.001-08:00

Champion cyclist Barbara Buatois of France, riding a Performer Low Racer Caliper, completed the 2010 Race Across AMerica (RAAM) nearly 20 hours before the next two fastest entrants in the Solo Female Under 50 category. The second and third place entrants rode conventional diamond frame road bikes

From Wedgies to Bents
by Bevin Chu
Taipei, China
January 27, 2011

The Decision

I recently decided to switch from "wedgies" to "bents," i.e., from conventional diamond frame bicycles to recumbent bicycles. The move will be permanent. The move will be one way. I do not intend to ride conventional diamond frame bikes, ever again.

The Reason

What drove me to such a drastic decision?

The short answer is, two bad spills on a conventional diamond frame bike, less than half a year apart. The first spill necessitated three months of physical therapy. The second, which occurred only two weeks ago, will probably necessitate an even lengthier period of physical therapy.

It's a shame, really. Under different circumstances, such a decision would not have been necessary.

The fact is I rode conventional diamond frame bikes most of my life, with nary a mishap. I never took any spills because I was riding on First World street surfaces, in major cities such as Washington, DC, Houston, New York, and Los Angeles.

Neither of the two spills I took recently had anything to do with riding skill. In neither case did I "lose my balance." Yes, I am considerably older than I was in junior high school. Yes, I have slowed down quite a bit, thank you very much. But I can still track stand until the light turns green with no problem.

No, the spills were caused not by pilot error, but by Taiwan's woefully substandard street surfaces.

Both times I was riding in a straight line at walking speed. Both times the front tire skidded sideways and dropped me on the pavement in a split second. Far too fast to react.

The first spill was caused by an abnormally low "curb" only two centimeters high. My front tire glanced against this nearly invisible "curb" and abruptly skidded sideways. A split second later I was down. I fell on my right side and injured my right knee and right elbow. My right elbow swelled up grotesquely, necessitating three months of physical therapy.

This spill was followed by a second spill, less than half a year later. The second spill, which occurred only two weeks ago, was caused by glazed ceramic tiles on the sidewalk. My front wheel rolled onto the icy slick tiles, and immediately slipped sideways. A split second later, I was down. This time I fell on my left side and injured my left knee and left shoulder. This time my injuries were even more severe. My left knee swelled up to the size of a cantaloupe. X rays of my left scapula show a wavy horizontal line that is probably a fracture. The doctors are uncertain. The injuries will necessitate an even longer period of physical therapy.

Left Knee: No fracture, but considerable soft tissue trauma

Left Shoulder: Possible horizontal fracture in scapula

The second spill was for me, the final straw.

Diamond Frames: Not for Tall People

The conventional diamond frame bike design has an intrinsic defect: It is unsuitable for tall cyclists.

The conventional diamond frame bike positions the cyclist above the pedals. This means that a tall cyclist is forced to sit at a stratospheric height above the pedals. The tall cyclist may fall as much as two meters before impacting the unyielding street surface below. The damage inflicted to the tall cyclist's bones, ligaments, tendons, and muscles by a fall from that height, is not hard to imagine. As the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

The World's Tallest Man on a Conventional Diamond Frame Bicycle

A fall from a diamond frame is a fall from a stepladder

The recumbent bike, especially the low racer recumbent, minimizes the probability of such serious injury, through intelligent design. Instead of positioning the cyclist above the pedals, the recumbent bike positions the cyclist behind the pedals. The cyclist is not forced to sit precariously high above the ground. Instead he stretches himself out comfortably, horizontally, behind the pedals.

In the event of a spill on low racer recumbent, even a tall cyclist falls less than half a meter before impacting the pavement. The difference between falling two meters and falling less than half a meter, may mean the difference between a fractured scapula and a mild case of road rash.

Barbara Buatois on her race winning MIT (Made in Taiwan) Performer Low Racer Caliper

A fall from a low rider is a fall from a beach chair

Diamond Frames: Tomorrow's Penny Farthings?

Yesterday, penny farthings were viewed as "normal" bicycles. Diamond frame bicycles, a novelty, were known as "safety bicycles" because they allowed the cyclist to sit closer to the ground.

Fall from a Penny Farthing

Today, penny farthings are viewed as quaint relics of the past. Diamond frames are viewed as "normal" bicycles, as "real" bicycles. Recumbents are viewed as oddities, ridden only by 50 something geeks with goatees. But recumbents are for all intents and purposes today's "safety bicycles," because they allow the cyclist to sit even closer to the ground than diamond frames.

Fall from a "Safety Bicycle" or Diamond Frame

Caption: WHAT'S IN A NAME? Old Gent (lately bitten with the Craze). "And that confounded man sold me the thing for a safety!"

Tomorrow, will recumbents be viewed as "normal" bicycles? Will diamond frames be viewed as quaint relics of the past, alongside penny farthings? Stranger things have happened.

Evolution according to Wedgie Advocates

Evolution According to Bent Advocates

Speaking for myself, the answer is clear. I was once unfamiliar with recumbents. I had no idea what they were. But once they caught my attention, I had to find out.

So I researched them. I compared them to conventional diamond frames, point by point. It was soon clear that next to the recumbent, the diamond frame was a hopelessly outdated design configuration.

The diamond frame ought to be replaced by the recumbent, asap, for the same reason that the penny farthing was replaced by the "safety bicycle."

The Bent: A Better Design that is Paradoxically Easier to Build

Compare the frame of a short wheelbase (SWB) recumbent with the frame of a conventional diamond frame upright.

The frame of a SWB recumbent is the essence of simplicity. It is hard to imagine anything simpler. It is nothing more than a single tube with three bends. A hole near one end forms the head tube. A split at the other end forms the chain stays. The result is a conceptually elegant, technically sophisticated design safer, more ergonomic, and more aerodynamic than any diamond frame one can imagine.

Frame of a SWB Recumbent

The frame of a conventional diamond frame upright, by contrast, is a complex assembly consisting of eight separate tubes that must be precisely held in place and laboriously joined together. The result is technically obsolete, less safe than a recumbent, and is the antithesis of ergonomic comfort and aerodynamic efficiency.

Frame of Diamond Frame Upright

The only thing the diamond frame has going for it, is familiarity and force of habit. They only thing the recumbent has going against it, is unfamiliarity and a lack of knowledge.

Bents are Wedgies Turned 90 Degrees

On the other hand, conceptually speaking, the recumbent bike is merely a conventional diamond frame bike rotated 90 degrees.

Take a wedgie, which is configured like this:

        /head
        |
seat/buttocks
        |
bb/feet

With the bottom bracket (bb) as rotational center, rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, like this:

bb/feet --- seat/buttocks --- headrest/head

And you have a bent!

Therefore much of the emotional resistance to bents is really unnecessary.

My Diamond Frame Past

When I was in junior high, my dad bought me my first bike, a discount store "English Racer" with upright handlebars, full metal fenders, three speed Sturmey Archer gears, and dual handbrakes.

In senior high I bought a discount store 10 speed with downtube shifters and centerpull brakes.

A year before graduating from college I bought a Peugeot PX 10.

A decade later I bought a Pinarello 10 speed with Campy derailleurs, downtube shifters, and centerpull brakes.

Three years ago I bought an entry level Giant urban commuter. I deliberately chose a cheap bike so I wouldn't have to worry about theft.

Substandard Street Surfaces and Diamond Frame Bikes: An Unacceptable Combination

Woefully substandard street surfaces are one thing. Defects inherent in the conventional diamond frame design are another.

When I rode conventional diamond frame bikes in the US and Canada, street surfaces were consistent and predictable. Because the street surfaces never precipitated any spills, the defects in the conventional diamond frame bike design were never an issue. After all, as long as a cyclist never falls, potential injuries remain just that, potential.

But after moving to Taiwan, the woefully substandard street surfaces here have made this defect in the diamond frame design a very real issue. For this 187 cm (6'-1 1/2") cyclist at least, the two add up to an unacceptable combination.

And since it is considerably easier for the Average Joe to switch bicycles than to persuade City Hall to repave the streets, the solution is clear. Stop riding wedgies, and start riding bents.

My Recumbent Future

I have now decided to sell my diamond frame urban commuter and buy a low racer recumbent.

I will probably buy the Performer Low Racer Caliper, a reasonably priced but high quality short wheelbase low racer made by Performer, a Taiwan based bike manufacturer. It is not the lightest low racer made, but at 11.9 kg (26 lbs) it is light enough. And I can always opt for the carbon fiber seat option to reduce the weight even more.

I looked at the highly praised Dutch low racers as well. Challenge, M5, Optima, Velokraft. But the prices were pretty high, several thousand Euros, more than I could justify spending. One bike, the Raptobike Low Racer, was very reasonably priced at 1100 Euros. But even though it was OEM'd over here, I would still have to pay a hefty import duty. This struck me as one of those times when it really does make more sense to shop locally.

Barbara Buatois on her factory modified Performer Low Racer. Notice the open cockpit with Superman handlebars instead of the stock praying mantis handlebars

Barbara Buatois with Performer Low Racer Caliper YouTube clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTFNd_iKPio

Performer Low Racer Caliper product homepage
http://www.performer.com.tw/2010/user/product_2.php?wp=05&sno=00067

Low Racer Caliper
alloy frame with carbon fork / SRAM Attack shifter / Shimano XT rear derailleur / Truvativ Elita 52/39/30 crank 170 mm integrated / 11-34 cogset / sealed bearing wheelset / TRP road brakes /
20x1.00 25-451 front / 700x23c 23-622 rear / 100 psi
MSRP 39,500 NTD

Performer Low Racer Caliper YouTube clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jDWJHK3LkY&feature=related
Performer Low Racer Folding Front Wheel Drive

Performer Low Racer variant, distributed by ActionBent

Are Low Racers "Too Low To Be Seen?"

I take exception to the claim that low racers are "too low to be seen," and that riders of low racers have only themselves to blame if the driver of an SUV runs them down.

I'm talking of course about "conventional" low racers with seats approximately 36 cm off the ground, and not the ultralow one of a kind machines used to set speed records. Those have seats only a few centimeters off the ground.

Performer High Racer. Seat height is 51 cm. Note that rider's head is higher than driver's head in parked subcompact. Performer Low Racer seat height is 36 cm, or 15 cm lower

A "conventional" low racer is about the same height as many sports cars, wheelchairs, and diamond frame child bikes. The driver of an SUV can hardly argue that sports cars, wheelchairs, and children riding diamond frame child bikes are "too low to be seen."

The driver of an SUV can hardly argue that drivers of low slung sports cars, users of wheelchairs, and children on diamond frame child bikes "were too low to be seen," that they "took their lives in their own hands," and wash his hands of responsibility for running them down.

The notion that the road belongs to automobile drivers alone, and that other road users are merely nuisances who ought to get out of their way, must go. Slow moving vehicles such as bikes must never be ridden on limited access superhighways. But all taxpayers have the right to use a nation's surface roads.

Enjoy 121 Ergonomic Office Chair

2010-06-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Enjoy 121 Ergonomic Office Chair
by Bevin Chu
June 21, 2010

Several years ago I purchased a cheap, no name office chair at Costco for $1,300NTD ($40USD).

Yesterday, it finally gave up the ghost. The plastic backer for the padded seat back snapped in two.

So I sprung for the $7,000NTD ($220USD) Enjoy 121 Ergonomic Office Chair, Enterprise Edition, illustrated above and below. The company also makes a Deluxe Edition, which has more adjustments and sells for $12,000NTD ($380USD).

The Enjoy 121 is a mesh style ergonomic chair. It uses no foam rubber on either the seat or the seat back. It is patterned after the $38,000NTD ($1200USD) Herman Miller Aeron, the great grand daddy of mesh style ergonomic chairs.

Sure, for $7,000NTD I could have bought five of my previous chairs.

But to keep matters in perspective, I could have splurged and purchased an Aeron. For the price of a single Aeron I could have bought five Enjoy 121s, or 25 of my previous cheap, no name office chairs.

Viewed from that perspective, I feel downright frugal.

The Enjoy 121 Ergonomic Office Chair is comparatively cheap, but for me it's more comfortable than any number of more expensive ergonomic office chairs.

That's because I have a longer than average torso. When I sit in most chairs, my upper back is usually unsupported. If the chair features a headrest, it is usually not supporting my head, but jabbing me in the upper back. Nothing "ergonomic" about that!

I could have blindly thrown money at the problem, but how much money I was willing to plunk down really wasn't the main issue. The main issue was that the seat backs on many ergonomic office chairs, even expensive ones, simply could not be raised high enough.

Not so the Enjoy 121. It has an exceptionally wide range of seat back height adjustments, making it suitable for users as short as 160cm and as tall as 190cm.

Problem solved.

The Enjoy 121 Ergonomic Office Chair can be found behind the check-in counters and boarding gate counters at Hong Kong International Airport (HKG), aka Chek Lap Kok Airport 赤鱲角機場, designed by famed British architect Norman Foster.

Presumably those charged with furnishing this world class air terminal with office chairs subjected them to a rigorous selection process before purchase.

FYI: I purchased my chair from Haw Jou System Furniture:
http://www.ergohuman.com.tw/index.php?m=0&t=9

Dupe Flip-Flops: Minor Flaw in Otherwise Excellent Product

2010-01-20T17:24:00.000-08:00

Note the gap melted into the ring portion of the logo using a hot wire. This prevents the logo from acting like a suction cup and sticking to smooth floors

Dupe Flip-Flops: Minor Flaw in Otherwise Excellent Product
by Bevin Chu
January 21, 2010

Dupe flip-flogs are excellent products. I have a couple of pairs in different colors.

But they have a minor flaw. The circular logo on the underside of the sole, near the heel, acts like a suction cup on smooth floors.

Occasionally it will stick to the floor momentarily before releasing. It's not so serious that one will trip. But after a while it becomes irritating.

I have solved the problem by using a hot wire to melt a gap in the ring portion of the logo. See photo.

Dupe flip-flops are excellent products. The materials are high quality. And except for this minor flaw, the design is as well.

I have notified Dupe of this minor flaw. Hopefully they will address it one way or another.

Fixies are Impractical, Perverse Throwbacks

2010-01-06T21:38:00.000-08:00

Specialized Globe Roll 2, in Fjord Blue

The Specialized Globe Roll 2 is a fixie. But to its manufacturer's credit, it comes with a flip-flop hub and front and rear handbrakes, allowing quick conversion to a single-speed. This makes the Roll 2 a far more versatile and sensible machine, rather than the cyclist's equivalent of a hairshirt. A beautiful piece of industrial design. MSRP US$830

Trek Soho S, in Matte Black

The Trek Soho S is also a fixie. But its manufacturer was also smart enough to give it a flip-flop hub and front and rear handbrakes, making it convertible to a single-speed. Another beautiful piece of industrial design. MSRP US$550

Fixies are Impractical, Perverse Throwbacks
by Bevin Chu
January 4, 2010

Much of what I have to say about "fixies," i.e., bicycles without freewheel mechanisms, is nicely summed up in Washington Post Staff Writer David Montgomery's widely read article, "Look Ma, No Brakes." As Montgomery puts it,

"A fixie has one speed, which makes it difficult to pedal uphill. A classic fixie has no brakes, which makes it difficult to slow on the downhill. A fixie has no freewheel, the part that makes coasting possible. Instead, the chain directly drives the rotation of the rear wheel, which means the pedals always turn while the bike moves... fixies are impractical, perverse throwbacks... "

Yes, I have heard the various and sundry "compelling reasons" to ride a fixie.

But most of their "compelling reasons" to ride a fixie are transparent rationalizations that even the fixie fanatics themselves don't believe.

One fixie guru whose authority is widely invoked by fixie fanatics, offers the following "compelling reasons" to ride fixies instead of single-speed or geared bikes.

Reason One: "Riding a fixed gear on the road is excellent exercise. When you need to climb, you don't need to think about when to change gears, because you don't have that option. Instead, you know that you must just stand up and pedal, even though the gear is too high for maximum climbing efficiency. This makes you stronger."

Reason Two: "A fixed-gear bike is considerably lighter than a multi-speed bike of comparable quality, due to the abscence [sic] of the rear brake, derailers [sic], shift levers, and extra sprockets. A fixed-gear bike also has a substantially shorter chain. A properly set-up fixed gear has a perfectly straight chainline. This, plus the abscence [sic] of derailer [sic] pulleys, makes a real improvement in the drive-train efficiency, an improvement you can feel."

Did you get that?

In one paragraph the fixie guru argues that fixies are better because forcing you to pedal against a heavier resistance "makes you stronger."

In a subsequent paragraph he argues that fixies are better because allowing you to pedal against a lighter resistance constitutes "an improvement you can feel."

The fixie guru was clearly not motivated by the reasons he offered. How could he be, when one reason flatly contradicts the other?

No, the real reason most, albeit not all fixie riders are so zealous in their advocacy of fixies, is desperate one-upsmanship. "Hipper than thou" one-upsmanship. "Greener than thou" one-upsmanship. "Que es mas macho?" one-upsmanship. "My hairshirt is scratchier than yours" one-upsmanship. All varieties of one-upsmanship, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

For most, albeit not all fixie riders, a fixie is a status symbol, a fashion statement, a Project Runway design accessory, a means of posturing.

Compelling Reasons to Ride a Fixie

So are there no compelling reasons whatsoever to ride a fixie?

Actually, there are one or two perfectly good reasons to ride a fixie. Some road racers for example, believe that riding a fixie will help them smooth out their pedal stroke, making them more competitive during road races. For them a fixie is a special purpose training machine.

Other cyclists may simply want an "open air exercise bicycle." For them riding a fixie is akin to "spinning," only outdoors, in the fresh air, instead of inside a smelly gym or stuffy health club.

Bicycles are Replacements for Horses

Bicycles are fundamentally replacements for horses. As historian David Herlihy notes in his book "Bicycle: The History,"

"The bicycle was the culmination of a long quest for a mechanical horse – a human-powered machine that could replace the onerous burden of using horses for transportation... the quest for the mechanical horse was meant to supplant the animal’s transportation services... the bicycle was originally designed to function as a means of utilitarian transportation."

As Eric Enders notes in his article "Your Times Is Over: Butch Cassidy and the Passing of the Outlaw West,"

Screenwriter William Goldman, like so many others, saw Butch and Sundance as emblems of a bygone era. Throughout the film [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid], images of the horse and bicycle are used to contrast the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. Eventually Butch himself realizes that his way of life is dying, and as he leaves for South America, he throws his bike down in disgust and offers a parting shot: “The future’s all yours, you lousy bicycle!”

In one scene, an opportunistic bicycle salesman interrupts a town marshal who is attempting to raise a posse, in order to peddle his newfangled contraption.

Marshal: Well, whaddaya say?

Bicycle Salesman: (He moves up next to the Marshal) I say this, I say ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and enemies, meet the future.

Crowd member: The future what?

Salesman: The future mode of transportation for this weary Western world. Now I'm not gonna make a lot of extravagant claims for this little machine. Sure, it'll change your whole life for the better, but that's all.

Marshal: And just what in the hell do ya think you're doing?

Salesman: Well, you got the crowd together. That's half my job, so I just thought I'd do a little selling.

Marshal: Well, I'm trying to raise a posse here if you don't mind?

Salesman: I got a short presentation. (To the crowd) The Horse Is Dead. You'll see - this item sells itself.

The Tie Ma, or "Iron Horse"

Nine out of ten bikes sold in America are made in China. In China, the term "iron horse" refers not to a steam locomotive, but to a bicycle. In China, a bicycle is colloquially referred to as a 鐵馬 (tie ma), which literally translates as "iron horse."

Bicycles are Human Powered Vehicles

Bicycles are fundamentally "human powered vehicles" intended to get a person from Point A to Point B, as swiftly as possible, and as efficiently as possible.

Any energy consumed overcoming inherent mechanical disadvantages within the bicycle itself, stands in the way of the rider from getting from Point A to Point B as swiftly as possible, and as efficiently as possible.

The Freewheel or Freehub, a Gift from God

That is why the bicycle freewheel or freehub was a gift from God. The bicycle freewheel or freehub allows a cyclist to coast whenever he has built up sufficient momentum by pedaling, or whenever he is traveling downhill. Why would anyone deliberately deny himself this energy conserving mechanical advantage? To dismiss coasting as "laziness" is nonsense. The energy conserved can be used to travel either faster or longer, and usually is.

That is why the derailleur gear was also a gift from God.

Bicycles are Fundamentally a Means of Transportation

Bicycles are fundamentally a means of transportation, intended to get a person from Point A to Point B, as swiftly as possible, and as efficiently as possible.

That was the bicycle's genesis. That is the bicycle's raison d'etre. And that is my basis for evaluating bicycle design.

That is why other than as some sort of special purpose training machine, or "open air exercise bicycle," I simply do not buy the countless "compelling reasons" to ride a fixie.

Look Ma, No Brakes!
Stripped-Down Fixies Have Long Been The Bike of Choice Among Couriers. Now, Hip Urbanites Have Gotten the Message.

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 28, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/27/AR2009092703241_pf.html

A Parting Shot

"Fixies Training Pants... to aid potty training"

An Ordinary Urban Commuter

I like a nice road bike as much as the next person. I have owned three in my lifetime, including a Peugeot and a Pinarello.

But bicycles do not always need to be fancy. Sometimes an ordinary urban commuter is all one really needs.

Millions of ordinary urban commuters such as the one above can be found on city streets on Taiwan.

The bicycle that is, not the rider.

How to Install Windows Movie Maker 6.1 from Vista (WMM6) in Windows 7

2009-12-17T08:22:00.000-08:00

How to Install Windows Movie Maker 6.1 from Vista (WMM6) in Windows 7
by Bevin Chu
December 17, 2009

Do you have Windows 7? So do I.

Don't you just love it? It's so much better than Vista isn't it?

There's only one problem. Windows 7 includes Windows Live Movie Maker, or WLMM, the worst version of Windows Movie Maker ever offered. WLMM doesn't even feature a timeline, the most attractive feature of Windows Movie Maker.

Vista, on the other hand, includes Windows Movie Maker 6.1, or WMM6, the best version of Windows Movie Maker ever offered.

Is there some way to have the best of both worlds? Is there some way to install the Windows 7 Operating System, and also have Windows Movie Maker 6.1, from Vista?

Microsoft will tell you you can't. Microsoft will urge you to live with Windows Live Movie Maker (WLMM), which comes with Windows 7. Windows Live Movie Maker. What a misnomer. Windows Dead Movie Maker is more like it. Windows Dead On Arrival Movie Maker, in fact. Call it WDOAMM.

Others may helpfully suggest that you download and install Windows Movie Maker 2.6 (WMM2.6). WMM2.6 isn't as bad as WLMM, but it's nowhere as good as WMM6.

Don't listen to them. Both WLMM and WMM2.6 are inferior versions of Windows Movie Maker with fewer features.

The fact is, you can install Windows Movie Maker 6.1 in Windows 7.

Simply visit one of a number of sites that offer free downloads of WMM6 specially tweaked so that it can be installed in Windows 7. Several are listed below.

They appear to have been written by the same software programmer, one Noel Danjou, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.

Download the executable, install it, and you're good to go!

NB: I'm not sure whether WMM6 should be referred to as 6.0 or 6.1. I'm calling it 6.1 in the interim.

Download Windows Movie Maker 6.1 for Windows 7:

From Noel Danjou
http://noeld.com/programs.asp?cat=video

From Softpedia
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Other-VIDEO-Tools/Windows-Movie-Maker-Installer.shtml

Windows 7 Beta Fish Wallpaper

2009-12-15T19:22:00.001-08:00

Windows 7 Beta Fish Wallpaper
December 16, 2009
Taipei, China

The Story of the Windows 7 Beta Fish, by Matthew Lawrence
http://blog.mat-lawrence.co.uk/2009/01/story-of-windows-7-beta-fish.html

Thanks to Matthew Lawrence, a computer programmer in the UK for having the foresight to hang on to a copy of this clever and beautiful wallpaper, and the generosity to make it available to everyone.

Much appreciated!

Be sure to read his fascinating account explaining what the fish had to do with the beta version of Windows 7.

Windows 7 Beta Fish Wallpaper

This wallpaper is beautiful. That much is obvious.

But why did I say it was clever? Because experience shows that blue may well be the most durable color for a wallpaper. Many other colors become tiresome after a while. Blue on the other hand, seems to hold up in the long term.

Given blue as our first choice, what next? One could of course make the blue wallpaper a blue sky. After all, the name of the operating system is Windows. As one looks out one's window, what does one see? The blue sky, of course.

But another, less obvious, but even more ingenious concept, is to make the blue wallpaper the blue sea. The bright spot is of course the sun. Its rays penetrate the surface of the waves.

Windows 7 Beta Fish Wallpaper - Horizontally Flipped

I flipped the wallpaper because the lighter colored water in the corner may make one's icons a little hard to read.

Horizontally flipping the wallpaper puts the darker water in the upper left corner, increasing the contrast between the icons and the wallpaper.

Cambridge Audio Azur 640A V2 Amplifier/Paradigm Atom V.5 Monitors

2008-12-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

Cambridge Audio Azur 640A V2 Amplifier/Paradigm Atom V.5 Monitors
Bevin Chu
December 12, 2008

My new budget audiophile hi-fi system, consisting only of extraordinarily high-value components:

-- Cambridge Audio Azur 640A V2 Amplifier
-- Cambridge Audio Azur 640C V2 CD Player (~~back ordered~~ canceled in favor of DAC)
-- Paradigm Atom V.5 Monitors
-- Keces DA-151 USB DAC Digital Analog Converter
-- Tripp Lite LC1200 Line Conditioner
-- Tara Labs Prism 300A Interconnects
-- Onix "Black" Speaker Cables

Cambridge Audio Azur 640A V2 Amplifier and 640C V2 CD Player Combo

Cambridge Audio Azur 640A V2 Amplifier Rear View

Reviews of Cambridge Audio Azur 640A V2 Amplifier
http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/product_reviews.php?PID=105&Title=Press+reviews

Reviews of Cambridge Audio Azur 640C V2 CD Player
http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/product_reviews.php?PID=99&Title=Press+reviews

Paradigm Atom V.5 Monitor, Cherry Finish, with Grill On

Paradigm Atom V.5 Monitor, Cherry Finish, with Grill Off

Paradigm Atom V.5 Monitor, Cherry Finish, with Grill Off

Reviews of Paradigm Monitor Series, including Paradigm Atom V.5 Monitor
http://www.paradigm.com/en/paradigm/reviews/review-2-4.paradigm

Keces DA-151 Digital Analog Converter

Reviews of Keces DA-151 USB DAC Digital Analog Converter
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/frr.pl?rdgtl&1227724779&read&d2&zzlDrubin&&
http://www.computeraudiophile.com/node/324
http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f46/review-keces-da-151-dac-800-hours-burn-297021/

Tripp Lite LC1200 Line Conditioner

Tara Prism 300a 1m Interconnects

Onix Black 2.5m Speaker Cables

All components and accessories were purchased from the highly knowledgeable people at Music Hi-Fi Co Ltd

http://www.hifi.com.tw/

Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bicycle

2008-05-24T04:57:00.000-07:00

Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike
Bevin Chu
May 24, 2008

捷安特 CT 102 城市通勤車 / Giant CT 102 Urban Commuter Bike, 2008 Model

Technical Specifications :
http://www.giant-bicycles.com/zh-TW/bikes/lifestyle/2224/31946/

My new bicycle. I just bought it today. A Plain Jane urban commuter bike. Nothing fancy, but solidly built by Giant, Taiwan's premier bicycle manufacturer. Carbon steel frame. 18 speed Shimano derailleurs. Shimano brakes.

This is not a high performance bike. High performance bikes don't come with full fenders, front brackets for mounting shopping baskets, rear luggage racks, and kick stands.

Price? Under $4000NT. About US$130.

When I was living in LA during the 1980s I had a Pinarello racing bike. Italian import. Double-butted aluminum frame. 10 speed Campagnolo derailleurs. Campagnolo brakes. Sew up tires. Total weight 22 lbs. I could hold it up with one finger on one hand.

Price? US$800 in 1980 dollars. Money well spent. No regrets. It was what I wanted. It was what I got.

But that was then, this is now.

Now all I want is a dependable urban commuter bike. Something to get me to the office for work. Something to get me to the supermarket for a bottle of orange juice. Something that can withstand the punishment dished out by the badly paved roads here on Taiwan.

I went online to get a feeling for what was available at what price. Given my modest requirements, I decided this particular make and model was the one to get.

Could I have afforded a fancier bike?

Of course. But I didn't want a fancier bike. I would be too nervous leaving a fancier bike out on the sidewalk. Anything fancier would be far too likely to get stolen. It simply wouldn't be worth the aggravation.

In fact, I considered getting an even cheaper bike for just that reason.

The "big box" discount stores on Taiwan, such as Carrefours, Geant, and RT Mart, sell no name bikes for under $2000NT. About US$65. I looked them over. Let me tell you, when you go from $4000NT to $2000NT, the quality takes a big hit.

An even more serious problem with these $2000NT no name, discount store bikes, is that the frames are too small. I'm 6'-2" (187cm), and these small framed bikes simply won't allow me to position myself on the seat properly.

So in the end I settled for an entry level name brand bike by Giant.

Some friends suggested a folding bike, something I could take indoors with me so it wouldn't be stolen.

But given the size of the potholes on Taiwan, I really feel more confident riding a bike with large diameter, standard sized wheels, rather than the tiny wheels found on folding bikes.

With the tiny wheels, one gets the queasy feeling the front wheel could drop into a pothole. The bike would then stop dead, and one would go flying over the handlebars.

Giant CT 102 for 2010
Same price, same specs, different paint job

Dragon Wallpaper

2008-01-27T07:33:00.000-08:00

Dragon Wallpaper Screen Capture
Proportion 3:5

Bebop is Chinese Music

2007-09-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

Bebop is Chinese Music

“[Bebop is] Chinese music.”
-- Louis Armstrong

The amazing Golden Ratio

2007-09-28T16:25:00.000-07:00

The amazing Golden Ratio
Assem Deif
Al-Ahram Weekly
27 September - 3 October 2007
Issue No. 864
Heritage

Artists reckon that the "Golden Ratio", also called the "Golden Section Phi" and nature's most astonishing number, is the ratio that controls the proportions of all beautiful objects, writes Assem Deif*

Historians trace the Golden Ratio back to Euclid, yet even before him it was governing the dimensions of monuments in ancient Egypt. The most pronounced of these is the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid is not the only structure from ancient Egypt that complies with constants like Pi or Phi; the Egyptians used the Golden Ratio in many ways both in the architecture of their temples and in their drawings. So whereas, the discovery of the "golden rule" was generally credited to the Greeks, the findings of such Egyptologists as De Lubicz and Fliders Petrie produced irrefutable proof that the Egyptians had a mathematical understanding of these constants, the ratios, not the symbol, 1000 years earlier.

There was much cross-culture between the Egyptian and Greek civilisations during the Hellenistic era, particularly in Alexandria where Egyptian and Greek scientists studied together at the Mouseion. Among them was Euclid. Historians call him Euclid of Alexandria without precluding the possibility he might have been Egyptian. It was in Alexandria that Euclid wrote The Elements.

Greek scholars were visiting Egypt even before the Mouseion was founded, including Thales, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and Pythagoras, who spent 22 years in Egypt and announced his theory only after leaving. Egyptians were aware of the triangle 3:4:5 which Pythagoras himself called the "Holy Triangle". Eight pyramids from the fourth and fifth dynasties have their inner triangle conforming to these ratios.

See:
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/864/heritage.htm

Giza Pyramids

leaf arrangements around a stem and plant branching in a fibonacci formation;

golden spiral

pascal triangle; panel of Khesi-Re

The Well Tempered Keyboard

2007-09-17T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Well Tempered Keyboard

Bevin Chu

September 18, 2007

The Well Tempered Keyboard

You just bought yourself a midi keyboard controller, as a cheap alternative to an expensive electric piano, or an even more expensive regular piano.

Not a synthesizer. A midi keyboard controller. No sound. No speakers.

You didn't want either built-in sound or built-in speakers because you wanted to spend money only on the keyboard. Not on dedicated electronics and speakers good for nothing else. You wanted your PC to generate the audio signal, and your speakers to transform those audio signals into piano sounds.

You wanted semi-weighted key action that emulated, but did not necessarily duplicate piano key action.

Semi-weighted Midi Keyboard Controller vs. Fully-weighted Electric Piano

Q: Will keyboard playing skills spoil the ability to play the piano, because of the difference in touch?

A: It is a myth that beginners MUST start with the piano in order to correctly develop a piano playing apparatus. This myth originated from the elitism and conservatism of modern piano education that focused only on raising of a few concert performers. In reality, playing on any other musical instrument, including the piano keyboard, can only improve the piano performance of your child.

More over, we recommend that children start learning the piano with the piano keyboard. The regular piano is very physically challenging for beginners, because it requires physical strength along with advanced coordination and perfect orientation on the piano keys. The majority of problems with piano techniques start with the lack of confidence in beginners. When the student has built his eye-hand-fingers coordination by playing on the piano keyboard, the task of mastering the "hard touch" of the real piano is much easier to handle. Freedom and flexibility of the apparatus appear gradually with the confidence of the student.

Being a 3-year-old child, Mozart started with the harpsichord (with the touch of a modern keyboard). It didn't spoil his apparatus at all!

We recommend a keyboard with at least 61 keys. Very soon you will find that a keyboard with less than 61 keys is just a toy, and you will be able to play only simplest songs.

- Hellene Hiner, Russian American Piano Instructor

Novation ReMOTE LE 61 - 5-octave Light Edition USB MIDI controller. Unsurpassed MIDI controlling technology is now available in its most compact format to date. With its funky Touchpad and cool 4-way joystick, the lightweight ReMOTE LE is the only choice for the musician on a budget wanting to trigger samples, lay down basslines or control a sequencer with true style.

Review of Novation ReMOTE LE

The ReMOTE LE is undoubtedly a cut above most portable keyboards we’ve seen. Its plastic casing feels durable and the weighted keys are good to play. The likes of Edirol’s PCR-M1 and M-Audio’s 02 are slightly more portable, but thanks to an above average feature set and impressive ease of use, the ReMOTE LE shines. Novation understand the needs of today’s computer musicians, and this understanding is reflected in their well-designed range of keyboards. If the SL isn’t for you, there’s a good chance that the LE will be. A lightweight SL it may be, but the ReMOTE LE is still one of the finest MIDI keyboards in its class. You’ll struggle to find better at this price. Verdict – 8/10

- Computer Music – Summer 06

Major Sticker Shock!

The salesman at the musical instrument store tried to sell you an electric piano.

They cost three times as much as your midi keyboard controller. Over one grand, instead of a few hundred.

Major sticker shock!

The salesman at the musical instrument store tried to sell you one of the well known commercial VST host, MIDI recorder/sequencer and audio recorder software packages.

They cost twice as much as your midi keyboard controller.

Major sticker shock!

Worst of all, they are far more powerful, hence far more complicated, than anything you are ever likely to need. They force you to waste time learning to use unfamiliar software before letting you play a single note of music.

The salesman at the musical instrument store tried to sell you one of the well known commercial piano plug-ins.

They cost as much as your midi keyboard controller.

Major sticker shock!

Your sticker shock. His bottom line.

So What Do You Do?

So what do you do?

Well, if you're like me, you go to websites such as Tobybear Productions, ASIO4ALL, Don't Crack Software, and KVR Audio.

You download the following VST hosts and VSTi plugins. All of these are freeware, except Tobybear Minihost, which is donationware.

Begin by installing Tobybear MiniHost.

Tobybear MiniHost

MiniHost is a powerful and full-fledged ASIO host that loads a VST plugin (instrument or effect) and processes it in realtime. MiniHost has been voted by the members of the KVR audio community as the best free host of the year 2004! Send MIDI data to VST plugins from external MIDI inputs, a resizable virtual MIDI keyboard, the computer keyboard or MIDI files, process live ASIO audio input or a WAV file, record audio output to WAV (16 and 32 bit), support for VST MIDI plugins that generate MIDI data. Donating $20 or more will make the daily donationware remainder disappear and put your name in the about box

http://www.tobybear.de/p_minihost.html

http://www.dontcrack.com/freeware/downloads.php/id/4228/software/MiniHost/

http://www.kvraudio.com/get.php?mode=results&st=f&q=minihost

Next, install ASIO4ALL.

ASIO4ALL - Universal ASIO Driver For WDM Audio

What's the difference between ASIO and DirectSound audio drivers? ASIO is a standard developed by Steinberg and designed specifically real-time audio processing. DirectSound is a Microsoft audio technology designed primarily for games. In general ASIO is the preferred type of driver for use with Cantabile. DirectSound support is provided for cases where no ASIO driver is installed or available.

http://www.asio4all.com/

ASIO4ALL seems to be most beneficial for AC97 based sound cards. And it does work well with SoundBlaster Live cards. It gives people with basic systems a boost. If you don't have a proprietary ASIO driver available, it can help a lot.

- RobertB

Do not neglect this! The latency using DirectSound is simply unacceptable. ASIO bypasses Windows' slower audio engine, offering much lower latency (audible sound delays).

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Studio_Technology

Finally, install these VSTi piano modules.

4Front Piano Module

A small and versatile piano module with unique sound. This piano module is neither a sample player, nor synthesized. It's a hybrid technology that combines both methods. This results in greatly reduced module size and light CPU usage. Unlike many other piano modules (like those gigabyte pianos), this module will never overload your CPU. It will never stick notes, and never break the sound or click during live performances.

http://www.4front-tech.com/proaudio-download.html

http://www.dontcrack.com/freeware/downloads.php/id/2396/software/Piano-Module/

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/597.html

mda Piano

The mda Piano VSTi is modelled around 31 carefully sampled and mastered Piano samples. Its Width Control not only controls panning of notes across the keyboard but at high settings adds a psychoacoustic widening effect adding a touch of room ambiance and spaciousness to the sound. The polyphony is up to 32 voices.

http://www.mda-vst.com/

http://www.dontcrack.com/freeware/downloads.php/id/1027/software/Piano/

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/123.html

Woodstock tickling the ivories, as Snoopy listens

Well, that about does it.

You now have a compact, portable, realistic sounding piano. All for the price of a cheap midi keyboard controller.

Now start playing.

Introduction to Proporzione Divina

2007-07-13T11:33:00.000-07:00

Proporzione Divina features commentary on art and music by architect and author Bevin Chu.

Proporzione Divina is Italian for "Divine Proportion." The Divine Proportion is also known as the golden ratio, the golden section (Latin: sectio aurea), golden mean, golden number, divine section (Latin: sectio divina), or golden proportion, and is represented by the Greek letter phi (φ).

The Golden Section

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The golden section is a line segment sectioned into two according to the golden ratio. The total length a+b is to the longer segment a as a is to the shorter segment b.

In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The golden ratio is approximately 1.6180339887.

φ = (square root of 5 – 1)/2 = approximately 1.6

The Golden Rectangle

Many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing.

The Fibonacci Series

The irrational numbers of the golden section closely correspond to the whole numbers of the Fibonacci series, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.

The numbers of the Fibonacci series are:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987 ... ad infinitum

This makes the Fibonacci series highly useful for architects and designers who wish to make their buildings and designs approximate the golden section, but must as a practical matter use whole number units.

Divine Immanence

The Golden Rectangle shows up in the most unexpected places.

For example, it shows up in the 16:10 aspect ratio of the newest, most advanced LCD monitors, which provide more comfortable viewing than older, now obsolescent LCD monitors with 4:3 aspect ratios.

The newer 16:10 aspect ratio is more ergonomic because it more closely matches the human being's natural field of view, formed by the two overlapping fields of view of two side by side human eyes.

Vesica Piscis: Latin for "bladder of the fish," two circles of the same radius whose centers lie on each others' circumference, aspect ratio of 3:2 corresponds to the fifth and fourth numbers in the Fibonacci series

The older 4:3 aspect ratio, by contrast, is noticeably less ergonomic because it chops off the left and right margins of that natural field of view.

ViewSonic Home Page (Traditional Chinese): "ViewSonic VG2230wm 22 inch multimedia liquid-crystal display, 16:10 golden ratio display ... high resolution golden ratio display 1680x1050"

The 16:10 aspect ratio of the newest LCD monitors reduces to 8:5, the seventh and sixth numbers in the Fibonacci series.

Adrian Smith of SOM discusses the Jinmao Building (美國名建築師論金貿大樓)

2003-12-05T00:02:00.000-08:00

Adrian Smith of SOM discusses the Jinmao Building (美國名建築師論金貿大樓)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/12/05)

Interview with Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)

Adrian Smith is a consulting design partner with the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, and is one of the most recognized architects in the world. His work includes several major skyscrapers, including the tallest building in China. In the following conversation with Skyscrapers.com's Director of Communications Tom Finnegan, Mr. Smith discusses his design philosophy, the economics and engineering of tall buildings, and his project history including a new world's tallest building.

Smith: Another project in Chicago called Dearborn Center was designed in 1989. Its structural system had a solid concrete core with only eight super frame columns and eight corner columns around the perimeter so its typical floor was extremely open. Although Dearborn Center didn't get built, it had a strong influence on Jin Mao Tower, designed in 1993. Except for the top, the shape and the floor plates are very similar. One of the main massing attitutes that Jin Mao borrowed from Dearborn Center and AT&T was the way the building wall steps back as it rises to the sky. On AT&T there are steps at the 15th, 30th and 45th floors. On Jin Mao, I tried stepping in 8 floor segments but determined that this was too static. So I tried modulating from larger stepped segments at the bottom of the tower to progressively shorter segments at the top. This approach solved the issue of the tower feeling complete even when the view of the lower levels was blocked by adjacent structures. The side effect of this stepping system is that it resembles the pagoda forms used in ancient China. These were actually the first form of high rise buildings. [emphasis added]

Finnegan: A lot of people have made that comparison, which I suppose comes as no surprise.

Smith: The comparison is direct. It wasn’t meant to look like a pagoda, but it was intended to evoke the memory of pagodas, much the same way I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre is a modern depiction of the ancient pyramids in Egypt.

Editor's Comments:

Sometime during the conceptual or schematic design phase of the Jinmao Building, Adrian Smith apparently apprised himself of the numerological significance of the number eight in Chinese culture. That is probably why a preliminary design scheme featured a stepback every eight floors. A spokesman for C. Y. Lee, architects for the Taipei 101 Building also told reporters that their design team deliberately divided the Taipei 101 Building into eight sections for numerological reasons.

The difference is that the designer of Taipei 101 became enamored with his pet "canted section" feature, to the eventual detriment of the overall design. The designer of Jinmao on the other hand, wisely reconsidered his initial "one setback every eight floors" scheme when it became apparent it just didn't look right.

Ironically Smith was right and Lee was wrong. Smith did what ancient Chinese artisan/architects would have done -- trust one's eye. Lee on the other hand, didn't. The consequence is Jinmao looks right, while Taipei 101 doesn't. Jinmao even feels more authentically Asian than Taipei 101.

Chinese architects should be busy creating a vital and convincing modern, Chinese-inspired, East Asian architectural style. They should be doing it better than Japanese, European, and American architects, but they aren't. That doesn't mean they won't, but at the moment they aren't, and that fact saddens me deeply.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Interview with Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
Illustration(s): Jinmao Building, Shanghai: Dearborn Center, Chicago
Author(s): Tom Finnegan, Interviewer
Affiliation: Skyscraper.com
Source: http://www.emporis.info/en/nc/iv/as/
Publication Date: November 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

The Pagoda, Prototype for Modern Asian Skyscrapers (寶塔, 現代亞洲摩天大樓的原型)

2003-12-01T05:23:00.000-08:00

The Pagoda, Prototype for Modern Asian Skyscrapers (寶塔, 現代亞洲摩天大樓的原型)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/12/01)

The Pagoda, Prototype for Modern Asian Skyscrapers

A previous article explored reasons why the nearly completed Taipei 101 Building is not a well-designed high-rise skyscraper.

This article examines two examples of far superior modern skyscraper designs, inspired by an Asian architectural precedent, the pagoda. Considering that the pagoda is among the oldest forms of high-rise tower in the world, modern high-rise towers based on the pagoda make perfect sense.

Jinmao and Petronas, Modern Pagodas

The Jinmao Building and the Petronas Twin Towers are superior to the Taipei 101 Building. They are superior because they embody the same visual characteristics as the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings: vertical continuity, vertical emphasis, and progressive setbacks. In the Jinmao and Petronas buildings the continuity of the primary building mass is maintained from top to bottom, allowing one to experience the building's full height. Collectively, the building's design elements underscore the building's vertical axis over its horizontal. The floor plans step inward, diminishing in size as the building ascends, giving dramatic emphasis to the building's height.

The traditional pagoda exhibits two of the three previously cited visual characteristics of modern point towers: vertical continuity and progressive setbacks. The traditional pagoda exhibits comparatively little vertical emphasis. Close examination of the traditional pagoda however suggests that a relative lack of vertical emphasis is not necessarily a defect. Vertical continuity and progressive setbacks are enough to ensure a visually convincing design.

Designers of Taipei 101 Flunk Architectural History

Taipei 101's lack of vertical continuity, on the other hand, is a much more serious matter. Taipei 101's tower is broken into sharply segmented "canted sections." These canted sections look like discrete blocks stacked precariously atop one another, ready to topple over any moment.

To make matters worse, the shape has an undesirable pop iconographic connotation. As one coworker noted, Taipei 101 looks remarkably like a vertical stack of Chinese takeout food cartons. Earlier schematic design sketches reveal that Taipei 101's designers became enamoured with this arbitrary shape starting day one and never wavered. They were presumably unaware of this unwelcome iconographic connotation, one that could make Taipei 101's image less appealing.

Traditional pagodas do not resemble separate blocks stacked on top of one another. Traditional pagodas look like monolithic shafts. Cornices or eaves, if any, look like projections from the pagoda's central shaft. Traditional pagodas, unlike Taipei 101, convey a reassuring visual impression of vertical continuity, hence structural integrity. The designers of Taipei 101 apparently, were oblivious to this not so subtle distinction.

Chinese Modern

Those knowledgeable about the sorry state of architecture in modern China may notice the irony. Taipei 101 architect C. Y. Lee is one of the few architects on Taiwan who is making an effort to integrate traditional Chinese architectural motifs into modern architecture. Unfortunately, Lee has never quite figured out how to pull it off. By grafting grotesque and historically inauthentic "Chinese" ornament onto otherwise modern buildings, Lee is truly barking up the wrong tree.

Traditional Chinese architectural themes can be successfully integrated into modern architecture. Japanese modernists have been skillfully integrating Japanese variants of Chinese architectural themes into modern architecture for several decades. So we know it can be done.

The way to integrate traditional Chinese architectural elements into modern Chinese architecture is to draw primarily on traditional Chinese architecture's spatial characteristics, and only secondarily its ornamental motifs. But that is a topic for another essay.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: The Pagoda, Prototype for Modern Asian Skyscrapers
Illustration(s): Xinghua Temple Pagoda in Anhui, China; Haibao Pagoda in Ningxia, China; Twin Pagodas at Yongzuo Temple in Shanxi, China; Jinmao Building in Shanghai, China; Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia; Taipei 101 Lacks Vertical Continuity
Author(s): Bevin Chu
Affiliation: CETRA Design Promotion Center
Source:
Publication Date: December 1, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Taipei 101, Bigger is Not Better (Taipei 101, 更大不等於更好)

2003-11-25T08:59:00.000-08:00

Taipei 101, Bigger is Not Better (Taipei 101, 更大不等於更好)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/11/25)

Taipei 101 is rising to number one in height

TAIPEI -- Some time over the next few weeks, a spire rising atop a skyscraper in Taipei will inch past Malaysia's Petronas Towers, making Taipei 101 the world's tallest building.

It took more than good luck for the building to reach such an exalted height -- and its owners plan for it to stay around long after its world record is broken by other developers.

As soon as C.Y. Lee and Partners architects finished a draft design for the 1,667-foot-tall Taipei 101, which is meant to resemble the sturdy bamboo stalk, developer Harace Lin sent for a feng-shui master.

"We wanted to avoid making any mistakes," said Lin, president of Taipei Financial Center Corp., a consortium of the island's leading banks and insurance companies that helped bankroll the $1.7 billion tower that will house a shopping mall, offices for 12,000 people, and the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

Although Taipei 101 will not be entirely finished until November of next year, the 101-story tower is already four times as tall as its nearest neighbors and dominates Taipei's skyline of mostly low-rise gray concrete blocks.

A 197-foot spire to be added in mid-October will make Taipei 101 taller than Malaysia's 1,483-foot Petronas Towers.

The Taipei skyscraper also boasts the world's fastest elevators -- 34 double-decker shuttles that can zoom at 37 miles per hour and take passengers to the 90th floor in less than 39 seconds.

Divided into eight canted sections -- a lucky number to the Chinese -- the tower is sheathed by a wall of tinted glass that reflects the sky and is embellished with traditional Chinese "ruyi" symbols, spoon-like figures of fulfillment and contentment.

It also faces the South, an auspicious direction.

"We designed this building based on the philosophy of integrating with nature," said C.P. Wang, architect and project captain. "It's like a plant growing to reach the sky. This is very different from the Western idea of conquering nature."

The only feng-shui problem, Wang said, was a perpendicular road that ran straight into the building's site, which could bring sickness or bad business to occupants. That was easily fixed by adding a fountain to block off the road.

"Feng shui is part of our culture, so we built these symbols to help people feel lucky," he said in an interview.

A big challenge was to make Taipei 101 strong enough to withstand the typhoons and earthquakes that plague Taiwan.

"The environment we're facing is probably the toughest in the world for very tall buildings," Wang said.

The result is a "megaframe" for the first 62 floors consisting of giant steel columns filled with high-strength concrete. The rest is light, made mostly of steel and glass.

Lin said the tower is designed to endure the strongest earthquake in a 2,500-year cycle -- the industry standard is 400 years -- or tremors measuring above 7 on the Richter scale.

Taipei 101 can also resist the biggest typhoon in a 100-year cycle, or gale force of more than 180 feet a second, he said.

And if a plane plows into the tower, like in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, Taipei 101 "will stay up much longer for people to escape," Wang said.

Editor's Comments:

The Taipei 101 Building may be the world's tallest building, but it is not great architecture. It barely qualifies as mediocre architecture.

Good Engineering, Bad Architecture

The Taipei 101 Building incorporates leading edge technology. The world's fastest elevators rocket tenants to their lease floors at a record 37 miles per hour. Once they have arrived, state of the art tuned mass dampers neutralize potentially catastrophic typhoon or earthquake induced swaying. These achievements however are engineering, not architectural achievements. The credit for them accrues to the engineers, not the architects.

Great architecture is not about sheer size. If sheer size made for great architecture, Boeing's Aircraft Assembly Plant in Seattle, the largest enclosed space in the world, would be prominently displayed in architectural history books.

Great architecture is not about engineering prowess. If engineering prowess made for great architecture, the English Channel Tunnel or "Chunnel" would be hailed as an architectural masterpiece.

A Tall Order

Great architecture is not about either scale of construction or engineering prowess. Great architecture is the creation of emotionally resonant forms of human shelter.

First generation modern masters Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier each at one time or another, designed diminuitive architectural gems that were neither the tallest, nor the longest, nor the widest in the world. They were merely the most emotionally affecting and inspirational. Unfortunately their achievements have seldom been matched.

The ideal I describe is admittedly a tall order. That this exalted ideal is seldom achieved is why neither Taipei 101 nor the now defunct World Trade Center Twin Towers qualify as great architecture.

The venerable, seven decade old Empire State Building is not great architecture either. It is an Art Deco period piece of average quality, clearly inferior to its more stylish predecessor, the Chrysler Building. But compared with the World Trade Center and Taipei 101, the Empire State Building comes off pretty well. As I have lamented before, this is depressing evidence of declining standards.

Chrysler and the Empire State

What makes the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building aesthetically superior to the WTC Twin Towers and the Taipei 101 Building? These rival Art Deco skyscrapers combined three important visual characteristics: one, vertical continuity; two, vertical emphasis; three, progressive setbacks.

By vertical continuity I mean the continuity of the primary building mass is maintained from top to bottom, allowing one to experience the building's full height. By vertical emphasis I mean that the building's design elements collectively underscore the building's vertical axis over its horizontal. By progressive setbacks I mean that lower flanking masses help dramatize the commanding height of the central building mass.

None of these visual characteristics desirable in a modern "point tower" are present in the Taipei 101 Building. Taipei 101 lacks vertical emphasis. Each of its eight canted sections has a self-defeating horizontal emphasis. Taipei 101 lacks vertical continuity. Inappropriate horizontal design motifs at the top of each canted section destroy vertical continuity, making Taipei 101 look as if it might fracture where one section ends and the next begins. Taipei 101 lacks progressive setbacks. Progressive height-enhancing setbacks do not appear until one reaches the rooftop antenna.

The Chrysler Building was completed in 1930. The Empire State Building was completed a year later in 1931. At the time of completion, each building was the tallest in the world. The designers of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings understood that being tall was not enough. A tall building couldn't merely be tall, it had to look tall as well. The designer of a tall building, they knew, must never negate a building's fundamental nature, not even inadvertently. The designer should always acknowledge, underscore, even dramatize a tall building's height.

The 101 story high Taipei 101 Building may be the tallest building in the world, but it sure doesn't look the part. The client obviously coveted the title of "World's Tallest Building" and was willing to pay handsomely for the bragging rights. The fact that Taipei 101 doesn't look as tall as the considerably shorter, considerably older Chrysler and Empire State buildings is an embarrassing indictment of those responsible for its external design.

In all fairness to the designers of Taipei 101, the building does have one saving grace, a reasonably well-designed, reasonably attractive adjoining shopping mall, probably the best in Taipei. The nearly completely leased shopping mall is where the designers of Taipei 101 were the most successful.

The Twin Towers

How exactly does an architectural designer make a tall building look tall? One of the most obvious and effective ways, albeit not the only way, is the way a fashion designer makes a suit of clothes look long, with vertical stripes.

This is the previously mentioned vertical emphasis, but it is not quite as straightforward as it sounds. The elevations of the ill-fated World Trade Center towers were nothing but closely-spaced, thin, white vertical stripes. Unfortunately these vertical stripes were too closely-spaced, too thin, and too white to read as discrete design elements. They registered instead as one giant, blurry moire pattern. The result was the Twin Towers were immense, scaleless, boring expanses of blank wall. When the Twin Towers were completed back in 1973, critics joked that they were the discarded boxes the Chrysler and Empire State buildings came in.

Yes, these vertical stripes were essential components of an innovative load-bearing wall system. Yes, they had to be spaced a mere 22 inches on center for structural reasons. No, that does not excuse the fact that as designed they amounted to an aesthetic disaster. Sound engineering is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good architecture.

Eero Saarinen's CBS Building, aka "Black Rock," by contrast, was a success. Aesthetically Minoru Yamasaki's flimsy white mullions on the WTC didn't work. Saarinen's massive black piers did. Obviously something present at CBS was missing at WTC. That something was mass; perceived mass and actual mass. CBS had it, WTC didn't.

Ironically the 9-11 terrorist attack would affirm the intuitive wisdom that "If it looks right, it probably is right." In 1945, the Empire State Building survived the direct, head-on impact of a USAF B-25 Mitchell bomber lost in the fog. As the entire world knows, neither of the WTC Twin Towers was able to survive similar impacts by hijacked Boeing 767s.

Bamboo, or Bamboozled?

According to Taipei 101's designers, the canted sections are reminiscent of segments of bamboo. This is disingenous eyewash. Anyone who has ever seen bamboo cane knows that bamboo diminishes in cross section as it rises. Any given segment of bamboo is invariably smaller in diameter than the segment below.

Taipei 101's canted sections are exactly the opposite. Unlike bamboo, they increase in cross section as they rise. Unlike bamboo, each canted section is identical to the one below. Taipei 101's canted sections bear no resemblance whatsoever to segments of bamboo.

Far from evoking the reassuring natural resilience of a stalk of bamboo, Taipei 101 resembles a precarious stack of children's building blocks, threatening to topple over at the slightest nudge. It is no excuse to say that the intellect knows this isn't so. Good design requires more than the creation of buildings that we know are stable. Good design requires the creation of buildings that we perceive as stable. The designers of Taipei 101 conveyed a highly undesirable impression of instability. Apparently they did so unintentionally, and are utterly oblivious about the extent of their design blunder. That is the saddest fact of all.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Taipei 101 is rising to number one in height
Illustration(s): Taipei 101 from Ground Level; World Trade Center Twin Towers, before 9-11; CBS Building, aka "Black Rock"; Chrysler Building; Empire State Building; Taipei 101 next to the Empire State Building; Sections of Bamboo
Author(s): Tiffany Wu
Affiliation: Reuters
Source: Boston Globe
Publication Date: September 30, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

San Francisco Bay Shrimp Junk Project (舊金山海灣捕蝦船案)

2003-10-29T08:32:00.000-08:00

San Francisco Bay Shrimp Junk Project (舊金山海灣捕蝦船案)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/29)

San Francisco Bay Shrimp Junk Project

Launching October 25, 2003, 10:30am at China Camp State Park!

From March through September 2003, the Small Craft Department of San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, in conjunction with China Camp State Park, is endeavoring to build a full-scale reconstruction of a hard-working San Francisco Bay Area fishing boat: a Chinese Shrimp Junk.

These single-mast vessels, ranging from 30 to 50 feet in length, were built almost entirely of local redwood. The long and narrow junks plied the waters of the shallower regions of the Bay Area from circa 1860 to 1910. The fishermen worked large triangular nets staked to mudflats, and brought their catch of shrimp ashore to small fishing villages. The shrimp was boiled, dried and processed for shipment to Hawaii and Asia.

Working from historic photographs, oral histories, and archaeological information, the largely volunteer crew, led by San Francisco Maritime NHP curator and boatbuilder John Muir, is reconstructing a forty-two foot junk. The junk is being built outdoors at the site of one of the largest of the Chinese Shrimp fishing villages: China Camp State Park, in San Rafael, California.

The SF Bay Shrimp Junk Project boatbuilding team is reconstructing the junk using, as much as possible, original materials and traditional Chinese boatbuilding techniques. The team is hand-forging its nails, as well as mixing its own caulking putty. They are also using the traditional Chinese method of bending wood through the direct application of fire.

The completed junk will be launched at China Camp State Park in the Fall of 2003, and will then become a working sailing museum vessel on exhibit to the public and available for special historic events around the Bay Area. The junk will share exhibit time between the historic Chinese village site at China Camp State Park and the Hyde St. Pier boat exhibit basin at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in San Francisco.

Editor's Comments:

The San Francisco Bay Shrimp Junk Project is a worthwhile project that will, hopefully, enhance public awareness and appreciation of Chinese contributions to ship building technology. These contributions are not limited to dusty history books and museum glass cases. As previous articles I have posted prove, they remain highly relevant even today.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: SF Bay Shrimp Junk Project
Illustration(s): Bay Shrimp Junk along SF Waterfront circa 1892, China Camp State Park Point San Pedro Shrimp Fishing Village circa 1888, The Shrimp Junk Taking Shape
Author(s): Unknown
Affiliation: San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, China Camp State Park
Source: http://www.nps.gov/safr/junk.html
Publication Date: October 14, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Walt Disney Concert Hall (迪仕尼音樂廳)

2003-10-27T05:32:00.000-08:00

Walt Disney Concert Hall (迪仕尼音樂廳)
[創意組織 ]
(2003/10/27)

Catherine Fox of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution joins a chorus praising Frank Gehry's recent Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall as great architecture. The editor begs to differ. Let's first hear what Fox has to say.

Architect Infuses Disney Hall with Grace, Glamour

The $274 million Walt Disney Hall complex fronts Grand Avenue in Los Angeles and occupies a 3.6-acre city block.

LOS ANGELES -- The 1997 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain established Frank Gehry as the premier architect of his generation. He affirms his position with the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The latest incarnation of Gehry's exuberant and distinctive vision rises above neighboring buildings in a thrilling concatenation of billowing, swooping forms.

The stainless-steel roof, a mix of matte and polished surfaces, shimmers in the sun -- a little Oz, a little glamour in Los Angeles' bland downtown. And a little mystery. The unpredictability of the shapes as well as the size of the building -- it occupies a 3.6-acre city block -- ensure that visitors cannot possibly conceive of the whole composition from one vantage point. It's a structure that entices a visitor to explore, offering the possibility of perpetual surprise.

Like "Rashomon," what one sees in Gehry's graceful shapes depends on one's viewpoint. They suggest ship sails or drapery in the wind here, a ship's prow there. Some read as a friendlier version of a torquing Richard Serra sculpture. The shell over the Founder's Room might be a Jell-O mold in an earthquake.

Sculpture meets architecture with such masterful inevitability that it's shocking how little faith the Los Angeles Philharmonic trustees had in Gehry after he won the commission in 1988. The stalled project was revived only after the success of his Bilbao museum, and it took some strong individuals to go out and raise the money needed to push the project forward. Even then there were wranglings about artistic control; at one point, the Los Angeles architect resigned. Luckily, the Disney family intervened.

The $274 million hall, which fronts Grand Avenue, is actually a complex. It includes a two-story rectangular administrative building, a public garden and two amphitheaters (seating 350 and 150) that wrap around the south and west sides of the main structure. The hall houses a streetside restaurant and a cafe off the lobby, as well as back-of-the house necessities and an underground parking deck.

The fabric on the hall's seats features a leaf pattern that was designed by architect Frank Gehry. The fabric is also used in a larger-scale pattern for the carpet outside the hall.

Disney Hall is big, but it's not a bunker. The main facade, which hugs the street, has plenty of glass and a welcoming entrance. The garden, which is accessible by stairways on two sides, ought to be a popular respite from concrete and asphalt. The only jarring note there is the concrete, flower-shaped fountain Gehry designed, Its clever surface -- a mosaic of blue and white Delft porcelain fragments, an homage to the late benefactor Lillian Disney -- can't disguise its ungainly proportions. The lobby is open to the public as well, providing access to the cafe, deck and box office. Even the Green Room, where performers greet guests, is visible from the lobby.

But no, this isn't a piece of urban infill. It is -- intentionally, of course -- a landmark. Whether the hall will spur urban regeneration a la Bilbao remains to be seen. Certainly it ought to be a draw. With the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art by Arata Isozaki and Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, L.A.'s downtown is becoming a hot spot for contemporary architecture.

Though punctuated with unusual wooden columns that curve like a tree trunk and branch and terminate in a swirling, skylit ceiling, the lobby is more like a conduit to other destinations than a grand room. Gehry saves that designation for the concert hall itself, which is, after all, the heart and soul of this community of spaces. And it is a gem, a space that is both inviting and exciting. The audience is made to feel that this is a place for special experiences.

The hall is paneled in Douglas fir, a wood commonly used for cellos and violas. The fir also ripples across the ceiling. The floors are oak. The upholstery is a lovely leaf pattern in red and orange, designed by Gehry and used in a larger-scale pattern for the carpeting outside the hall. Natural light seeps in through skylights and a large rear window.

Although the hall seats 2,265 and Atlanta's Symphony Hall seats1,750, the Los Angeles room is infinitely more intimate. The warmth of the wood and the palette of the upholstery play their part, but the effect is largely achieved by the vineyard seating (in the round), which means the hall can be narrower and shorter, and more people get a closer view.

The organ is the focal, and exclamation, point. In an ebullient gesture, Gehry encases the pipes in wood and arranges them as if they are a just-flung batch of pickup sticks. According to composer John Williams, Gehry likes to call them "french fries," but they are too elegant for that.

Disney Hall should assuage any concerns that the world was in for a flock of Bilbao clones. Although there is no confusing his work with anyone else's, Gehry proves here -- and in an exhibition of projects-in-progress at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art -- that his vocabulary is as flexible as his imagination. (Thank goodness his ungainly Experience Music Project in Seattle was a blip.)

Gehry's oeuvre is a model of how technology can be harnessed to keep pace with vision. His staff uses CATIA, a computer program used in the aeronautics industry, to draw plans from cardboard models, and it employed a global positioning system to help plot the roof's curves.

The future Atlanta Symphony Center has an architect who pushes the envelope as well. The similarities between Santiago Calatrava and Gehry don't stop there. Both are known for their distinctive sculptural visions. Both studied urban design and try to combine the "wow factor" of their iconic forms with accessible public spaces.

As in Los Angeles, the clustering of important buildings (the future Symphony Center and the High Museum -- both the original by Richard Meier and Renzo Piano's expansion) ought to create a synergy. That depends, of course, on the success of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's as-yet-undisclosed design. One thing is sure: Walt Disney Concert Hall sets the bar high.

Editor's Comments:

As much as I hate to inject a dissonant note into the chorus of approval, I do not consider Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall to be an architectural masterpiece. Far from it. Neither his concert hall in Los Angeles nor his museum in Bilbao qualify as masterpieces -- certainly not in the sense that Frank Lloyd Wright's 1959 Guggenheim Museum in New York or Mies van der Rohe's 1929 German Pavilion in Barcelona qualify as masterpieces.

Why not? Because a work of architecture deserves elevation to the status of masterpiece only if it expresses the architectonic forces that birthed it. Gehry does not even acknowlege these architectonic forces, let alone express them. The shapes of the Guggenheim Museum Bilboa and Walt Disney Concert Hall reflect neither the structural logic, nor the functional logic, nor the symbolic logic that brought them to light. They are utterly arbitary, and they look it.

What's wrong with being arbitary? Plenty. To say that an architectural design is arbitrary is to say that it need not be the way it is -- that it could just as well be some other way. It could be larger or smaller, taller or shorter, wider or narrower -- it really doesn't make any difference. Can anyone imagine a more damning indictment of a work of art than to say that the way its creator left it makes no difference?

Gehry's design comes across best on its LA Philharmonic Office and Founders' Room elevations. These elevations communicate Gehry's parti with the greatest clarity. Lightweight, brightly-polished titanium curves float weightlessly above the heavy, coarsely-textured, masonry podium below. A bold study in contrasts, right?

Not quite. Take a closer look at the street level, west elevation, where Gehry's castles in the air are forced to return to earth. How will they make contact with the podium below?

Nobody knows, least of all Gehry. Gehry apparently lost sight of a well known truth: architecture is not painting, least of all surrealist painting. Gehry might indulge his whims by drawing metallic curves floating weightlessly in mid air, but he had better not try to build them.

Is it necessary to point out that this constitutes a major conceptual blunder, and is not something any self-respecting architect can sweep under the rug?

So how was this dilemma resolved? It wasn't.

Instead, finding no solution, the modelmakers in Gehry's office furtively hid the unresolved interface behind greenery, aka "growies." Unfortunately for Gehry these fig leaves must be interrupted at the entrances.

Nor are Gehry's shapes particularly inspiring as pure art divorced from functional considerations. Richard Serra? I hardly think so. Contrast Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall with Jorn Utzon's expressionist masterpiece, the Sydney Opera House, and you'll see what I mean. Utzon's building is not only more rational structurally and functionally, it is more attractive sculpturally and compositionally.

Some may say that Utzon's design benefits disproportionately from its magnificent, breath-taking setting, poised between earth, water, and sky. Anyone who thinks this need only perform a simple mind experiment. Visualize Gehry's building situated on Bennelong Point in place of Utzon's. See what I mean? Gehry's design is not even in the same league as Utzon's. Leave aside the bitter controversy over unauthorized design changes for the moment. Uzton's forms work visually because they work conceptually. They have no growies, because they need no fig leaves.

The conclusion is depressing, but unavoidable. Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall is indeed significant, but only because it illustrates a steady decline in architectural design standards that began with the passing of first generation modern masters Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Architect infuses Disney Hall with grace, glamour
Illustration(s): Walt Disney Concert Hall Exterior
Author(s): Catherine Fox
Affiliation: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Source: http://www.ajc.com/travel/content/travel/content/1003/27disneyarch.html
Publication Date: October 27, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Chinese Sampan Teaches Much to Designers (中國舢舨啟發現代造船技師)

2003-10-23T00:37:00.000-07:00

Chinese Sampan Teaches Much to Designers (中國舢舨啟發現代造船技師)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/23)

Chinese Sampan Teaches Much to Designers

C. Andrade, Jr., recently came across an old model of a Chinese sampan. It is an odd piece of work, full of interest and instructive, too. Mr. Andrade lent the model to George B. Douglas, who has taken off the lines, and these lines, pictures of the model and an article written by Mr. Andrade, are given herewith in THE RUDDER.

THE accompanying lines and sail plan illustrate a very interesting model of Chinese sampan. The model from which this was taken is an authentic piece of work, evidently made by a Chinese shipbuilder, as it contains all the peculiarities of design and construction that belong to the Chinese system of naval architecture. It is a fact not generally known that the Chinese are, and for many centuries have been, very successful sailors, and the model shown herewith is a good illustration of their ability as designers. It will be noted that the lines embody many of the refinements which are found in the most up-to-date boats in the United States. For example, the wetted surface of this model is reduced almost to the theoretical minimum for the displacement shown. There is not a single square inch of surface wasted in any projecting keel or skeg or deadwood.

The sheer line of the bottom of the boat also illustrates a peculiarity which naval architects in this country have just begun to appreciate, and that is, that the run can be carried out quite full, almost to the stern, and then come up, with a sharp turn, without hurting the boat's speed in any way. This fact has been known for a number of years to the torpedo-boat builders of England, who carry their displacement curve very full, almost to the stern. The same thing is shown on the Herreshoff small steamers of the type of the Mirage, and other boats of that class, where the keel line is carried out with an easy curve, about to the point where the shaft leaves the hull, and then turns up rather sharply to the stern. This same feature accounts for the very short overhang, with strong upturned buttock lines that are found in the last two or three years' designs of the Herreshoff sailing yachts.

There is no planking across the stern of the boat, but there is a big open space somewhat like a well all the way from the transom to the heavy after bulkhead, which is shown in the sail plan and also in one of the photographs.

I have known of this peculiarity of Chinese construction for many years, but only recently have I been able to evolve any theory which would account for it. This method of construction must have some great advantage, or the Chinese would not have adopted it originally, or having adopted it, would not have adhered to it for centuries, as they have. It is my belief that the purpose of this stern construction is this:

It will be observed that the stern of this model is very full. The half-breadth plan shows that the waterlines are carried out to their full beam, almost to the transom. This, of course, gives the model great stability, and also great ease in driving, but it has the disadvantage of making a stern with too great buoyancy, that is to say, if this boat were planked solid across the transom, and were driven off in a heavy following sea, the enormous surplus buoyancy of the stern would make her pitch to a dangerous degree, and would tend to bury her head. It is at this point that the reason for the peculiar stern construction becomes apparent, for it is obvious that if this boat is running off with a heavy following sea, the instant that a wave strikes her stern, a very large volume of water will be momentarily held in the space between the stern proper and the after bulkhead. In a large boat, this weight of water would probably amount to a ton or more, and the weight of this water momentarily holds down the stern and prevents it from lifting unduly on a following sea.

The effect is just exactly as though a very large weight of ballast were placed in the stem of the boat. Every one knows that this is the only proper and safe way to trim a small boat when running off in a heavy following sea. But the Chinese stern has this advantage over the permanent ballast, and that is, that the moment the sea has passed the water runs out of the space at the stern, and the boat is left light and free to travel with much greater speed than if she were loaded down with a ton or so of ballast at the stern.

There is quite a marked flat portion on the bottom of the hull, so that she can go aground and rest at low tide without heeling over. Indeed, the whole boat appears to be designed for this contingency, because it will be noted that she depends for lateral plane on two features; first, a dagger-board forward, which can be lifted, and, second, a very large rudder aft, which also can be housed entirely within the hull, when not in use. It will be observed that the daggerboard contains the great essential which is necessary in a member of this type, i.e., narrow width with great depth.

It is well known that the former edge of the keel, or centerboard, is what does most of the work, and the Chinese apparently have grasped this fundamental principle. Therefore, while the daggerboard seems to have a very small lateral area, it will be noted that its area is of very high efficiency, particularly as the board is located right under the fore-foot, where it works in solid water, which is undisturbed by any portion of the hull, and which is not affected by any lateral movement that would be gathered by the hull further aft. This daggerboard has two different holes and a stop, so there are three different adjustments at which it could be carried, thus changing the balance of the boat very materially, as desired.

The rudder, as is common with Chinese rudders, has five diamond-shaped holes in the blade, and the blade itself is of very thin wood. The purpose of these diamond-shaped holes is undoubtedly to permit dead water to run through to the back of the rudder blade and prevent the accumulation of dead water along the after edge of the rudder. As already stated, the rudder can be completely housed in the hull, simply by setting it straight fore-and-aft, and then drawing it up through a slot, which is cut for the purpose in the deck. This construction is shown in detail at the stern of the hull in the sail plan.

"Transom" timbers removed for clarity to show end of planks. The grey bulkhead is partially hidden behind the ends of the planks since it is located at the second section line in from the stern. A sampan will typically have a flat bow timber, often tapering from small at bottom to wider at the top - COD

It will be observed, on reference to the buttock lines, that the boat carries a long and very efficient floor practically from station No.2 to the very stern of the boat. This feature will, of course, make the boat very fast on a reach, and will make her very easy to drive.
It is quite apparent from a glance at the body plan that the boat will have to be weighted with a generous amount of inside ballast before she will acquire much stability, but as she is built for carrying weight, that feature is really an excellent one.

The anchor is an interesting detail, as it will be noted that it is quite large, in comparison with the rest of the boat, and is made entirely of wood, the only metal being on the single fluke. It will also be noted that the stock is placed at the end of the anchor, next to the fluke, and not at the cable end. As soon as the anchor strikes the bottom, the weight of the metal fluke brings it down, and as soon as it takes hold, the stock lies flush with the bottom, and makes an anti-fouling anchor.

There are a couple of little hand windlasses of primitive type, one on each side of the mast, as shown in the half-deck plan. The mast is set in a tabernacle, so that it can be lowered when going under bridges, etc.

It will be noted that the rig is very simple, and very efficient. The mainsheet rigging is quite interesting, consisting of a single length of sheet, which is rove in an unusual manner, as will be noted from the sail plan. The wooden block through which all the parts of the sheet run has a little becket at its lower end, and this becket runs along the wooden traveler on the extreme stern.

I believe that a boat built exactly on these lines, including the unusual stern construction, would make a very comfortable and useful small boat for cruising. I can see no objection to building such a small cruiser with a jib set on a stay running to the stem-head, and a mainsail which might hang over the stern a foot or so, so as to be easily reefed.

As the lines are drawn, it shows the stern a little higher than the bow. This is a peculiarity of Chinese construction, and is a feature that was common on ail old types of sailing ships, as it will be recalled that Columbus's ships, and the Half Moon, and all the sailing vessels of that time had the stern considerably higher than the bow. Many theories have been advanced for this, but modern practice, of course, has gone the other way. I suppose one reason for making the stern higher was so as to give the steersman a better view; second, so that the vessel would ride head to the wind, in case she was left to drift in a gale; and, third, to avoid the danger of being swamped by overtaking waves in a heavy sea. With this high stern, and the daggerboard down all the way, this sampan should lie head to the wind in any kind of a gale, without any sail at all. I will be glad to hear of any boat built to these lines.

Editor's Comments:

The invention of the Chinese junk/sampan hull and sail archetypes required creativity and originality. Their subsequent evolution over the centuries that followed required patience and perseverance. Modern sailing enthusiasts are the happy beneficiaries of both processes.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Chinese Sampan Teaches Much to Designers
Illustration(s):
Author(s): C. Andrade, Jr
Affiliation:The Rudder
Source: http://www.friend.ly.net/~dadadata/junk/sampan.html
Publication Date: July 1917
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Canadians Take a Fancy to the Chinese Junk (加拿大人愛上中國帆船)

2003-10-23T00:23:00.000-07:00

Canadians Take a Fancy to the Chinese Junk (加拿大人愛上中國帆船)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/23)

Batwings and Bamboo

Even the dog beside me was quiet while the old man rowed his dory towards us. Minutes earlier our on-water party had been laughing. My father and I had just sailed from the Comox Marina to Newcastle Island, and our neighbours wanted to hear of our adventure. But we were silenced.

The old man looked thoughtfully at each of us.

"Which boat you in?"

My father nodded vaguely towards Nanaimo Harbour, "Not ours. We're bringing down someone else's to Sidney. Just a white boat."

Alan Farrell, builder of the legendary Chinese junk China Cloud grinned. Behind him, the colours of his orange-red and black boat shone. "Another one of those white boats with blue sail covers?" he asked mischievously.

Between Victoria and Port Hardy, Lasqueti Island and Vancouver, boat builders have embraced the colourful Chinese junk. West Coasters build modern day junk rigs because they are affordable, "beachable" and maneuverable in the water.

"A flat-bottomed junk can be built for the price of a modern day kayak," Dan Prain says. He finished his own junk rig on a Herreshoft Meadowlark hull four years ago.

"Boats of 30-plus feet [19.5 metres] can be made. Paint comes from paint exchanges, lines from government wharf dumpsters and sails cut out of plastic tarps," Prain says. While the materials can come cheap, the form of the rig varies artistically with each builder.

Michael Parker, who has built 10- to 13-metre beachable West Coast junks in a "funky" style, agrees. In 1966, Parker was fishing on a junk, The Lotus Princess, near Sooke, B.C. He was amazed at the spaciousness of it and the simple catwalk that bordered the cabin. His life has never been the same since. Junks make him feel, "overwhelmed, touching nostalgia."

Years later, when Parker was building his own junks, he was handed a piece of yellow newsprint. The article was about an old fishing boat that had come from Hong Kong. It was The Lotus Princess. Parker was astounded that the junk had come so far. This confirmed his belief in the strength of the junk form. He sums up a 2,000 year history simply: "Chinese junks are practical. Built to take abuse [and] water damage."

Since 221 BC, during the Ch'in Dynasty, the Chinese junk has dominated the world's sailing fleets. A thousand years before European ships dominated the seas, the junk was already using maritime innovations such as the balanced rudder, watertight compartment and spoon-shaped stern.

In China, spotting a junk on the horizon was considered a symbol of good luck.

Certainly for Hong Kong, the junk not only symbolized luck but also industrial and financial security. Hong
Kong has a long shipyard history, producing junks for industry and pleasure. Although fewer junks are being built there today, fishing junks are still being shaped with heat and charcoal.

Given its various forms, it is no wonder that the shape of the traditional Chinese junk remains a mystery. Chinese shipbuilding has long been recognized for an absence of written plans. Expertise was passed down between generations. This verbal exchange of instruction continues among builders in British Columbia.

"If it looks right, then it probably is right," says Prain, citing a general rule of thumb for building a junk.

Those who build junks share newspaper clippings and out-of-print books. It is this dialogue that makes the junk form stay alive.

When Prain is asked what distinguishes the junk's body, he says, "It is not so much a hull form, but a state of mind."

Steel is becoming more common in the Gulf Islands as the material of choice for junk hulls, though they are traditionally made of wood. Wooden junks on the West Coast have mostly been flat-bottomed. Sailboats generally have a keel that descends from the hull to a drop of approximately 0.6 to 0.9 metres. The longer the keel, the deeper the water needs to be when the boat anchors. Thus, a boat without a keel not only anchors easily in shallow areas, but also beaches on sandy shores. Most junks have a detachable rudder that can be raised when beaching the vessel.

Red and yellow cedar, fir and yew are the primary woods used to build junks. Natural crooks and knees are used as latches, rudder handles and joints. The Chinese junk is an expression limited only by the imagination.

The junk is environmentally safe. "I'd rather be an attraction than a detraction," Parker says of the junks beached near his home on Hornby Island. By keeping his boat on the beach, Parker avoids painting the underside of his hull with fouling agents. The more time the boat spends on the beach, the more time the bottom has to dry, warding against marine growth.

In addition, "The [lug rig] sails don't flap and all the other sails in the wind flap a heck of a racket," says Parker. He claims that a silent lug rig can be orange tarp or Dacron. Traditional junk sails are Chinese red, an orange-like mix of white, black and red, or deep green. The sail rigging uses multiple lines. The more lines there are in a rig, the less chance of stress on any one line. The battens (the crossbeams of the rig), are made of bamboo or fir. Parker insists that the sails can be put up easily in the wind, just like an "automatic transmission."

Junk rigs are used on boats other than the traditional flat bottom junk, such as Colvins' Gazelle and St. Pierre Dories.

Rolf Zarr lives aboard his 13-metre sailboat at Stamps Landing, B.C. He has had success adopting a junk lug rig to his sizable boat, making it manageable for one sailor. His initial rig plans came with a Pelican design. He had never seen a junk. When asked about first raising his junk sails, Zarr's face lights up.

"Some people don't like junk rigs at all," says Zarr, "but it suits my personality."

Junk rigs come naturally to some people. "It felt like something I'd done before. It doesn't make a lot of practical sense, but" Parker hardly pauses in his thoughts when describing the first time he saw a junk, "it felt like coming home."

Editor's Comments:

Recreational boaters in well to do countries in Europe and North America agree. The Chinese junk hull and junk rig are inexpensive, easy to build, practical, and fun. For those who have longed to own their own sailboat, but assumed they simply couldn't afford it, the Chinese junk may be the answer to their dreams.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Illustration(s): photographs by Lynn Vanherwaarden and Dan Prain
Author(s): Leanne Prain
Affiliation:Pacific Rim Magazine
Source: http://www.langara.bc.ca/prm/2000/Junks/junks.html
Publication Date: 2000
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Blondie Hasler's Jester (名英國探險家的中國風帆)

2003-10-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

Blondie Hasler's Jester (名英國探險家的中國風帆)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/21)

The Ship Would Not Travel Due West

The Singlehanded Trans-Atlantic Race

From the late 1800s until the 1960s, the development of the modern sailing yacht was an evolutionary process, occasionally interrupted by a flash of insight. Racing and cruising yachts were little more than refinements of the last sail-driven fishing schooners. In the first half of the 20th century , measurement rules and conservative owners were slow to accept the Bermudian rig or the fin keel, despite their proven efficiency. That conservative attitude finally began to change forty years ago when five daring pioneers set out from the southwest of England on an adventure that would forever change the face of yachting.

In June, 1960, with no fanfare, five sailors left Millbay Docks, Plymouth to race across the North Atlantic in the first Singlehanded Trans-Atlantic Race. At that time, the voyage they were embarking on was viewed by many in the yachting community as not just challenging, but practically impossible. The gale-swept ocean with its prevailing westerly winds was seen as an overwhelming force that no small yacht could prevail against for 3,000 miles, let alone a singlehander.

Most of the technologies we take for granted had yet to marketed. Dacron had just been introduced, wood was still the accepted material for hulls and spars and gentlemen sailed to windward as little as possible. A 25 footer like the Folkboat (with 4'-8" of headroom) was universally considered the ideal size for a solo ocean crossing, although this itself was viewed as a somewhat eccentric pursuit. Self-steering was a matter of lashing the tiller and hoping for the best, so solo ocean racing was simply inconceivable, a pipedream that would result in disaster and bring disrepute on the whole yachting community.

If the critics had made the effort to learn anything about the two men who were behind the race, they might have realized that this was no publicity stunt. H.G. "Blondie" Hasler and Francis Chichester knew exactly what they were getting into. When all five entrants completed the course, conventional wisdom on sailing and seamanship had been turned on its head, and the sport had entered a new era. Within a few years, Hasler's self-steering and junk rig would become an accepted part of the cruising scene, and thanks to Chichester, sponsored record breaking and radio reports would bring the adventure to the homes of millions.

Blondie Hasler: Soldier, Yachtsman and Inventor

Lt.Colonel H.G. Hasler DSO, MBE began his adventures on the water not in a yacht but in a kayak during World War II. In December 1942, he led a ten-man team of Royal Marines in a daring attack on the occupied harbor of Bordeaux in western France. They launched five folding kayaks at the mouth of the Gironde from the deck of submarine and paddled 75 miles upriver under cover of night. Only two kayaks reached their goal, a loading dock, where they attached limpet mines to four German merchant ships. When the charges went off, the ships sank at the dock, blocking access for many months.

The Germans might never have found out how this bold attack had been carried out, but the British submarine was unable to remain in the area to pick up the marines, so they were forced to find their own way across occupied France. Eight of them were never seen again. Hasler was the only one who spoke French and he and a Private named Billy Sparks managed to return to Britain via Spain with the help of the Resistance. Although still in uniform, the other eight men were shot as spies on direct orders from Berlin. (This cowardly act was later mentioned at the Nuremberg trials and is said to have ended the "gentleman!|s agreement" between the English and German high commands.)

These gallant men became familiar to everyone in post-war Britain as the "Cockleshell Heroes," the name of a book and a film about the raid. After the war ended, Hasler took up sailing, first in Petula, his gaff yawl built by William Fife in 1899. His innate curiosity then led him in a completely different direction, and he purchased a Thirty Square Meter named Tre Sang. Although it was designed for racing in sheltered waters in Scandinavia, Hasler entered the boat in some RORC races in the late 1940s and proved this low, light needle of a hull was capable of fast passages in the right conditions.

To test more radical ideas, he had another Scandinavian design, the Folkboat, built in the early 1950s. He had to patiently explain to the builders that he didn't want any form of cockpit. The whole boat was to be decked over, with just two small circular hatches in the cabin top. This was to be his floating laboratory and he called it Jester "because it was such a bloody joke." Perhaps because of wartime experience, Hasler was no dilletante, he was totally committed to making his ideas work. So unlike most nautical inventors, he rejected anything that wasn't absolutely seaworthy.

In the following years, he cruised around the Channel with different kinds of self-steering vanes on the Jester's stern and an unstayed wooden mast carrying variations on the Ljungstrom (lapwing) rig. This consisted of twin Bermudian mainsails set on a single luff. While closehauled, the two sails acted as one, but downwind the twin booms were goosewinged out giving port and starboard mainsails.

The idea showed promise and Hasler spent a couple of seasons thinking he had a workable, offshore system. But he reluctantly concluded that the risk of the booms flying out of control in strong winds was too great, and there were also two mainsails to reef. The Jester was living up to its name. He ditched the project and adopted an even more obscure rig, the Chinese junk sail.

Hasler soon proved to himself that the Chinese rig was a marvel of engineering. The fully-battened lugsail could be raised, lowered or reefed in any weather without leaving his circular main hatch, which was protected in bad weather by a small pram hood. He knew instinctively that his search was at an end; he had found a rig that could stand up to his ultimate test; solo passage across the North Atlantic without leaving the cabin. Thus began the modern junk rig movement!

With the rig questioned solved, he now was free to tinker with his self-steering vane and dream of his next goal. "It seemed that a race is always the best inducement for developing anything, and if I was to get people aiming at ease of handling and comfort, it would have to be a demanding race," he recalled in later years. "Going to windward across the North Atlantic seemed the most demanding thing to do!"

He defined the prospective race as follows: "A sporting event to encourage the development of boats, gear, supplies and technique for single-handed passages under sail." There was a dramatic lack of rules: no handicaps, no compulsory equipment, no marks to round. When asked about safety and the need to carry a radio transmitter, Hasler merely replied "It would be more seemly to drown like a gentleman."

Editor's Comments:

Lt.Colonel H.G. "Blondie" Hasler of the Royal Marines was a determined man. His audacious scheme to paddle kayaks 75 miles up the Gironde to plant limpet mines on German shipping anchored in Bordeaux proved that. But Hasler was an eminently practical man as well. His practicality was fully consistent with his determination. In order to successfully sail across the Atlantic, the second widest ocean on the planet, and to do it windward, "the hard way," Hasler knew he needed every advantage he could get. Not surprisingly Hasler chose the Chinese junk rig, the most ergonomic sail configuration ever designed.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: The Ship Would Not Travel Due West
Illustration(s): Blondie Hasler's Junk-rigged Folkboat Jester
Author(s): Peter Marsh
Affiliation: Sea to Summit
Source: http://www.angelfire.com/or/petermarsh/ostar.htm, http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/Forest/2137/fhist/fhist.html
Publication Date: NA
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Modern Norwegian Yachts with Chinese Junk Sails (摩登挪威游艇裝配中國風帆 )

2003-10-17T03:31:00.000-07:00

Modern Norwegian Yachts with Chinese Junk Sails (摩登挪威游艇裝配中國風帆 )
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/17)

Modern Norwegian Yachts with Chinese Junk Sails

Arne Kverneland was unhappy with the usual Bermuda rig on his single-masted sloop Malena. He tried the gaff rig and found it promising. But when Kverneland tried the junk rig that's when he found what he had been looking for. The Malena has since been sold. Arne is currently constructing a larger boat, also junk rigged.

Svein Magnus Ueland's 50 foot ferro-cement schooner was designed by Samson Marine. Its junk-rigged sails feature stiff battens of aluminum tubing and full panels.

Nils Johan Aksdal's ferro-cement schooner is a Colin Archer design, with its topsides raised one foot. Its junk-rigged sails feature stiff battens of aluminum tubing and full panels.

Editor's Comments:

Even modern yacht hulls designed by naval architects using sophisticated computer programs can benefit from ergonomically designed, easy to use Chinese junk rigs. Long waterline, heavy-displacement sailing ships with multiple masts can be sailed with only a handful of crew members, providing they are junk-rigged.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Modern Norwegian Yachts with Chinese Junk Rigs
Illustration(s): Malena with Gaff Rig, Malena with Junk Rig, Samson with Junk Rig, Samson with Junk Rig, Colin Archer with Junk Rig
Author(s): Victor Wintherthun
Affiliation: winterthun.net
Source: http://winterthun.net/victor/photo_gallery.htm
Publication Date: NA
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Thomas Colvin's Chinese Junks (名美國造船技師Thomas Colvin 的中國帆船)

2003-10-13T05:27:00.000-07:00

Thomas Colvin's Chinese Junks (名美國造船技師Thomas Colvin 的中國帆船)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/13)

Thomas Colvin's Chinese Junks

About Thomas E. Colvin

Thomas E. Colvin was born in 1925 in Chicago and, for him, life became boats. At 5 he built a boat by mating together oilcloth-covered apple and orange crates; at 6 he rigged a rowing skiff and made a sailing boat from a discarded cement mixing trough; at 7 he designed and built his own 10 foot catboat; all through grade school he worked in boat shops, starting as a handy boy, greasing machinery; on weekends, he crewed on racing boats, learning what makes sailboats go fast; he was drawing journeyman foots pay before entering high school; in his first year of high school, he sold his first professional design, a fish tug that was built and worked; at 14 he quit school for the sea, serving in sail and steam, moving up from Ordinary Seaman to Master of both. (This may sound young to have been constructively working on different projects. A surprise government inspection at my shipyard one day found my 6 year old son working on a project using the bandsaw and circular saw. My 8 year old son was welding up an art project for which he received a first prize. My 12 year old daughter was up on a scaffolding painting the name and scrolls on the hull we were building. The year before she won second prize in the national Singer Sewing Machine contest with a complete pants and jacket outfit she had made. I was informed by the man from OSHA that the children could not work in the shop because it was heavy industry, whereupon I asked when they would be allowed in the shop in order to learn shipbuilding. I was informed that it was 18 years of age. I told the gentleman that, at 18, they would be too smart to want to do that kind of work. I was correct.)

Since 1952, he has been a senior designer for the Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company in Virginia; Consulting Naval Architect for Kaiser Aluminum Company in Chicago; president of Colvin Manufacturing Company and Colvin Sailmakers, Miles, Virginia; and now maintains his design office along with being president of Sidereal Offshore Logistics & Analytical Research in Alva, Florida. He has designed everything from aircraft carriers to fishing vessels, barges, sailing vessels, motor and steam vessels for commercial and pleasure use, as well as constructed vessels in his own shipyard up to 100 foot in wood, steel and aluminum alloy. At this time, he has produced over 300 designs, ranging from 12 foot to 150 foot in length. He still builds boats for his own use.

Several times during his life, he has taken time out to go cruising on vessels that he designed and built, and he also lived aboard and cruised with his family on his three-masted 48 foot aluminum Chinese junk, KUNG FU-TSE, for 16 years. He has written many articles and technical books, trying to help others to achieve their dreams. Hundreds of ordinary people who have never undertaken such a task before have built fine boats from his designs, ranging from daysailers to around-the-world cruisers. One must always remember amateurs built the Ark and professionals built the Titanic.

Chinese Junks

My junk designs encompass many families from flat bottom to multi-chine and round bottom. I have no designs for V bottom junks. They fall basically into four families.

1. Flat Bottom Junks with Pram Bows
2. Multi-chine and Round Bottom Hainan Junks
3. Cargo Junks
4. Shoal Draft Fishing Junks

Flat Bottom Junks with Pram Bows

Flat bottom junks with pram bows range from 36 feet to 90 feet in length. The smallest one has leeboards, and all others have daggerboards. These are good ocean-going vessels; however, when modified for yachting purposes, a centerboard is a more practical solution for obtaining lateral plane.

Multi-chine and Round Bottom Hainan Junks

Multi-chine and round bottom junks, based on the Hainan junks, range from 42 feet to 150 feet in length. The most popular ones are OOTHOON at 41 feet, KUNG FU-TSE at 48 feet, and LUK CHIN at 54 feet which have been built in both steel and aluminum. The 54 foot junk has also been built as a round bottom steel hull. The larger sizes are usually round bottom since, in larger sizes, most builders prefer this type of construction and are equipped to handle the bending of round bottom frames. These are excellent sea boats. The larger ones incorporate daggerboards, while on the smaller ones used for yachting I have substituted a long shallow keel which opens up the whole interior to an infinite variety of arrangements. Most of them have made long voyages and, as such, I like to keep the engine and fuel tanks very close to the center of floatation and center of buoyancy. I also use the engine room with bulkheads at each end to isolate all machinery. This provides good working conditions around the engine. Most vessels have access doors for passage through the engine room; whereas, in others the engine room bulkhead is not pierced and access is from the deck only.

Cargo Junks

Shown is an 18.5 meter (60 feet) cargo junk displacing 42 tons in ballast, which is under construction at the present time in Timor. This family of cargo junks has a distinct type of hull form that has no direct counterpart in China, but is a combination of several types plus some modifications that stress performance to windward. They are modest carriers and are primarily used in the Indian Ocean. They range from 60 feet to 90 feet on deck. It will be noted that these junks are rather narrow and deep. Unlike the Hainan type of junk, these vessels are seldom used for bulk cargoes, but instead haul refrigerators, stoves, sinks, tiles and other building materials as well as other cargo that can be packaged. The windward ability at the expense of other points of sailing was necessary because she also ventures into the islands at all seasons rather than wait for the fair winds of a monsoon.

Shoal Draft Fishing Junks

Shoal draft fishing junks range in size from 40 feet to 75 feet the more popular ones being in the 50 feet to 60 feet length. They are flat bottom and can be beached, but are excellent sea going vessels. Out of season, many of them do carry coastwise freight. Like the sharpie, there are limitations on the amount of headroom available, depending on length. In trying to compare these with Western hulls, they are sort of a cross between a dory and a sharpie. Throwing in their Chinese ancestry, they have the wider stern galleries. Most have a daggerboard, but some have found it advantageous, even though it is foreign to them, to use a centerboard since the trunk then splits the hold in half longitudinally for better stowage of ice and fish.

Editor's Comments:

Thomas Colvin is a highly respected American naval architect. Sailing ships built to his designs are highly prized and sought after, sometimes fetching more than their original cost. According to Colvin "he lived aboard and cruised with his family on his three-masted 48 foot aluminum Chinese junk, Kung Fu-tse for 16 years." Colvin is a master shipwright. He is someone who could design, build and live aboard any kind of ship he wanted, power or sail, western or eastern. Yet he chose Chinese junk-rigged sails on a Chinese junk hull. Colvin knew a good thing when he saw it. This speaks volumes, about both Thomas Colvin and the unsung heroes who bequeathed the world traditional Chinese maritime technology.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Thomas Colvin's Chinese Junks
Illustration(s): Flat Bottom Junk with Pram Bow, Oothoon, Cargo Junk, Kung Fu-tse (Confucius)
Author(s): Thomas Colvin
Affiliation: Thomas E. Colvin, Naval Architect
Source: http://www.thomasecolvin.com/chinese_junks.htm
Publication Date: NA
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Joshua Slocum's Liberdade (Joshua Slocum 的自由號)

2003-10-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

< Joshua Slocum's Liberdade (Joshua Slocum 的自由號)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/08)

The Liberdade, by Joshua Slocum

Illustration One is a Cabin Profile and Sail Plan of the Liberdade.

Illustration Two is a Midship Section. Notice the bundles of bamboo on the gunwhales for flotation and to prevent capsizing. Some features, such as the planking, resemble a Cape Ann Dory. Others features resemble a sampan.

The full text of The Voyage of the Liberdade, in plain text format:

http://www.mcallen.lib.tx.us/books/liberdade/liberdad.txt

Editor's Comments:

On February 28, 1886, Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scotian sailor, his American wife and their two young sons boarded the Aquidneck in New York harbor, bound for Montevideo, Uruguay. Shortly after Christmas Day, 1887, the 25 year old, 326 ton Aquidneck ran aground on a sand bar off the coast of Brazil, near Guarakasava. Slocum watched helplessly as his recently purchased barque was dashed to pieces in the pounding surf. The now impoverished Slocum no longer had the means to get himself and his family back to America. In a scenario straight out of "Swiss Family Robinson," Slocum made a bold decision. He built a 35 foot sailing vessel on that remote Brazilian beach, and sailed his family back to America. The vessel Slocum built was a cross between an American dory and a Chinese sampan, and was fitted with Chinese full batten junk sails. Slocum referred to it as a "canoe." It was completed on May 13, the anniversary of the day the slaves were emancipated in Brazil, and Slocum named it "Liberdade," Portuguese for "Liberty." On December 28, 1888, after a journey fraught with peril, Slocum triumphantly sailed the Liberdade up Chesapeake Bay into Washington, D.C. He and his family were finally home.

Why did Slocum choose a modified Chinese sampan hull and a Chinese full battened junk rig for the Liberdade? Because in his words:

"Her rig was the Chinese sampan style, which is, I consider, the most convenient boat rig in the whole world."

Seven years later, in 1895, Slocum would depart from Boston Harbor, MA in the 37 foot sloop Spray. For the next three years he would sail single-handed around the world, a passage of 46,000 miles, eventually arriving back in Newport, R.I. in 1898. This feat, believed to be without precedent in recorded history, would make Slocum the patron saint of small-boat voyagers, navigators and adventurers the world over.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: The Liberdade, by Joshua Slocum
Illustration(s): Cabin Profile and Sail Plan, Midship Section
Author(s): Unknown
Affiliation: McAllen Memorial Library
Source: http://www.mcallen.lib.tx.us/orgs/liberd1.htm
Publication Date: Updated September 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Michael Kasten on The Junk Rig (Michael Kasten 論中國風帆)

2003-10-06T03:26:00.000-07:00

Michael Kasten on The Junk Rig (Michael Kasten 論中國風帆)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/06)

What About the Junk Rig?

Is the Junk Rig Suited to Modern Cruising?

The junk rig shares many of the virtues of the gaff rig. The junk rig or "chinese lug rig" is easy to handle, very easy to reef, easy and inexpensive to build, easy to rig, has no complex hardware, requires no winches, is easy to maintain, involves very low rigging stresses, provides a low center of effort so requires less beam or depth of keel, and at least in my view, looks great!

That is quite an impressive list of positive attributes... While the following is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to the junk rig, it is a brief introduction to a few of the advantages offered by the chinese lug, or junk rig. Due to its excellent qualities for blue water voyaging, I believe the junk rig has much to offer.

Some Advantages Specific to the Junk Rig

Reefing: The ease of reefing a junk rig is legendary. Perhaps it is best illustrated with a brief story about sailing one quite windy day off Port Townsend on Migrant, sister ship to Colvin's Gazelle. This was in 1979, and I was considering the junk rig for my own boat, then under construction. Naturally curious, I asked the skipper about reefing the junk rig. He had just passed around mugs of hot chocolate, so I expected a brief discourse on the subject. Instead, without saying anything he walked over to the main mast and with one hand released the main halyard just enough to let it slip over the belaying pin, paying out about half of it and belaying it again. The boat was reefed. He did not put down his mug of hot chocolate. He did not spill any.

Suitability to Cruising Boats: Many hull forms will handle the junk rig very nicely. As we are now seeing, fully battened sails are the "state of the art" on high performance sailing craft, for example on the America's Cup contenders. Given proper design, there is no reason the junk rig cannot be adapted to performance oriented cruising boats. An excellent combination is also the use of a fairly traditional hull form with the junk rig. As with any rig, there must be correct balance, and sufficient sail area, with an efficient plan form given to the sails. In my view, there will ideally not be any "western" sails such as a jib, and the rig should approach that of a true ocean going Chinese junk.

Suitability to Motor Sailors: A motor sailor can make excellent use of the junk rig. A motor sailor can be 100% sailing vessel, as well as being 100% capable under power. There are many other approaches as well, such as that taken by the Gulliver 46, the Greatheart 48 and the Greatheart 60 designs. These types have an emphasis on sail that is more on the order of around 60% to 70%. In other words, the sails are provided primarily for the purpose of auxiliary propulsion, rather than primary propulsion. The sails serve the function of being the "get-home" motive power in the case of engine failure. In addition, the sails provide extra boost while motoring when the wind favors. As a bonus, the sails and rig provide excellent roll dampening. For this purpose, the junk rig is ideal.

Simplicity: With a schooner or ketch configuration arranged in true Chinese junk fashion, therefore not having a western jib, there would be just two junk sails, therefore just two halyards total. For a larger vessel, a small mizzen or small fore sail can be used, also ideally a junk type of sail.

Ease of use: On any cruising vessel, be it a sail boat or a motor sailor, it seems particularly advantageous to have the ability to instantly reef the sails, or to lower them completely without any fooling around. Sail and battens collect neatly in the lazy jacks. Once down, you can go to the sail to throw a line around the battens if necessary.

Flogging / Luffing: There is no sail flapping and flogging when passing through the eye of the wind, either while tacking or jibing.

Safety: Individual "sheetlets" are lead to each batten, a full set of sheetlets on each side, so the sails are self tending. The sail shape can be controlled very effectively. This is quite a safe arrangement as well. The multiple sheets, one to each batten, make jibes very gentle, so there is no drama if someone inadvertently puts the helm too far over. This "soft jibe" effect is augmented by there being a fair sized portion of the sail forward of the mast, as a counter force. This makes the junk rig very forgiving for family sailing.

Sail Stress: Having multiple battens, the sails can be made of somewhat lighter material. Sail "cut" is not usually regarded as being critical, and most often junk sails are built "flat" rather than being cambered.

Appearance: In my view, the junk rig looks "right" on many vessels, especially so with a somewhat "traditional" hull form. Given the right match to the hull form underneath, in my eyes the junk rig is very handsome. This can even be stretched to the somewhat unusual in some cases. For example, the junk rig would be a perfect companion to a vessel like the 46' trawler Gulliver...

Spars & Rigging

Spars: Spars can be solid wood, or alternately, the junk rig can take advantage of welded aluminum tube or pipe for spars. These are perfect for the junk rig and when painted properly are nearly indistinguishable from traditional round wooden spars. Compared strictly on a strength to weight to cost basis, aluminum pipe spars are nearly impossible to improve upon.

Battens: Many types of battens have been tried, varying from the obvious use of wood, to the use of ABS pipe, and then to the use of fiberglass rods or bars. Each material has an advantage. Fiberglass battens are a bit heavier and more costly, but they will usually outlast the other types by a substantial margin.

Rigging: The junk rig is friendly to use. For example, just as with a traditional gaff rig, one will be handling soft lines rather than harsh stainless wire and winches.

Proportion: The junk sail drawing presented above is very generic, and is intended primarily as a schematic of a four batten junk (upper yard and boom not included in the batten count). In most applications, the sail's proportions would be stretched to be somewhat taller and less wide. In other words, the rig would ideally have a somewhat higher aspect ratio.

A Few New Terms

A minor advantage of familiarity with the junk rig is being able to impress dock side wags by knowing all about lizards, sheetlets, euphroes, snotters, and bowsing tackles....

Sail shape is controlled by the sheets mainly. Each "sheetlet" runs through a "euphroe" which acts as friction block to keep the tension set as intended. In my drawing, I've made use of a simpler arrangement using a fiddle block and separate "lizard" eyes in order to allow the sail to self adjust when it is reefed.

Once the sail is raised, if it is desired to tension the sail vertically, it is hauled downward by a "bowsing tackle." If it is desired to move the sail forward or aft, it can be done by controlling the "out haul" which in this case leads forward to the leading edge of the battens. The top yard can be controlled via a line called the "snotter" to move the spar forward or aft, or to snug it against the mast, as needed.

In Conclusion

There are many excellent resources for more information on the junk rig. Tom Colvin has written many good articles on the subject, as have Hasler and others. If this kind of thing is of interest, please inquire.

Kasten Marine Design, Inc.

Editor's Comments:

Michael Kasten is a modern enthusiast of the Chinese junk rig. Like many members of the junk rig fraternity, Kasten has come up with modern adaptations of the two millennia old junk rig using modern industrial materials.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: What About the Junk Rig?
Illustration(s): Junk Rig, Gulliver Junk Rig
Author(s): Michael Kasten
Affiliation: Kasten Marine Design
Source: http://www.kastenmarine.com/junk_rig.htm
Publication Date: 2001
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Brian Platt on The Chinese Sail (Brian Platt 論中國風帆)

2003-10-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

Brian Platt on The Chinese Sail (Brian Platt 論中國風帆)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/10/03)

The Chinese Sail

Nobody could have designed the Chinese Sail, if only for fear of being laughed at. A device so elaborate and clumsy in conception yet so simple and handy in operation could only have evolved through trial and error. It is indifference rather than difficulty that has caused Chinese sailing craft to be so little studied in the West but the difficulties themselves are formidable enough.

For a start there have probably always been more varieties of sailing craft in China than in all the rest of the world put together. Furthermore:

"The study of everything connected with the Chinese junk is complicated by the most vexatious contradictions. No sooner is an apparent solution found, or a rule permitting of a particular classification arrived at, than along comes an exception of such a formidable nature as to wreck all previous conclusions."

So wrote G.R.G. Worcester, formerly of the China Customs. He is one of the very few Europeans to have given the subject some of the attention that it would seem to deserve.

In my small way I found the same difficulty and, for that reason, merely relate what I learnt from "High Tea" and from what I had seen of Hong Kong junks before I set sail. The letters E & OE (errors and omissions excepted) should be read beside any general statement I may make about the way things are arranged aboard Chinese boats.

Another difficulty I met with was the fact that some parts of the Chinese rig have no equivalent in the West. We have no name for them. I have done my best to adapt conventional terms - though some of those may be not too familiar to modern yachtsmen - but where I could find no suitable term I have had to invent my own.

The Masts, Hull and Standing Rigging

The Chinese Sail may be defined basically as a fully-battened balanced lugsail. There is one sail to each mast. Other sails may sometimes be rigged on booms or between the masts but a two-masted vessel normally carries two sails, a three-master three sails etc. The sailing junks around Hong Kong generally have two or three masts, not more. The foremast is stepped right in the bows, the mainmast about a third of the way aft. If there is a mizzen the construction of the Chinese rudder generally prevents it from being stepped in the centre line, in which case it is stepped to starboard.

A description of the rig is not complete without some description of the hull that carries it: and particularly so with the Chinese junk which is very much an integrated craft. There is no false-keel on Chinese sailing boats. Instead there is a great barn door rudder hoisted in chocks, which when lowered extends well below the level of the keel. To some extent this acts as a centreboard. It can be raised and lowered to adjust the balance when sailing and when beached. When lying head-to-wind under a sea-anchor the whole rudder can be lifted clear of the water. On the Hong Kong styles of junk there is frequently a projecting forefoot where the stem joins the keel, presumably to balance the underwater grip of the rudder. In addition most junks up to about 60 ft overall have a daggerboard between the mainmast and the foremast.

Inside, the hull is built around a system of watertight compartments. Whereas additional seaworthiness may be a consequence of this type of construction I doubt whether it was ever the object. The Chinese hull (if we are speaking of the seagoing varieties) is a seaworthy shape and in normal circumstances has no need for such aids: and the Chinese boatman, for his part, will rarely spend money on anything which he does not consider strictly necessary. The purpose of the bulkhead construction, I think, is twofold: structural strength and working capacity. Different types of cargo or the consignments of different customers can be isolated from each other in the different holds. On fishing boats some of the compartments are filled with water to keep the bait or catch alive.

The large stern of the Chinese junk provides a working and living area, which is frequently extended even further with an overhang. Indeed, if there is a mizzen mast the overhang is essential to stay it and to work the sheets. A couple of catheads which project on either side of the bow are linked by a crosspiece and serve, on Hong Kong junks, another multiple purpose: to stay the foremast, to ship the anchors (whereby I justify the use of the term "cathead") and perhaps also to provide a working platform at the bow.

In general the standing rigging of the junk appears unbelievably flimsy, but in fact the nature of the Chinese sail imposes such an evenly distributed strain that heavy rigging does not seem to be necessary. The big junks of Northern China often carried no standing rigging at all, the masts being strengthened instead with laminating strips clamped on by iron bands. With an unstayed mast the collar where it passes through the deck will act as a fulcrum and the butt of the mast will work on the keel like a crowbar: but the junks of northern China did not even have a keel, merely a thicker plank down the centre to take the mast stepping! The portion of the mast below decks, however, was braced against the system of internal bulkheads. The bulkhead type of construction not only would have made for a rigid frame but must evidently have distributed this leverage in the same way as standing rigging; perhaps more efficiently.

All the masts have a forward rake which, with the high poop, give the vessel the appearance of "slipping downhill". This creates the impression that the junk would bury her bows in a head sea, but I found it to be quite illusory. Some helicopters create the same impression that they are flying into the ground! The reason for the forward rake of the masts is probably to cause the sails to swing outboard in light winds. The rake of the foremast is much more pronounced than that of the others. Acting half as a mast, half as a bowsprit, it increases the sail area and brings the centre of effort forward. Another effect is to cause the foresail to "goosewing" of its own accord when running before the wind.

Charles Jarrett said:

"The forward rake of the mast takes any viciousness out of a gybe by making the sail swing uphill: also, if the sail does succeed in gybing, as soon as the after part gets into the lee of the mainsail, the balance part forward of the mast is swinging into the wind, an action which so deadens the motion of the sail that, as a rule, it comes back to its original setting." (Yachting Monthly, 1924)

The Sail

On Hong Kong junks the sail hangs always to starboard of the mast, though this varies in different parts of China. Sailing to windward the lugsail tends to be more efficient on the tack where it lies away from the mast than when it lies against it, which may explain why in some areas of China the mainsail is hung to one side and the other sails to the other - to give equivalent efficiency on both tacks. Possibly the local preference was conditioned in the first instance by the prevailing winds. In the South China Sea they blow half the year from the northeast and half from the southwest and the fishing junks from Hong Kong would tend to sail East out to sea and West back home, so that when sailing close-hauled they would nearly always be on the port tack: hence the sails are hung to starboard.

The battens (A-B in Diagram 1) are rigid lengths of bamboo with very little taper or flexibility. They are attached to the port side of the sail to take most of the chafe against the mast when on the starboard tack. On the starboard side, sandwiching the sail to the batten, there is usually a thin slat of bamboo (i.e. instead of the batten being held in a pocket as in Western rigs the battens are on the outside and the sail is held between them). The slat prevents the sail from bellying between its points of attachment to the battens and also acts as a chafing strip when the sail rubs against the shrouds.

On the port side of each batten there is a parrel (C) around the mast which holds the sail against the mast when on the port tack. Insofar as there is a "boom" at all on the Chinese sail it is not the lowest batten but the one above it. The distance between the true lowermost battens is only about half that between the others and in any case that portion of the sail is usually brailed up to enable the helmsman to see underneath. Even when the sail is fully extended the lowest panel seems to do hardly any work. It has no parrel to hold it against the mast at its forward end and sometimes no sheet at its after end, so that on the port tack it hangs loosely to leeward. That portion of the sail might be described as an appendix: the real foot of the sail being at the lowest batten but one, which I will call the "boom".

To the forward end of the boom there is an inhaul (D) by which the distance of the tack forward of the mast can be adjusted [often called the boom parrel]. The sail's centre of gravity, suspended from the halliard, is of course well aft of the mast and the weight of each batten tends to push forward. If unchecked the luff of the sail would be a convex line and there would be a transverse strain on the sailcloth between each batten. To control this a line or wire (E) runs from the forward end of each batten to about the centre of the batten below it. The weight of each batten hangs downward and forward and the lines at "E" (which I term "checks") opposed the forward thrust of the higher batten to the downward thrust of the lower.

Aboard High Tea I found that the checking action was not complete and there was still some convex line to the luff; not only pulling the sail out of shape (as the luff had been cut to fall straight) but causing the forward end of the battens sometimes to foul the shrouds. To control this tendency, I evolved a luff-line as illustrated in Diagram 2.

It worked very effectively and I thought I had made a real contribution to the Chinese rig until I discovered later that some North Chinese junks have an arrangement of combined parrel and luff-line to serve just that purpose!

The foot of the sail is carried on two buntlines (F), one forward and one aft of the mast [also called topping lifts or lazyjacks].
Each is a continuous rope, one end spliced to a block, the other running up through a pulley at the masthead, down the other side of the sail, round the foot, up through the block on the other end and thence down to a cleat.

Where it passes the boom it is seized to a ring to prevented it from slipping.

The buntlines take the weight of the sail and battens when it is reefed or furled. This arrangement provides a purchase which is useful to take the weight of the heavier sails or in a strong wind. Furthermore, they can brail up the foot of the sail, as another way of reefing or to enable the helmsman to see underneath, or to clear an awning or bulky cargo. When reefing or furling the sail drops down within the buntlines and is cradled in the curve of them like a Venetian blind. There are no reef points to tie and no need for them. Reefing is achieved by letting go a few feet of halliard until the lower battens lie on each other.

If it is blowing very hard the wind may belly out the panel in between and prevent the battens from meeting properly. But this is very simply corrected by pulling up the foot of the sail a few inches with the buntline.

Whereas the battens are bamboo, the yard of a Chinese sail is wood. It is possible that because the whole weight of the sail is suspended from the halliard at one point bamboo might not be strong enough: or it may be that a heavier spar is wanted along the head to bring the sail down faster. This would particularly apply to the Hong Kong sail and its comparatively short yard.

The arrangements connecting the yard with the mast are shown in Diagram 3. There is one halliard (no peak halliard) and a roving parrel [also called running yard parrel] is led from the same place on the yard as the halliard, passing round the mast, back through a block and down.

When raising or lowering sail it is necessary to adjust this line. Such, at least, was the arrangement as first rigged aboard High Tea. It had the merits common to the Chinese rig of low capital cost and ease of repair, but I found the extra line a nuisance to adjust. I experimented, therefore, with a brass ring and wooden parrel balls that encircled the mast and was shackled to the yard at the point where they crossed (somewhat forward of the halliard). It worked quite efficiently but being hard it tended to chew up the masthead, so I improved on it with a collar made of old fire hose liberally coated with paraffin wax to provide stiffness and lubrication. At either end it was riveted to a metal triangle and a bell shackle passed through the triangles linked it to the yard. It worked very well.

The Sheets

The sheets of a Chinese sail do two things. They control, as ours do, the angle of the sail to the fore-and-aft line of the vessel. They also control the shape and flow of the sail. The two functions are independent: the second being performed by thinner lines, "sheetlets", running from each of the battens to a euphroe connected to the sheet itself.

The sheetlets are as far as possible a continuous line (Diagram 4) starting from the top batten. There is no line to the yard and no need for a vang with such an arrangement, as the sheetlets give adequate control up to the top of the sail.

This arrangement requires a good deal of space so if the sail is to be close-hauled the sheet needs to be led to the windward side. When going about the sheet must be unhitched from the windward side, the sheetlets flicked around the leech as it comes across so that they do not foul the ends of the battens and the sheet hitched up again to the other side.

I had noticed on the foresails of some junks an arrangement of double sheets and sheetlets: one set on each side of the sail so that on either tack the windward set took up the strain. I reproduced this arrangement on all three of my sails, leading the fore and mizzen sheets aft and forward so I could control them from the cockpit. To discourage the sheetlets from fouling the end of the battens I attached them forward of the leech about 15% of the width of the sail. Going about, thereafter, became simply a matter of pushing the helm down.

The purpose in leading the sheetlets to and fro through the euphroe in a continuous line is to make for easy adjustment. A little familiarity with the lead of the sheetlets makes it very simple to adjust the shape of the sail (e.g. to flatten it when sailing to windward). To permit two further adjustments the lower end of the sheetlet is left free, either attached to the appendix batten or knotted to stop it running out through the euphroe. If the sheetlets become too long the sail cannot be fully close-hauled so by taking in on the lower end of the sheetlet adjustment can be made for stretch and for the lengthening effect when the sail is reefed.

Comparison with Western Rigs

Sailing Qualities

Comparisons are still being made and merits argued between the gaff and Bermudan (to Americans, "Marconi") rigs. The Bermudan is generally accepted as being superior to windward because of its long leading edge, but for cruising the gaff is sometimes preferred on grounds of a shorter mast and better distribution of sail off the wind. Short of conducting a controlled experiment, with an identical hull under identical conditions, it would be difficult to assess how the Chinese sail compares.

I remember once sailing a Dragon to windward in Hong Kong harbour, against a light but steady breeze and watching a medium-sized Chinese junk (50 to 60 ft overall) on the same tack. Lacking a deep keel the junk was making a lot more leeway than I, so his actual course was not so close as mine, but he was pointing as close and sailing as fast as I was. In such conditions, and comparing a work boat with one designed and maintained for racing, the comparison seemed to me to speak pretty highly for the junk.

Theoretically I would say that for sailing ability the Chinese sail must fall somewhere between the Bermudan and gaff. Its flatness would tend to make it sail better to windward than the gaff and not so well off the wind. I do not doubt that the long leading edge of the Bermudan sail makes it potentially the best to windward so long as it has been properly made and stretched (a Bermudan sail that has been allowed to get out of shape is not particularly efficient). Therein lies the rub. The shape of a Bermudan sail has to be built in and its retention requires skilful tailoring and high-quality materials. The shape of the Chinese sail, by contrast, is maintained and controlled by external features in the form of the battens and sheetlets. Anybody who can cut and stitch cloth can make a Chinese sail out of almost any woven material. If one had to make do with poor quality materials and workmanship the most efficient type of fore-and-aft sail that one could make would be the Chinese; which is probably why Slocum chose it when building his "Liberdade".

Handling Qualities

When sailing conditions are easy the Bermudan rig is probably a little less trouble to handle than the Chinese; though when conditions are easy the handling of the Chinese sail could hardly be described as difficult! By contrast, as conditions cease to be easy the handling of the Chinese sail remains much the same, while Western rigs become more and more burdensome.

This is due to the degree of control given by the battens and sheetlets. A sail presents few handling problems so long as it is kept full, which is why there is a temptation with Western rigs to hold on to sail in a rising wind rather than face the blood and sweat of trying to get it in; particularly when sailing single-handed. So the helmsman continues until something breaks or until the situation becomes so obviously dangerous that he prefers to face the lesser dangers, trying to bring under control a wet and flogging mass of canvas. With the Chinese rig you carry sail until the last possible minute for a different reason: because you know that you can reduce sail anytime you like, without trouble. The sail will always come down; it cannot flog because the area of unrestrained cloth between the battens is not large enough. For the same reason it does not slat in calms. All it can do is flutter and sway - and reefing is the simplest operation in the world.

The absolute control that you have over a Chinese sail lets you cope equally easily with other situations. You can do anything with it: reef it from the top down or the bottom up, spill the wind with the sheet or the halliard, adjust its shape or its balance, sail under as much or as little of it as you like; or brail it up to see underneath. It is a little more trouble to raise the sail (principally because of the number of ropes to snag) but this is more than compensated by the ease and speed with which it is dropped. The Chinese sail comes down like a pack of cards and is gathered into its buntlines, with no more work after that than pulling it inboard and making it fast.

There is no way of heaving-to a junk, but there are other things that can be done instead. Sail can be reduced progressively until just one corner remains to hold the boat steady against the wind or it can be dropped altogether, the daggerboard and rudder hoisted clear of the water, and a sea anchor thrown over the bows. The fact that the stern is higher than the bow and the low windage of the unstayed or lightly-stayed masts should certainly assist the Chinese sailing boat to lie closer head-to-wind than ours.

A controlled gybe is better executed with a Bermudan than with a Chinese sail because it can be sheeted-in closer. On the other hand an accidental gybe in a strong wind is liable to do less harm with the Chinese sail than with ours, because the shock is more evenly distributed.

Maintenance

Any sailing ship constantly at sea requires continuous running repairs to its rigging. This is probably more true of the Chinese junk than of our boats: partly because of the large amount of rigging but more because of the poor quality of the materials that are used. The junk is generally a family boat so that there is plenty of crew available for minor repairs. More important is that the materials be cheap and easily obtainable and repairs easily executed. On these grounds the Chinese sail suits its owner very well.

The materials and workmanship that go into a Chinese sail, if applied to a western rig, would blow to pieces in the first serious wind. The sail cloth is poor quality shirting-material, bound together with huge "homeward-bound" stitches. The battens are attached to the sail with a few strands of thin wire. There is no reinforcing in the way of the battens and no grommets. The wire is simply pushed through the cloth and round the batten a couple of times. The Chinese operates his boat on a very tight budget but he would use better materials if he thought they were necessary. In fact, the strains on a Chinese sail are so much less, due to the absence of flogging and slatting, that such materials are perfectly adequate. As for the workmanship, the Chinese sees no point in making it out of proportion to the materials.

My problem was slightly different. I was single-handed, I was by no means such a quick and able workman as the Chinese sailor, I was facing a long ocean passage in very rough conditions and I had more money to spend. It was worth my while to go in for better quality in the hope of reducing maintenance. Some of it was justified. I used Terylene rope for the halliards and nylon for the sheets and sheetlets. I used tough plastic hose for a chafing-strip where the battens rubbed against the mast and made the parrels of wire cable heavily greased and encased in plastic. Other measures proved to be a waste of time and money, but I had by no means reached the limits of experiment and had succeeded in cutting down the running maintenance at sea to almost nil.

I had anticipated a great deal of chafe in the Chinese sail. I found it to be much less than I had expected. Perhaps the worst chafe, and it was not important, was at the point where the after buntline passed round the foot of the sail. Otherwise chafe was only serious when the sail cloth was rubbed, wet, between two hard surfaces. I found that the sails suffered much more when reefed or furled than when extended until I had learned, when shortening sail on the starboard tack, to pull out the folds of cloth from where they might be caught and rubbed between the upper and lower battens or between the battens and the mast.

In my experience of both rigs under cruising conditions I would say that they compare differently from the point of view of maintenance, but by no means to the disadvantage of the Chinese. The Chinese sail is more liable to suffer small chafe-spots and they are much more difficult to repair at sea because the sail is so much more permanently rigged. There would be so much work in disconnecting all the battens and lines in order to get the sail comfortably stretched across one's knees out of the wind that it is easier, if the sail must be patched, to try to cope with it fully rigged.

What is lost on the roundabouts however is more than recovered on the swings. Because it does not flog the sail is less likely to tear, and if it does tear or chafe the hole will show very little inclination to spread, so that it can quite safely be left until the next calm or landfall gives leisure to deal with it. A broken batten must be repaired without too much delay; but so long as the battens remain intact the sail can be full of holes and yet retain a great deal of its efficiency. Further, although the patches may be more difficult to apply, even on dry land, they do not need to be applied nearly so well. Having learned my sail repairs on the Bermudan rig I could not bring myself to use homeward-bound stitches, but at the end I was experimenting with canvas cement - sticking on my patches - and the method gave every promise of working extremely well. Any tendency of the edge to lift might be checked with light stitching or staples.

At this point I can see the armchair yachtsmen, if they have followed me so far, rising from their seats in horror. Canvas cement! Staples! For my part I do not always equate what is seamanlike with what is old-womanish. Invisible mending is fine for those who like luxuries and can afford the time and money but in a sailing boat at sea the important thing is to keep sailing. I would not, however, advise anybody to try that technique on a western rig. The cement and staples will probably hold but they create an area of lesser flexibility, so that when the sail flogs it is likely to rip around the edges of the patch.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that there is no welded or wrought or cast or machined metal work in the Chinese rig - or none that cannot be replaced with a rope or wire - so there is no repair that cannot be executed at sea. Only simple tools need be carried, and an ample supply of bamboo and baling-wire in addition to the cordage and sail cloth and twine that are carried as normal spares.

Conclusion

It is difficult to make any sense out of the contempt with which the Chinese sailing boat is generally regarded in the West. This contempt stems from ignorance, but the ignorance itself, I think, has its roots in three main causes. The first is the almost unbelievable indifference displayed by most Europeans and Americans in the Far East to the races that live around them. Amazing the prevalence of misconceptions and the lack of any attempt or desire to find out the truth, the failure even to learn the language. If those living near China cannot be bothered even to explore Chinese cooking (the average white man in Hong Kong is acquainted with perhaps a dozen dishes out of the hundreds that exist!) why should they be bothered to learn about Chinese sailing boats? [emphasis added]

The second factor is that even in Hong Kong there are many, many varieties of Chinese sailing boat, each adapted to a different purpose. The average Westerner does not see much of the ocean-going varieties. The type mostly seen around Hong Kong harbour is the harbour lighter, a great high-walled craft with a single mast and huge tattered sails, which is built for load-carrying rather than for sailing. The sail is only an auxiliary for use with a fair wind: otherwise the vessel is towed by tug or propelled by sweeps. Anybody seeing those boats, and assuming them to be representative of the Chinese junk, would naturally conclude that the type had not very good sailing qualities!

Finally, it should be pointed out that the Chinese is not interested in the same things as we are. We, admiring their ornaments, laugh at the superstitions on which they are based. The Chinese, admiring the finish and materials that go into our boats and the care with which they are maintained, probably laugh just as much at the idea of lavishing so much sentimentality on an inanimate object. If the external appearance of a boat or vehicle or building is shoddy and neglected it creates an impression of a general unsoundness that may be quite untrue, just as a coat of paint can make something appear solid which is actually on the point of falling to pieces!

Bearing in mind the very small margins on which they work I think the Chinese are inclined to neglect maintenance beyond the point that is efficient or economic, but in this context I am concerned not with the fact but with the appearance of inefficiency, which can be deceptive. The same lack of spit and polish and the preconception that oriental dispositions are necessarily inefficient, led experienced military observers before the war to underrate the Japanese!

Comparing my experience aboard Chempaka (a Bermuda rigged cutter on which I sailed from Singapore to Manila) with that aboard High Tea I do not doubt that High Tea's was the better rig. During equally squally weather in the South China Sea the handling of Chempaka's sails became a real burden and progress was almost nil. Further, when repairs when necessary, there was almost nowhere I could find the proper quality of materials and workmanship to repair a Bermuda rig, whereas adequate quality for the Chinese rig could have been found in any large village. I do not know how Chempaka's rig would have stood up to the almost continuous winter gales of the North Pacific, and frankly I would not like to try; though I would not mind making the same journey again on a junk.

There is no such thing as an ideal sail for all conditions and I doubt whether there ever will be. Among most yachtsman the Bermuda rig has become generally accepted, and with good reason, because of its windward ability and its relative simplicity and lack of chafe. It is a good sail for easy conditions, which are the conditions under which most yachtsmen do their sailing. However, for all round cruising ability in difficult or unfamiliar conditions I think the Chinese sail is unbeatable.

Editor's Comments:

Junk rig enthusiast Brian Platt was a westerner whose mind was open. As a result of his open minded attitude, Platt was able to transcend a regrettable history of chauvinism. Platt learned to appreciate and make use of China's ingenious contributions to maritime technology. If westerners such as Platt can do this, shouldn't modern Chinese be able to do the same?

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: The Chinese Sail
Illustration(s): Brian Platt on his Chinese Junk "Sea Emperor"; Sea Emperor during Trials; Rigging, Port Side; Yard, Roving Parrel, Halyard; Sheets; Luff Line
Author(s): Brian Platt
Affiliation: The Cheap Pages
Source: http://www.friend.ly.net/~dadadata/junk/platt/platt_chinese_sail.html
Publication Date: 1960
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Ancient Chinese Sail Design -- 2000 Years Old and Still Going Strong (古老中國風帆設計)

2003-09-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

Ancient Chinese Sail Design -- 2000 Years Old and Still Going Strong (古老中國風帆設計)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/09/25)

Ancient Chinese Sail Design -- 2000 Years Old and Still Going Strong

The full batten sail is a Chinese invention. No other seafaring civilization has ever created a sail design even remotely similar. Invented over two thousand years ago, the junk rigged full batten sail is a marvel of nautical engineering. Developed as a commercial rig, it was highly efficient and turned a profit for its users, otherwise it would have been quickly abandoned. It made use of inexpensive materials, yet achieved amazing results. A dizzying variety of junk rigs and junk hulls were developed, specifically tailored to different cargo, water and weather conditions. Larger junks are supremely seaworthy and display superb blue water voyaging characteristics. A junk rigged full batten sail is a snap to build, rig, handle, reef, and maintain. It requires no complicated or expensive hardware, such as winches. It imposes exceedingly low stresses on the rigging. It provides a low center of effort and as a result requires less beam width and keel depth.

Compatible with Any Hull

The junk rig is compatible with virtually any hull imaginable. It has been successfully installed on inflatables, dinghies, racing yachts, cruising yachts, motor fishing vessels and large commercial craft. High tech adaptations of the full batten junk sail can be found on everything from 70 foot Americas Cup racers to 40 foot blue water voyagers, from 18 foot Hobie Cats to 7 foot windsurfers. Traditionally sampans and junks up to 30 feet feature one sail. Junks between 30 feet and 40 feet feature two sails. Junks over 40 feet feature three sails, and so on, all the way up to the 400 foot leviathans built during the Ming dynasty. But this rule has many exceptions, with no evidence to suggest that more or fewer masts are more efficient. To achieve the greatest versatility with the rig however, the hull should be shallow draft and light displacement, enabling one to explore coastal shallows, to sail up canals or rivers into inland lakes in addition to crossing blue water. The traditional junk mast is unstayed, and instead supported from the keel of the boat. Deck stepped junk masts, while non-traditional, are also feasible. A modern schooner or ketch configured along the lines of a traditional Chinese junk requires only two junk sails and two halyards. Nothing more. On a longer vessel, a junk rigged mizzen or foresail can be added.

Upwind and Downwind Performer

Junk rigs are capable of superb windward performance and can often outreach and outrun boats fitted with more conventional sail plans. A junk rig will enable a boat to sail as close to the wind as the hull will allow. Junk rigged racing yacht hulls usually achieve 35 degrees to windward. Junk rigged cruising hulls usually manage 40 degrees. The notion that junk rigs are poor windward performers is a myth; a misperception based on junk rigs fitted to lumbering, load-carrying hulls instead of racing hulls. When making comparisons one must not forget that many Bermudan rigged hulls perform poorly to windward, meaning they cannot sail closer than 55 degrees to windward, despite what Bermudan fans may claim. The reason is a Bermudan rig must be sailed with racing precision to yield good results, whereas the junk rig can be sailed in a relaxed, laid back manner, yet produce the same results. Off the wind, the junk rig is even more efficient, with its large sail area high up and full battens that boom out the sail. A Bermudan rigged boat must hoist a spinnaker just to keep up with a junk rigged boat of the same length. To add to the misery of the overtaken Bermudan rigged boat skipper, the unstayed mast of the junk can even accept a ghoster or cruising chute.

Reefing Speed Champion

It is difficult to overstate the value of being able to instantly reef or completely lower the sails on a sailing vessel in response to constantly changing sailing conditions. The junk rigged full batten sail has precisely this capability. It can be reefed in the blink of an eye, as easily lowering a Venetian blind. The ease with which a junk rig can be reefed must be seen to be appreciated. Junk sail expert Robin Blain recalls the first time he saw a junk sail reefed. He was a passenger on a boat called the Migrant, and was considering using a junk rig on his own boat, then under construction. Out of curiosity Blain asked the skipper how hard was it to reef a junk rig. The skipper had just passed around mugs of hot chocolate, so Blain expected the skipper to settle in his seat and hold forth on the subject. Instead the skipper sauntered over to the mainmast and with one hand released the main halyard, allowing it to slip over the belaying pin. He payed out half of it, then belayed it again. The sail was reefed. The skipper never set down his mug of hot chocolate and never spilled a drop. The junk rig was "user friendly," long before the industrial era term was invented.

Stress Free Rigs

Sailing enthusiasts accustomed to Bermudan rigs are in for a surprise their first time aboard a junk rigged boat -- a pleasant surprise. Junk sails are eerily, uncannily silent. They do not flap or flog while passing through the eye of the wind, whether one is tacking or jibing. The full battens preclude such antics. Furthermore the low tension in the running rigging prevents noise and chafing. Finally, a full set of sheets lead to each batten on a junk sail. These multiple sheets make the junk sail self-tending and the sail shape highly controllable. They also make jibes extremely gentle, including the inevitable unanticipated, unintended jibes. No jarring, unwelcome surge of adrenalin follows when someone inadvertently cranks the helm too far over. The fact that a substantial portion of the sail is positioned forward of the mast and acts as a counterforce further augments this "soft jibe" effect. All of this makes the junk rig highly forgiving for family sailing, where comfort is a consideration, or for long distance voyaging, where long term fatigue is a consideration.

Stress Free Sailing

Because junk sails have multiple battens, the stress on the fabric in each panel is surprisingly light. As a result a junk rig can be assembled from almost any material imaginable. Modern junk sails are usually Dacron polyester, but can be acrylic, cotton, canvas, polyethylene, even old flour sacks! Sail cut is not critical, and junk sails are typically built flat rather than cambered. Masts, yards, booms, battens can be made of wood, hollow timber, metal tubing, fiberglass tubing, carbon fiber tubing, and of course the traditional bamboo. The junk rig, like the gaff rig, uses soft lines, not stainless steel wire and winches. The motion of a boat with an unstayed mast junk rig is far gentler than a boat with a stayed mast Bermuda rig. Crews feel less fatigued at the end of a days sail in a junk rigged boat than they do in a Bermudan rigged boat, with its sharper, more abrupt movements. These advantages may not be apparent to people who have never sailed junk rigged boats, even if they have read about them.

"I bought Migrant in 1991. In 1994, with the same [Chinese junk rigged full batten] sails Dick Johnson used to go to Australia, New Zealand, Pitcairn, Mexico, and back to Bellingham, I sailed from Bellingham bound for Mexico. I spent a year and a half in Mexico before sailing onward to French Polynesia, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, the Marshalls, Micronesia, down to the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Australia. By then I had put four more years in the tropical sun on the same sail cloth, and it had become very fragile. On the way up the Barrier Reef, the top panel started developing tears. By the time I had crossed the top of Australia, the top panel was in shreds and only the bolt rope around the perimeter was holding the sail and yard together, yet the sailing performance did not suffer in any noticeable way. The sun damage in the lower panels was severe enough that a careless push with my hand would go right through the sail. [Yet] even in bad squalls the rips did not propagate because of the low stress on the cloth. I continued onward through Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. I finally replaced the sails in July of 2000 when they became too disreputable looking, even for me. What other rigs exist where a rip in the sail is not of any great concern, or that you would be able to continue onward for that many miles using sails with cloth so old and fragile?"
-- William Servais,
skipper of the junk rigged schooner Migrant

Explanation: Junk Rig Association Newsletter, What About the Junk Rig?
Illustration(s): Traditional Chinese Junk Rigged Ship, Western Hull with Chinese Junk Rigged Sails, Hobie Cat with Full Batten Sail, Neil Pryde Full Batten Windsurfing Sail
Author(s): Bruce Roberts, Michael Kasten
Affiliation: Junk Rig Association, Kasten Marine Design
Source: http://www.bruceroberts.com/public/HTML/JUNK-2.htm, http://www.kastenmarine.com/junk_rig.htm,
Publication Date:
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Ancient Art of Origami shapes High-Tech Gizmos (古老摺紙技術影響高科技器材)

2003-09-17T00:22:00.000-07:00

Ancient Art of Origami shapes High-Tech Gizmos (古老摺紙技術影響高科技器材)
[文化創意產業]
(2003/09/17)

Ancient Art of Origami shapes High-Tech Gizmos

TOKYO - When Taketoshi Nojima envisions the future, he pictures it in collapsible terms.

The Kyoto University scientist imagines people lounging on foldable furniture and living in houses that compress rather than crumble during an earthquake.

His inspiration springs from an unlikely source - origami.

Long regarded as a children's hobby, the Japanese folk art - which creates delicate objects from intricately folded squares of paper - is riding a wave of newfound enthusiasm from scientists, mathematicians, and engineers around the country and, increasingly, across the globe.

Researchers have tapped into the craft's abundant hidden rules, angles, and limits, poising them to revolutionize the design and function of everything from water bottles to the "crumple zones" of cars.

"Origami theory can be used for anything," says Mr. Nojima, one of the country's leading experts in the field. "Because origami is everywhere."

Nojima is applying principles of the ancient art to design more energy-efficient satellites. In the United States, Robert Lang, a former NASA researcher and origami master, drew on his knowledge of the form to create a software program, called TreeMaker, that scientists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California used in designing a more portable telescope that unfolds like a flower.

And Ichiro Hagiwara, a Japanese scientist, is rethinking the way cars absorb energy in a crash in light of origami's fold lines.

From folding maps to folding cars
Evidence of origamic applications is everywhere: Maps, airbags, tents, instant food packaging, and domed stadium roofs are just some examples of products that utilize the mathematical elements of the traditional craft.

Unlike many bulky and esoteric theorems, scientists say that origami's mathematical beauty lies in its simplicity. The folded lines merge to create a poetic, seamless geometry.

While the math behind origami's industrial purposes borrows from the spirit of its conventional counterpart, one key difference exists - three-dimensional properties. Though an origami crane may appear 3-D, it's actually 2-D because it's created from a single plane.

Engineers say by using 3-D origami, solar panels can readily expand in space and plastic beverage bottles can collapse like an accordion under reverse, twisted pressure.

The benefit of 3-D origami is that "there is good stability in one direction and very weak resistance in another direction," says Arzu Gonenc Sorguc, a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology from the department of architecture at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.

Some scientists propose that this characteristic - which makes a structure withstand various external and internal forces - can even save lives.

Mr. Hagiwara launched a research project this year to construct cars with an origami-like structure that would absorb more energy from collisions and minimize injury to passengers.

For 24 years, the impassioned engineer worked for the Nissan Motor Company, studying the science behind automobile accidents. But it was only recently, after he read Nojima's research on 3-D origami, that a new application clicked in his mind.

"Suddenly, I understood that we could use origami to reduce the impact on crashes," he says. "I had never thought about it in this way before."

Train-tunnel origami
Buoyed by the promise of such applications, Hagiwara's group has also patented a way to reduce concrete crumbling in high-speed train tunnels, which poses a major threat to the safety of railways in Japan. The idea is to mount foldable beams and steel nuts onto the inner surface of the tunnels, something that could absorb pressure, Ms. Sorguc says.

"It is called origamic because when you bring the structure to the site it is folded and when you mount it, it expands," she says.

Nojima, who works in the department of aeronautics and astronautics, has proposed using origami to build more energy-efficient solar sails for space satellites. His plan uses the least possible surface area, and the sails blossom once in space with one fluid motion. Pulling on opposite sides of a paper origami spiral shows the effect.

The idea draws on that of Koryo Miura, another Japanese space scientist who engineered the elegant, "one-pull" method of map folding and also developed origami techniques to apply to space satellites during the 1970s.

Origami's relationship to nature sparked Nojima's interest when he noticed similar patterns appeared in the spiral sequences of sunflowers and snails. His principle that living things can connect organically to man-made objects spawned the concept of a folding house designed with criss-crossing steel beams.

"During earthquakes or natural disasters, we could move such a house ... and reuse [undamaged] parts," he says. This, he adds, would be in keeping with "the trend to help the environment."

At the heart of all of the ongoing research - most of which probably won't come to fruition for another five to 10 years - is the hope that origami will be recognized as more than child's play.

"There is meaning in origami now," Sorguc says. "It shouldn't be considered as a toy anymore, but as something real and useful for engineering."

Editor's Comments:

Wikipedia: The line between the Chinese vs Japanese paperfolding techniques were quite blurred to begin with due to so many years of history. The arrival of Akira Yoshizawa essentially pushed the Japanese name "origami" into the west and the rest of the world. In China and other Chinese speaking places, the art is still referred to by the original name Zhe Zhi (摺紙) unchanged.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Ancient Art of Origami shapes High-Tech Gizmos
Illustration(s): BLOOMING SCIENCE: A compressed paper model of the solar sails from a space satellite (top) unfolds into a fluid origami spiral. TOKYO INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Author(s): Sonia Krishnan
Affiliation: Christian Science Monitor
Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0917/p01s03-woap.html
Publication Date: September 17, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Linux: We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us (我們遇到了敵人, 他就是我們)

2003-09-03T22:45:00.000-07:00

Linux: We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us (我們遇到了敵人, 他就是我們)
[人因工程 ]
(2003/09/03)

Linux: We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us

I am constantly amazed and surprised by the resourcefulness, creativity and overall enthusiasm that abound in the Linux community. But why can't they create something that works easily?

GPL and open source translate into a sense of ownership among Linux users. The community effort to expand and improve the OS is amazing. But based on my experiences, Linux is still a mixed bag, with plenty of late-night-where's-the-nearest-hammer infuriation over stuff that just won't work.

I recently took a second stab at putting together a Linux-based PVR/media jukebox server system. I got further this time, but I'm still staring at a system that just won't work.

I took my time. I read all the documentation. I diagnosed and fixed multitudinous glitches. But instead of success, I'm sleep-deprived, frustrated, and ready to chuck the box out the window.

It's time for the Linux world to throw the "project" concept out the window too. Stop thinking of these development efforts as works-in-progress, and start thinking of them as products. Not in the charging money way, but in the "finish and ship" way. Linux applications need to just work.

Dependencies Must Go

Multimedia and Linux are often at odds with one another, and multimedia packages such as Freevo and MythTV have a list of dependencies as long as your right arm. And that's my first gripe: dependencies.

Apps like Red Hat's RPM are only "smart" enough to tell you that a dependency-check failed, but won't go out and get you the bits you need. And it often escalates geometrically: App X needs packages A, B, and C, each of which needs another couple of packages. Before too long the whole thing starts looking like a Ponzi scheme, only nobody's getting rich.

Solutions Are Coming: Tools like Debian's apt-get, Gentoo's emerge and Yellow Dog's yum do a very good job of addressing this problem. They do dependency checks up front, gather the needed bits from trusted servers, and surprisingly, they often get your app installed.

In my PVR project I used yum and I ended up downloading dozens of packages before finally getting MythTV to work. Or at least, I think it worked. But, as it turns out, once I cleared the monkey bars, now I had to crawl under the barbed wire.

MythTV needs a lot of other modules to be installed and configured, including xmltv and MySQL. An Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) audio driver is recommended. So while the yum installation utility installed almost everything, it missed the ALSA driver.

With a small amount of effort (altogether now, './configure; make; make install') I installed the alsa-lib and alsa-utils packages, and finally got it working on my Sound Blaster Audigy.

I wasn't so lucky with MySQL. The yum-based installation was incomplete and the program is so Byzantine I still haven't gotten it working right. Yes, I know it's a heavy-duty enterprise-class database server, but where are the graphical configuration tools?

Unfortunately, MythTV requires that MySQL be installed and working, or no soup for you. Suffice it to say, I'm still soup-less.

DVD Playback on Linux: One good thing came of all this bit-mashing: the mplayer media player and all the lib dvd packages were installed correctly, so now I can play DVD movies on my Linux system. But it's a small consolation prize for the still-dead MythTV bits currently inhabiting my system.

So what's the solution? How about adopting a single word-command? I suggest "install" to compile and set-up a package. This could be done through a Bash script.

Then the installation routine should launch a graphical configuration utility that will help you connect all the parts necessary to make the thing work.

Finally, this installer will tell you where it put the damned executables. Some apps put the bits in /usr/local/. Others put them elsewhere. But there's little consistency on this point, and dammit, there needs to be a lot more. Windows may be the devil, but at least you can easily figure out where an application installs itself.

Lindows Gets It Right: Companies like Lindows have had some success leveraging Debian's apt-get to address these problems. Many Linux pros scoff at Lindows, calling it "Linux for the AOL set," but the company is actually making some headway.

Still, more work still needs to be done. It begins with a fairly simple definition: an application is NOT installed unless it works as advertised. And the installer should ensure that that all the dependent modules are installed and actually configured correctly. The whole thing should just work after the installation is done.

We need 'Finishers'

The Linux community -- package developers, distribution makers and driver writers --need to understand that that theirs is a symbiotic relationship. They need each other to be successful.

Linux continues to face challenges from all sides: Microsoft still squarely has Linux in its cross-hairs, considering it the single biggest threat to continued success.. SCO is waging a proxy war against Linux while simultaneously shaking IBM down for cash, scaring many companies away from Linux in the process. Linux needs a more consumer-friendly OS to help to shore up its somewhat shaky desktop foundation.

Not Dumbed Down, But Smartened Up: I'm not proposing that we dumb down Linux. I'm not proposing that we bury code behind some curtain that no one can see. I'm just asking that Linux application developers think their projects through from A to Z, with Z representing a polished product that installs successfully with minimal fuss.

We're part-way there, but like many Linux packages themselves, the most sweat-equity goes into getting that last 10% right. If developers don't feel compelled to finish their applications, then we need a new group of developers. I'll call them "finishers," to get the job done.

I enjoy a good puzzle as much as the next guy, but that's what a Rubik's Cube is for (they're making a comeback, you know). My Rubik's Cube should be puzzling. My Linux application installation should just work.

Editor's Comments:

I never cease to be amazed at the mindset of some Linux users. These Linux True Believers are so emotionally overwrought they can't think straight. They rant endlessly about the evils committed by Bill Gates and Microsoft, then in the next breath demand that Linux remain so user-hostile it can never hope to replace Windows as the OS of choice. They issue hysterical denunciations of anyone who urges the creation of a more convenient distribution, i.e., one that takes only an hour instead of a week to configure properly. Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake, Xandros are all uniformly denounced as "dumbed down."

Have these self righteous zealots forgotten that Linux is "free," as in "free speech?" If they don't like these user friendly versions of Linux, they are free to boycott them. No one is denying them the right to use their own favored distros. If these masochists insist on wearing hair shirts, no one is standing in their way. Let those of us who have more useful things to do with our time than searching the net for nonexistent hardware drivers enjoy our own distros, and we will leave the zealots to theirs.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us
Illustration(s): Lindows, Lycoris, Mandrake, Xandros
Author(s): Dave Salvator
Affiliation: Extreme Tech
Source: http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998,a=58657,00.asp
Publication Date: September 2, 2003
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

Can ESP Affect Our Lives? ( 超感覺的知覺對我們的影響 )

2003-09-01T22:59:00.000-07:00

Can ESP Affect Our Lives? ( 超感覺的知覺對我們的影響 )
[創意組織 ]
(2003/09/01)

Can ESP Affect Our Lives?

CAN we heal psychically? Cure illness through prayer? Spy on our enemies by means of ESP? See in our mind's eye places we have never visited and know nothing about? Extrasensory perception--ESP-has long been the fodder of public fantasy and media exploitation. Countless books, movies and TV shows captivate audiences with beguiling tales of psychic phenomena and unexplained events. As we watch, we wonder, "Wow, what if that's true?" There is also a less well-known side of ESP: serious research conducted by a few university laboratories and private foundations. But why so many critics and skeptics? Why isn't the data any stronger? Is ESP simply wishful thinking, sloppy science, clever conjuring, or outright fraud? Is the public just being duped? Most people believe that ESP is all around us; most scientists assume that ESP does not--cannot--exist. If ESP is real, then it should be big news. Five scientists with experience in the field offer their varying views.

PARTICIPANTS

Dr. Barry Beyerstein of Simon Fraser University is a member of the Executive Council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Barry claims that experimental results in ESP investigations support neither the hope nor the hype.

Dr. Dean Radin, an experimental psychologist who has conducted extensive research programs investigating psi phenomena, has been president of the Parapsychological Association three times. Dean says he is skeptical of skeptics.

Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, a leading investigator in parapsycholgy and ESP, is research director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Marilyn offers evidence from her own investigations of telepathy and psychic healing.

Dr. Charles Tart, the author of numerous books on parapsychology and the nature of consciousness, is a core faculty member of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Charles seeks to combine careful science with spiritual understanding.

Dr. James Trefil, a professor of physics at George Mason University, is the author of numerous science books, such as 101 Things You Don't Know About Science and No One Else Does Either. Jim applies common sense where it is often missing.

ROBERT: Marilyn, as a parapsychologist, you focus on the practical implications of paranormal phenomena. What are some of the ways in which ESP can affect our lives?

MARILYN: It may be a little premature to think about the actual application of parapsychological phenomena, since we're still in the research-gathering stage. But some possible applications include healing. One idea is that the belief system or intention of the healer may influence a patient. Such healing can occur even at a distance and even when patients don't know that "good thoughts" are being sent to them.

ROBERT: This is not just psychosomatic medicine, where the mind influences the body hormonally?

MARILYN: I think it's a step beyond the notion of a placebo kind of effect. It would be some kind of distant intentionality effect on physical systems.

ROBERT: Define "distant intentionality."

MARILYN: It's the idea that one person's thoughts may be able to influence another person's physiology at a distance, without any normal sensory communication between the two. This type of claim is quite common; many healers in many different cultures believe they can heal people at a distance.

ROBERT: What are other areas where ESP may have practical value?

MARILYN: Crime detection, certainly; many police departments use psychics on a regular basis. Detectives will try anything to solve a case, and sometimes a psychic can help them come up with a novel explanation.

ROBERT: Barry, as a skeptic, do you think that the only way ESP affects our lives is by wasting our time and taking our money?

BARRY: I don't put experimental parapsychologists in the same category as psychics who pester police departments and do waste their time. I have personal knowledge of one such case, and I've read about others, and I think that there's more noise in the system, really, where the police are concerned. But first we have to establish whether ESP exists. And even if it does, parapsychologists will admit that the effect is so tiny that it probably wouldn't have any practical effect in the real world.

ROBERT: But if there's a tiny effect, doesn't that significantly change our worldview?

BARRY: Absolutely. If ESP is there and can't be explained by prosaic means, then it does change our worldview in significant ways. That's why as skeptics we say that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. The existence of paranormal phenomena would be such a fundamental change in the scientific worldview that we have to make sure of the evidence before we take that leap.

ROBERT: Charles, in your book Body, Mind, Spirit, you've considered the potential effect on our lives of learning to use ESP. Do you believe that everyone has these abilities, and can we develop them?

CHARLES: If I say everyone has psychic abilities, that's a matter of belief, because of course not everyone has been tested. But I see no reason not to assume that ESP is a fundamental human talent. It does need to be developed. As Barry [Beyerstein] mentioned, if we do have it, ESP is usually a very small-scale phenomenon. That's why I wrote a book called Learning to Use ESP.

ROBERT: But can you learn to use ESP? Can you show developmental increase of ability over time with any kind of training?

CHARLES: My best guess is that we can, but there hasn't been enough research on this. Our fundamental need is to get ESP ability up to where you can demonstrably use it at will.

ROBERT: But have you seen experiments in which there's an increasing level of psychic performance?

CHARLES: Yes.

ROBERT: Are these experiments replicable?

CHARLES: Very few people have even tried to replicate them under proper conditions. That's why I say that the human ability to increase ESP skills is my best guess at this point, but I'm not going to come out and say it's been proved yet.

ROBERT: Jim, in your many books, such as The Dark Side of the Universe and Are We Unique?, you scan the frontiers of science. Do you see ESP on the frontiers?

JIM: Not really--I see it as something that's been around. If the effects are there, as everyone has said, they're very small. But not even the small effects have been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the mainstream scientific community.

MARILYN: I'd like to address this question: Several people have mentioned the smallness of the effect. But it's been well established in conventional medicine, for example, that the use of aspirin can prevent second heart attacks. The size of the effect in that study was very small, too, across a very large sample size, but they actually stopped the study prematurely, because they were depriving the control group of a viable treatment.

BARRY: Sure, but there's a big difference. We understand what aspirin does; there's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis arising from the molecular function of aspirin and how it affects the body.

ROBERT: Do you have to understand the molecular mechanism to recognize an experimental result?

BARRY: No, but in this particular case we have a theory, and the result was a predictable outcome of the theory. It turns out to be a small effect, so you do need a large sample size to achieve statistical significance.

ROBERT: But isn't Marilyn [Schlitz] saying that small effects don't necessarily mean small importance?

MARILYN: Just because ESP effects may be small doesn't mean we can dismiss them. The same is true of many treatments given in conventional medicine. The goal, really, is to begin to harness all these things in such a way that they have better applicability.

ROBERT: Dean, in your book The Conscious Universe, you go after the skeptics pretty hard. Do you feel threatened by them?

DEAN: I'm skeptical about skeptics. Skepticism is truly a double-edged sword. It's usually imagined hacking away at things that you wish to debunk. Many ESP cases are easy to debunk, because they're just people fooling themselves. But you also need to cut in the other direction and take a very careful look at the skeptical tactics and rhetoric that are used to try to explain something away. I did so in my book, and I discovered that in many cases of parapsychological phenomena, skeptical arguments are flawed.

ROBERT: Let's take a practical example. [Looking away] I have this feeling right now that Marilyn [Schlitz] is staring at me. We all have that feeling on occasion, such as when we stop at a red light and feel compelled to check whether the driver in the car next to us is looking at us. Is this just common psychology, or might there be some ESP lurking here?

DEAN: The only way to know for sure is to bring it into the laboratory.

ROBERT: Have you done that?

DEAN: I've tested staring in the lab; so has Marilyn. You can use conventional, well-understood, double-blind, randomized, controlled techniques to see whether or not people can actually tell when they're being stared at--or whether their physiology changes as the result of being stared at.

ROBERT: And?

DEAN: The result of some twenty studies shows that people, in general, are more aroused when they're being stared at than when they're not. But the arousal is unconscious, and we detect it by looking at autonomic measures.

MARILYN: In real-world situations, are people just experiencing enhanced peripheral vision, not consciously aware that they're seeing something out of the corner of their eye? The question can be answered only by going into a lab and reducing all conventional sensory inputs. Only then can we begin to look for some added x-factor that may increase our ability to detect someone looking at us. We've conducted two formal experiments, which we replicated twice. In all cases, we found a significant difference between the staring periods and the control periods.

ROBERT: What parameters do you check?

DEAN: We look at the EEG, the electrical activity of the cerebral cortex.

ROBERT: Alpha waves--the slow, rhythmic, electrical undulations characteristic of the resting brain?

DEAN: Right.

ROBERT: So if I'm in a relaxed state, showing alpha waves, and someone is staring at me, what happens?

DEAN: Whenever your attention shifts, it desynchronizes your alpha waves, which means that these nice slow waves disappear. If this happens at the time as the person is doing the staring, then that's an interesting indicator.

ROBERT: Marilyn, were you staring at me before?

MARILYN: I'm looking at you always, mate.

BARRY: She wasn't before you said it. She looked at you when you said it.

ROBERT: Charles, are there any common personality characteristics for high ESP incidents?

CHARLES: No, I don't think so. There's been a fair amount of study on the personality correlates of people who score a little higher and a little lower. And they come out barely significant, but not very practical. One difference that's especially interesting, even if the effect is small, is between people who believe in ESP versus people who don't believe--something you find out before you test them for ESP.

ROBERT: You call them the sheep and the goats.

CHARLES: Right. The sheep are the believers; the goats are the nonbelievers. First, you categorize the believers and the nonbelievers, and then you give them what is essentially a multiple-choice test. When you score the results separately for the two groups, the believers--the sheep--tend to score significantly above chance, just as they were told to, and the goats often score significantly below chance. Now think about this for a minute. If I had a deck of ordinary playing cards, and asked you to guess red or black, we know you would get about fifty percent by chance. Even without statistics, if you got all fifty-two right, that would be extraordinary. How about if you got zero right? That would be just as extraordinary statistically. The goats score significantly below chance, and they feel good about it! They say, "See, there's no such thing as ESP; here I got a lousy score on the test, and that proves I'm right." But the only way someone can score significantly below chance is to use ESP unconsciously so that they know what the right card is and don't guess it.

ROBERT: That sounds like after-the-fact rationalization, what we call a posteriori reasoning. What happens when you average the sheep and the goats all together?

CHARLES: But you don't average them together. You make the distinction ahead of time; that's the point. As a psychologist, I find this disparity fascinating. I've studied many ways in which we distort our perceptions of reality to support our belief systems, and here are people pulling off a small miracle in order to prove that there are no such things as miracles. It's great!

ROBERT: Dean, do you find any common characteristics of high ESP incidents, other than the sheep-goat effect?

DEAN: Marilyn [Schlitz] has begun investigating the relationship between ESP and the nature of creativity. Among people who describe themselves as creative, there seems to be a high correlation with ESP. In telepathy tests among artists, writers, dancers, and musicians, creativity was a tested correlate, and it turned out that in these tests musicians had an effect size two to three times higher than the average person.

MARILYN: We did a study at the Julliard School in which we asked whether people--music, dance, and drama students--could detect images of a video clip being played in another room. All these student groups scored significantly higher than the general population, though the musicians scored the best. This study was then replicated in a PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh.

ROBERT: Please describe a typical response--how was the study set up?

MARILYN: A person in one room would be watching a video clip from the musical The Wiz, a parody of The Wizard of Oz. Someone in another room would be under sensory isolation with Ping-Pong balls over the eyes and white noise fed into the ears, and knowing nothing at all about the video clip, they would describe a hot-air balloon, a black female nightclub performer, a lion, a wizard, a dog, the color yellow. What was playing on the video at that very moment, in the other room, was a scene of Diana Ross as Dorothy, with the scarecrow, the wizard, the tin man, and the lion, all walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with the cityscape of New York in the background.

ROBERT: But how many times did this kind of direct hit not occur?

MARILYN: Well, what we did then was to show that same video clip, with three decoys, to the recipient, who was asked to identify which one most closely matched their described imagery. We did this in a number of experimental trials, in such a way that you could use statistics to identify how likely the response was on the basis of chance alone. If the recipients were just guessing, we would expect that about a quarter of the time they would get it right; in fact, we found that fifty percent of the time they were able to correctly identify the target clip.

ROBERT: But how robust is that data?

MARILYN: Qualitatively, there were very striking matches between the recipients' experience and the content of the actual target. Subjects were in this dreamlike state [induced by sensory isolation], as they described their imagery--

ROBERT: So they were in a dreamlike state? Charles, do you find more incidents of ESP during dreamlike states?

CHARLES: If you look at what happens in people's ordinary experience, yes--a great deal comes from dreams or similar states of reverie. Experimental work conducted some years ago at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York monitored people sleeping in the laboratory who were woken up during periods of dreaming, while a sender in another room was trying to telepathically influence those dreams. Overall the results were quite significant, and some of the individual results were striking. We may talk about average effects being small, but occasionally we find extremely good psychic descriptions.

ROBERT: Barry, what is the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal--or, to those who love her, CSICOP? Why do you go after these hardworking parapsychologists and make their lives so difficult?

BARRY: It's not a witch-hunt. CSICOP is a group of people with expertise in a wide variety of scientific, philosophical, and other academic disciplines who simply ask for the evidence and the analysis. Those whom we criticize obviously think we're unfair. We think we're only doing our job. We're simply making sure that the evidence measures up, by our standards.

ROBERT: Let's focus on healing, an area of Marilyn's personal interest. Where do you look for transpersonal effects in the healing process? We've all heard stories of the power of therapeutic touch, such as the laying on of hands. Certainly many diverse religious groups invoke the power of prayer.

MARILYN: First of all, I must say that the skeptical community has been very helpful in these areas. There have been cases where skeptics have simulated a psychic surgeon doing an "operation" without any instruments--separating the skin, pulling out some kind of organ. Frequently these psychic surgeons are using some kind of false thumb filled with blood and tissues of animals, in some kind of a heavy dramatic ritual. In and of itself, this may not be wrong, because the shaman or the psychic surgeon is trying to harness the patient's own belief system and this is their way of doing so.

ROBERT: But there's nothing psychic or paranormal going on?

MARILYN: I can't speak of all cases, but there are instances in which the psychic surgery is a fraud--which is a term I hate to use, because it implies evil intent. Certainly there's nothing paranormal involved. On the other hand, we have interesting data when we come into the laboratory and look at the effects of distant prayer, intercessory prayer, on patient populations. There was a very nice study of coronary care patients, all of whom were getting conventional medical intervention. These patients were split into two groups. One was prayed for--at a distance--and one was not prayed for, without either group knowing what was happening. The people who were prayed for had far better, statistically meaningful medical outcomes, relative to the control group.

ROBERT: Pardon my naivete, but how do you direct your prayer to one group rather than another?

MARILYN: That's one of the challenges. And there are others: Exactly what do we mean by prayer? And what do you do about the fact that some people in the control group are being prayed for by their families?

ROBERT: What do you tell the healers? Pray for the patients in room 302 but not in room 308?

MARILYN: The healers aren't told anything about the control group; they just focus on the active group. At any rate, the experimental results seem supportive of an effect. In another project, we worked with patients with advanced AIDS. Again, we split them at random into two groups; each person knew he was participating in a study that involved distant prayer, but no one knew which group he was in. And again, the medical outcomes for the prayed-for group were statistically better than for the group that wasn't prayed for.

JIM: I have a long experience of hearing such accounts, and when they're described they always sound like this, but when you start getting under the hood, the devil is in the details. You get down there and find that there are subtleties in the way these experiments were designed, or in the statistical analysis, that make them much less powerful.

ROBERT: I'd be a little concerned about giving people a false sense of security: if they thought that the power of prayer was going to replace normal medical treatment, it could have deleterious consequences.

MARILYN: You're absolutely right. In studies conducted at Duke Medical Center, all the patients got conventional allopathic medical treatment. Prayer was just used as a booster.

ROBERT: Can you pray for this show?

MARILYN: I am intending highly for this show's success, trust me. In the Duke study, the group who received the distant prayer--the distant intentionality--apparently were differentially benefited. The problem is that we don't know how to define the internal states or make them operational. Is the healer-sender praying? Intending? Meditating? Are there stronger effects in one kind of conscious state than in another? These are empirical questions; they can be tested down the road.

ROBERT: Dean, there was a time when the CIA was involved in psychic research for intelligence reasons. Can you tell us about that?

DEAN: Before 1995 I couldn't have; the work was classified until then. But, yes, there's something like a twenty-year history of CIA funding, with two objectives: one, to find out whether the rumors about psychic experiments being done in the Russia or China were true and, if so, were they a national security threat; and two, if ESP is real, then how do we improve its utilization for intelligence gathering and how do we find people who can do it? On the threat assessment side, the answer was that we didn't have much to worry about--not because there wasn't anything to ESP, but because no one knew anything more about ESP than we did.

ROBERT: Can ESP be useful for national security?

DEAN: The answer appears to be yes, but probably no more so than in a few exceptional cases of psychic detective work. For example, there might be a spy satellite picture of something that the National Security Council couldn't identify but was concerned about. A psychic would be asked to describe it.

ROBERT: How would the psychics locate the target? Would they be given longitude and latitude?

DEAN: We don't know how they locate it. They're just told that there's an important target and they're supposed to provide information about it. Then they do whatever they do--draw a sketch or describe it verbally. Obviously the intelligence community doesn't rely on psychics, because that would be just stupid. Instead, they take all of the human intelligence and the satellite intelligence and see if the psychic information fits in.

ROBERT: Some people might think that if the CIA was funding experiments in ESP, then there really is nothing to it.

DEAN: I have more faith in our government than that.

CHARLES: There was a rumor going around years ago that the Russians were using telepathic bombardment to make our national leaders act stupidly, but we showed that we didn't need any help on that score.

ROBERT: There was a world chess championship in which Viktor Korchnoi blamed his loss on the Russians' having planted a psychic in the audience to influence him.

CHARLES: Seriously, I've seen the same data Dean has. I was a consultant on the CIA projects. Sometimes the remote viewing worked extremely well. Of course you'd never use it as a sole source of intelligence, but at times it could make a wonderful supplemental source. Now, there is a concern here we need to address. Though many of us think that ESP is real and sometimes works strongly, that doesn't mean you should start basing your life decisions on apparent psychic information. You have to use your intelligence. Even Mohammed said, "Trust in God, but tie up your camel."

DEAN: That admonition goes for any application of psychic phenomena, whether currently in use or just being speculated about. At this point, ESP should be called in only when there's no other form of information, or healing, or whatever, available--when you have nothing to lose by trying it. I have high confidence that what we see in the lab is evidence of some kind of ESP--some kind of psychic perception that, in principle at least, can have some benefit.

ROBERT: Dean [Radin], Marilyn [Schlitz], Charles [Tart], you're all sheep, in that you believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena. Have any of you ever tested positive for ESP?

CHARLES: I've occasionally been tested positive. But I don't usually say that I believe. I do say that I've assessed the scientific evidence and have reached a conclusion on that basis.

MARILYN: I follow Charles.

DEAN: I feel the same way. My belief is based on empiricism. I always run myself on my own experiments, and sometimes I do pretty well.

ROBERT: And other times?

DEAN: And other times I don't. But statistically, over time, probably in the positive direction.

ROBERT: Barry, what do you make of this?

BARRY: I've done the same thing. I have some devices in my laboratory, off in one corner, where I've tested myself many, many times. I also run my students through, every time I teach a large course. And I have people visit my lab because they think they have psychic ability, and I run them on the machine. So far, the laws of chance are not in any great danger, as far as my experience is concerned.

ROBERT: At best, ESP seems to be a very weak phenomenon. What mechanisms could generate such a weak phenomenon?

DEAN: It's not clear that ESP is so weak. When we consider experimental psychology in general, which is essentially what this research is, we always find that effects in the laboratory are much weaker than they are in the real world. Why? Because we force a control. We put constraints on the experimental design in order to be able to make a scientific assessment. So I'm not disturbed by the fact that we get relatively small effects in the lab. It actually bolsters my expectation that once in a while some of the spectacular things that people say have happened in their lives might be real. Occurrences in the real world are always much richer than what we see in the lab.

ROBERT: One can imagine mechanisms for telepathy, such as strange brain emanations or quantum mechanical effects. Even clairvoyance, where one is apprehending information at a distance, could be subject to fields of some sort. But how in the world could precognition work? By what conceivable mechanisms can we know the future? It seems so contrary to everything we understand.

CHARLES: I think that's very exciting. It reminds us that we haven't been at science very long--that we don't know much about the universe. I have a conservative approach to science; I believe that data comes first. If your theory doesn't fit the data, that just means your theory is inadequate. You don't throw away data because your theories can't handle them. The data for ESP are overwhelming, in my estimation. There are thousands of studies out there now. It happens, even though I don't understand why.

ROBERT: Dean, why are psychic experiences so compelling for the people who claim to have them?

DEAN: That's an interesting question, because we often think we're dealing only with the very small phenomena we see in the laboratory. But there's something called the luminosity of the experience--it's a sense of transcendence. The psychic effect is bigger than you are, and it's so compelling that it changes people's perceptions and drives them to wonder why. This has persisted for thousands of years.

BARRY: Well, my explanation for that is that people could well think they had a psychic experience and be mistaken, but the mere fact that they believed it would cause a tremendous emotional reaction.

ROBERT: Don't we find these transcendent feelings rather common in epileptic seizures?

BARRY: Epileptic seizures, drug effects, certain kinds of migraine headaches--there are all kinds of things that can produce illusions or hallucinations of transcendence. Direct electrical stimulation of the brain [the temporal lobe] exposed for neurosurgery can induce transcendent experiences. So can magnetic fields. Transcendent experiences are triggered by activating specific circuits in the brain's limbic system.

ROBERT: Charles, as a transpersonal psychologist, what do you think are the clinical implications of ESP experiences?

CHARLES: We're very culture-bound in the way we look at ESP experiences. In certain societies, if you started hearing voices, you might go to the wise people, who would say, "You have the talent to become a shaman; we'll train you." If you start hearing voices in our society, our wise people--psychiatrists--will give you the conventional explanation that, basically, you're crazy. Our healers will say, "Take this drug and the voices will go away." If our society has got it right--if hearing voices is always imaginary and pathological--then treating such a person for insanity is appropriate.

ROBERT: Hearing voices is a neurological condition.

CHARLES: It might be a neurological condition, right. Or it might be that this person has some kind of telepathic ability working and once in a while hears someone else's thoughts.

ROBERT: How could you distinguish between the two? How could you ever prove your telepathic hypothesis?

CHARLES: You could test it. At the very least, you could allow the possibility that the voices are ESP. But suppose you are telepathic, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to let your ego swell up because this voice tells you you're wonderful? Are you going to do crazy things because you get bad advice from the voices? We still have a clinical responsibility to help people deal in a sane, mature way with this phenomenon. But it's important not to invalidate it to begin with. I've talked to many people who had what seemed to be garden-variety psychic experiences, but because they thought ESP was impossible they assumed they were crazy--and they suffered needlessly for lack of an adequate framework.

ROBERT: You've been one of the leaders in studying altered states of consciousness and how they may relate to ESP or different worldviews. But since altered states are illusions, how can they possibly help us understand reality?

CHARLES: Altered states are illusions? How do you know that what we're doing now isn't an illusion? You're starting out with a value judgment. As a scientist, I want to know the data. If a person comes to me in a certain state of consciousness, I want to assess how that consciousness functions, what it's good for, what it's bad for. We can't have just one state, somehow superior to all others. Some altered states of consciousness are better for some things. For instance, being in love is an altered state of consciousness. Not a terribly good state for balancing your checkbook, but for interpersonal relationships there's a lot to be said for it.

ROBERT: Are people in love more receptive to ESP than people who aren't?

CHARLES: There's some suggestive evidence, but not much research, so I don't know.

ROBERT: Can you find enough people in love to construct a database?

CHARLES: We could find lots of people in love, but can we find enough parapsychologists who have the resources to test them? People shouldn't get the idea that parapsychology is a big research enterprise. It's minuscule.

ROBERT: Why is that?

CHARLES: One year I had a twenty-thousand-dollar grant, which made me one of the richest parapsychologists in the world. This is absolutely trivial by ordinary scientific standards. The people who run the funding agencies generally think there's no such thing as ESP, so they won't waste money giving out grants.

ROBERT: Sounds like a conspiracy.

CHARLES: No, I don't think it's a conspiracy so much as general cultural conditioning. You don't put your money into things you don't think are worthwhile.

DEAN: There's another reason as well. One of the reasons the government-funded ESP programs were top-secret for so many years had nothing to do with the objective itself but with what they called "the giggle factor." People in a position of authority are afraid of jeopardizing that position by saying, "Maybe I'll give a little funding to this area." It says a lot about the politics and sociology of how science is done. Charles is right: there are only about twenty to forty people around the world who are looking into parapsychology from a scientific point of view.

ROBERT: That's a very small number.

DEAN: It's an extremely small number. One of the nice things, though, is that we all know each other and what's going on in the field.

ROBERT: Do you have to use the Internet, or can you just, well, "communicate"?

DEAN: We use the best method available, which right now is the Internet.

MARILYN: What's exciting to me is that we have so many more questions than answers, even about something as fundamental as the brain. We can't debate the fact that we have a brain, but we know very little about how the brain operates. Why should we exclude the possibility that people's experiences for centuries and centuries may have some legitimacy?

ROBERT: I'm not sure we know very little about how the brain operates.

BARRY: For centuries and centuries, people thought the world was flat, too. There are lots of things in the world that appear to be different from what they are.

MARILYN: That's just my point. There's data now being compiled implying a broader worldview, one in which consciousness is much more engaged in the universe than the materialist model would predict. I think that we human beings are deeply embedded in the world. And these data suggest that somehow our consciousnesses can reach out beyond our brains and touch the world.

ROBERT: Marilyn, what data can you come up with in the next few years that would convince Jim [Trefil] and Barry [Beyerstein] that ESP research is worth pursuing seriously?

MARILYN: It has to do more with relationship-building than with anything else. We need to develop enough trust and respect among smart and busy scientists so that they stop for a few moments and take seriously the data that currently exist. We don't need to collect more data; we need to communicate with each other. The data need to be shared among people with different disciplinary perspectives, who may begin to build the theoretical framework we're seeking.

ROBERT: If what you're saying is true, if your current evidence is as compelling as you think, you should want to spend millions of dollars promoting and developing it.

MARILYN: I'd be happy to spend millions of dollars on it. If there are any donors out there who want to contribute, we're ready.

ROBERT: But why doesn't this happen? Why no recognition, no appreciation? There's obviously no skeptics' conspiracy. I don't think Jim and Barry, for example, even met before today.

JIM: One thing that should be pointed out is that this isn't a complaint only about parapsychology. The entire federal funding system does very poorly in supporting high-risk research.

MARILYN: Right.

JIM: That's because the guy who's in charge of giving out the money wants to be able to say, at the end of the year, "I had x number of papers published; this is what I spent, and this is what I got for it." Supporting high-risk research means taking a big gamble--not just ESP but any high-risk science. For example, SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has been in and out of funding for decades for the very same reason.

DEAN: Another reason it's been very difficult to get funding is because people in positions to make those decisions have only the popular conception of what it is I do. When they hear the terms "parapsychology" or "ESP," they immediately turn off and won't even read the materials. But on virtually every occasion when I've had a chance to sit down with someone in my lab, run the experiments, and explain how they're analyzed, the person goes away thinking that this research is at least interesting and probably deserves some funding.

ROBERT: So, what happens now?

DEAN: Parapsychologists have to go out and meet people, educating physicists about what we do.

ROBERT: You need politics in ESP, just as you do in other avenues of life.

DEAN: You have to be a good salesman in any area of science.

ROBERT: OK, we fast forward for a prediction. One hundred years from now, will ESP have any accepted applications?

MARILYN: No question, yes.

CHARLES: In healing, definitely.

JIM: I doubt it very much.

BARRY: There will be people who believe it as firmly then as now, and the effects will be as small and trivial then as now.

DEAN: I have trouble predicting next Tuesday, but if I had to guess I would say, yes, there will be real applications of ESP.

ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

I DON'T think we've convinced anyone not to visit fortune-tellers or call up the psychics, but perhaps we've cast a critical eye on those who would convert your hope into their dollars. ESP and psychic phenomena can make great entertainment; we think, "What if?" So enjoy the stories, but give your eye a critical glint; learn to distinguish science fact from media fiction. Although I reject the vast majority of ESP claims, I cannot discard them all. And while I strongly support skeptics disabusing the public of psychic fantasies, I also support serious parapsychologists continuing their investigations. I follow their research and enjoy their thinking. "Don't give in!" I cheer from the sidelines. "Pursue the dream!" The issue is vital--because if ESP does exist, if we ever admit the presence of anything nonphysical, our view of the world changes. Time and space dissolve and we redefine the human condition. But separate what you know from what you hope to get closer to truth.

Editor's Comments:

Dean Radin notes that

"Marilyn [Schlitz] has begun investigating the relationship between ESP and the nature of creativity. Among people who describe themselves as creative, there seems to be a high correlation with ESP. In telepathy tests among artists, writers, dancers, and musicians, creativity was a tested correlate, and it turned out that in these tests musicians had an effect size two to three times higher than the average person."

Marilyn Schlitz notes that

"We did a study at the Julliard School in which we asked whether people--music, dance, and drama students--could detect images of a video clip being played in another room. All these student groups scored significantly higher than the general population, though the musicians scored the best. This study was then replicated in a PhD thesis at the University of Edinburgh."

In case readers were wondering why on earth a website dedicated to increasing industrial design competitiveness and enhancing cultural creativity was posting articles on ESP, this should provide the answer.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: Can ESP Affect Our Lives?
Illustration(s): Barry Beyerstein, Dean Radin, Marilyn Schlitz, Charles Tart, James Trefil, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/mindbrain/109/109transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect

What is Parapsychology? ( 什麼是超心理學? )

2003-08-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

What is Parapsychology? ( 什麼是超心理學? )
[創意組織 ]
(2003/08/29)

What is Parapsychology?

CAN claims of extrasensory perception, or ESP as it is commonly called, be studied as a science? Can assertions of psychic phenomena be subject to the scientific method of experimental design, statistical significance, and independent replication? The controversial field is called parapsychology, and if you can read minds, see the future, or sense unusual things, we have some parapsychologists who would like to meet you--and test you. But critics--who call themselves skeptics--assert that the entire field is virtually all pseudoscience, without serious merit, just capitalizing on uncritical media and a gullible public. Parapsychology, according to skeptics, should be debunked. Parapsychology, according to proponents, is the scientific study of the paranormal, also known as psi phenomena. It is the careful investigation of events--like mental telepathy, clairvoyance, or other bizarre manifestations--that seemingly cannot be accounted for by natural law or knowledge. The claim that parapsychology is a real science excites some but annoys others. Is parapsychology a new science or an old fraud? Here we brought together some leading parapsychologists and skeptics. They joust and we judge.

PARTICIPANTS

Dr. Barry Beyerstein, a neuropsychologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada and a leading skeptic, is a regular contributor to the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Barry requires reasonable evidence and logic to justify extraordinary claims.

Dr. Dean Radin, an experimental psychologist who has conducted ESP experiments, is the author of The Conscious Universe. Dean believes that ESP research demonstrates what he calls "the scientific truth about psychic phenomena."

Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, trained as an anthropologist, is the research director of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a leading scientist in parapsychology. Marilyn presents careful experiments supporting the existence of psychic phenomena.

Dr. Charles Tart, a research pioneer in scientific parapsychology, is the author of over 250 articles published in professional books and journals, including Science and Nature. Charles is a spiritual seeker who believes that one of his virtues as a scientist is that he hates to be fooled.

Dr. James Trefil, a professor of physics at George Mason University, is a prolific author and commentator on science in the national media. Jim views parapsychology through the critical eyes of a mainstream scientist.

ROBERT: Dean, why do you think that the scientific method can be applied to the investigation of psychic phenomena? Skeptical critics claim that ESP is more wishful thinking or ancient superstition than serious science, with a touch of modern fraud tossed in now and then.

DEAN: Science consists of two general areas: there is the act of measurement, which is the empirical side of science, and there is the development of mechanisms, which is its theoretical side. When people ask the question, "Is parapsychology scientific?" they're almost always thinking about the theoretical side. And it's quite true that we don't have very good theories about why psychic phenomena happen.

ROBERT: Do you mean that even those scientists who are convinced of the reality of psychic phenomena cannot construct convincing fundamental mechanisms--theories--to explain its underlying cause?

DEAN: Yes. But on the measurement side, it's very clear that the scientific method can be brought to bear on these phenomena.

ROBERT: We're going to examine that assertion. Charles, you've been a parapsychologist for forty years; you're one of parapsychology's founders. Can you describe the field and give some sense of its import for human understanding?

CHARLES: Parapsychology is our modern name for what was originally called psychical research. It began as an organized field of inquiry in the nineteenth century, when there was much conflict between science and religion. Science seemed to be explaining more and more of the world, and it threatened to throw out religion totally. But a few scientists thought that religion was not all nonsense. They wondered whether it was possible to apply the methods of science, which had worked so well in the physical sciences, to examine the strange or unusual happenings associated with religion and to find out whether those phenomena are actual fact or just superstition. Parapsychology is the modern evolution of those early investigations.

ROBERT: Barry, you're a neuroscientist and a skeptic. I know what a neuroscientist does--you study the brain. What does a skeptic do?

BARRY: A skeptic is someone who demands reasonable evidence and reasonable logic to back up extraordinary claims. I wouldn't call parapsychology a pseudoscience, as long as it uses the same experimental controls, the same techniques, and the same mathematical and statistical procedures that are used within mainstream science. We can disagree about the adequacy of the evidence--that's what I'm skeptical about--but I don't claim that it's all fraud or pseudoscience. The key is the amount of evidence and the availability of that evidence for skeptics to check.

ROBERT: We're going to give you some evidence right now. Marilyn, the Institute of Noetic Sciences is a leading center of research on the mind and unusual phenomena. Could you describe your own most compelling experiments where human "senders" influenced the physiological responses of human "receivers" at a distance, without any intervening sensory communications?

MARILYN: We were interested in evaluating the extraordinary claims made by healers in different cultures. Were those healers somehow able to influence the physiology of people at a distance, under conditions where recipients didn't even know that senders were trying to affect them? Since such investigations are very difficult to conduct in a field setting, we moved into the laboratory. The experiment monitored the measurable effects of autonomic nervous activity, which is the part of our physiology that functions automatically.

ROBERT: Like heart rate, breathing, peristalsis.

MARILYN: That's right. So I would invite you into the lab and I would monitor various attributes of your physiology.

ROBERT: I'm nervous already.

MARILYN: We can calm you¡K. Then we would sCHARLES monitoring your galvanic skin response, the electrical activity of your skin, which is the same method used in lie detectors--

ROBERT: I'm not coming near you.

MARILYN: Oh, you have something to hide, do you? Here's the procedure. You, as the recipient-subject, sit in one room while we're monitoring your physiology. Then we invite a sender-healer to sit in a distant room, and there's absolutely no sensory communication between the two of you. We ask this healer, at specific random moments, to influence your physiology at a distance. So, for example, he or she might try to calm you, by employing psychical projections of serenity. We then compare your autonomic nervous system activity during the test periods, when the healer is attempting to calm you, with your autonomic nervous system during the control periods, when everything is the same except the healer is not sending. We call these experiments "intentionality at a distance."

ROBERT: As the recipient, I wouldn't know when the healer was trying to exert influence-intentionality--at a distance?

MARILYN: Exactly. You'd have no idea when these influence periods occur; they're randomly distributed throughout the session. We've now compiled about forty experiments that were set up under this kind of protocol. Overall, the results are highly compelling. There are strong statistical data to support the idea that there's some kind of exchange of information between the sender and the recipient, even though under these conditions there's no sensory contact.

ROBERT: Have you had nonbelievers--skeptics--auditing the experimental design, the data, and the statistical analysis?

MARILYN: The most recent experiments I've done were with a professor from England, Richard Wiseman, who's a card-carrying member of the skeptical community. He was very interested in doing experiments together, and the first project we did was in his lab, under his conditions. Everything was identical--same equipment, same randomization procedures, same subject population--except that I worked with half the people and he worked with half the people. The result was that we both replicated our initial findings: I got statistical significance and he didn't. This result was compelling to us, in terms of what effect the expectations of the researcher might have on the results. We then invited Richard to come over to my laboratory and set up the same experiment--and, again, we replicated the effect a second time. These experiments suggest that not only is there an effect but it can happen under conditions where skeptics and proponents work together. And they further suggest that there may be some way in which the belief systems or expectations of the researcher come into play.

ROBERT: Jim, you're a physicist. One of your many books is 101 Things You Don't Know About Science. Did you include parapsychology in your list?

JIM: No--that book was a tour of the frontiers of science at the end of the twentieth century.

ROBERT: Why didn't you include parapsychology?

JIM: One of the criteria I used for including an issue was that there had to be some reasonable expectation that the issue would be resolved in the foreseeable future. Parapsychology has been around, as has been said, for over a century. I don't see a resolution coming anytime soon, so I didn't include it.

ROBERT: Dean, take us through the categories of parapsychology. People know what mental telepathy is, but there's more.

DEAN: There are four classic categories that are studied as part of parapsychology. One is telepathy, as you said. The common understanding that telepathy means "the reading of minds" is not quite right, because that sounds as though thoughts were being perceived, and this virtually never happens. Telepathy means that there's some kind of mind-to-mind connection; it's often a feeling, the kind of emotion that seems to pass. The second category is clairvoyance, which is getting information from a distance, either in space or time. The third category is precognition, which can be considered a subset of clairvoyance, which is the acquisition of specific information through time.

ROBERT: So clairvoyance is defined as the occurrence of apprehending information directly, something that you couldn't know through the senses. Clairvoyance differs from telepathy in that clairvoyance perceives information directly from an object or about an event, whether past, present or future, without the necessity of any other mind knowing about that object or event.

DEAN: Right. For example, [the object or the event] can be hidden, as in an envelope or at a distance, so that normal senses couldn't perceive it. Or it could be displaced in time, whether precognition [knowledge of the future] or retrocognition [knowledge of the past]. The fourth category is psychokinesis, popularly known as "mind over matter."

ROBERT: What's a classic "mind over matter" experiment?

DEAN: In the old days, gamblers would claim that they could toss the dice and make a certain number come up more often than chance should allow, and that initiated about forty or fifty years of research, doing exactly that experiment.

ROBERT: Might trips to casinos alleviate some of the financial pressure of funding parapsychological research?

DEAN: There are two questions here: first, is there any effect when gamblers "will" certain numbers to come up; and second, if there's an effect, what is its magnitude? It turns out that when we do the overall assessment, we discover that there's an effect, but its magnitude is less than one percent. That's not very big.

ROBERT: One percent is well below the lowest odds advantages of the house. Do we cancel the trip to Las Vegas?

DEAN: You'll continue to lose at the casinos, though maybe a little bit slower.

ROBERT: Charles, give us some sense of the classic experiments in parapsychology, and how the field developed originally as a science.

CHARLES: In Victorian days, people played what you might call telepathic parlor games. I might ask you to go off in another room, open a book, and read a certain passage, while back here the rest of our little group would try to write down our mental impression of whatever was in that passage. Let's say that on occasion some of us would get a few words that were the same as those in the book. This kind of experiment is very hard to evaluate; there are lots of words in a book passage. There were many informal, inconclusive experiments like this.

ROBERT: How were the first reasonably scientific experiments designed?

CHARLES: A more classic telepathy experiment would work something like this. Someone goes off to a different room and shuffles a stack of cards a dozen times to make sure it's thoroughly mixed. He or she would then, at predetermined time intervals--say, every sixty seconds--look at one card at a time. Meanwhile people back in the original room would write down their impression of the order of the cards. We could then evaluate, with statistical mathematics, whether the experiment produced results that were sufficiently above chance to justify the supposition that sometimes information was being transferred. I'd estimate that there are now several hundred experiments showing that this kind of telepathy experiment can produce results greater than chance. Now, it's a small effect, as Dean [Radin] said; it differs from chance by only a few percentage points. It's very rare to get a perfect score; getting a hundred-percent-correct result in such an experiment has happened maybe two or three times in the whole history of the field.

ROBERT: Given the huge number of experiments that have been conducted, one would expect, just from normal randomized statistical distribution, that every once in a while the results would be a hundred percent perfect. I'd equally expect that every now and then the results would be a complete bust--getting nothing right, zero percent.

CHARLES: Except that we have sophisticated sets of statistical tools that can differentiate between results that reflect statistical significance and random distribution. Of course, one can make the counterargument that the published results are only those experiments that happen to come out above chance, and that if you included all the actual experiments done but unpublished, then the total results would approximate chance. To test this claim, you can figure out how many unsuccessful, unpublished psi experiments would have to have been done. It turns out that for this counterargument to be true, then every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth would have to have been doing ten failed experiments a day for the last five thousand years. This shows the strength of the data. The evidence for the existence of telepathy or clairvoyance is overwhelming.

ROBERT: We're talking about a meta-analysis of parapsychological experiments--an analysis that pulls together a large number of independent experiments.

DEAN: Meta-analysis means the analysis of analyses, so rather than doing multiple trials in a single experiment, you look at the collected results of many experiments.

ROBERT: In the last thirty or forty years of parapsychological research, what's your strongest piece of evidence?

MARILYN: I don't think we can identify one particular experiment that makes the case for the field; we have to look at the aggregate. Research has taken different directions. There's the remote viewing work, where people are attempting to describe characteristics of geographical locations at a distance. A number of experiments have now been done using this kind of procedure--and have been replicated consistently--producing sufficient data to demonstrate that there's some kind of effect happening here.

ROBERT: You've conducted some of the interesting Ganzfeld experiments; this is a procedure where you reduce sensory input for subjects and then ask them to describe, say, a remote video clip. One of the favorite techniques is to tape sliced Ping-Pong balls over their eyes and feed white noise into their ears; then they're asked to imagine what somebody else is drawing, or something like that.

MARILYN: The Ganzfeld is a procedure that was initiated at the turn of the twentieth century, when introspective psychological experiments were popular. Sensory deprivation is a technique that induces imagery; in a way, it simulates the dream experience, and people start seeing images.

ROBERT: Is it like an altered state of consciousness?

CHARLES: Yes, sensory deprivation is conducive to inducing an altered state.

ROBERT: Has it been shown that altered states have a positive correlation with evidence for telepathy and clairvoyance?

CHARLES: There's a general literature to that effect, and I believe that it's probably true. If I say, use your ESP, that's a simple, rational thing to do--and it usually doesn't work. We don't know what part of the mind ESP comes from, but it doesn't seem to come from normal consciousness.

ROBERT: Barry, what does a skeptic make of all this?

BARRY: Unfortunately, the debate has gotten so technical that what we're now talking about are very, very small statistical effects. And when the effects are that small, and that difficult for skeptics like myself and my students to replicate, then we have to look to the possibility that there are interesting statistical anomalies and artifacts here, not real phenomena. A statistical effect, if you get one, means that it's unlikely for the event in question to have happened by chance alone. But even if there's something operating here, statistical significance alone can't tell you what that something is. Is it some paranormal phenomenon? Or is it sensory leakage? Is it fraud? Is it recording error? Or is it some kind of subtle artifact of the experiment that's well worth studying but is normal, in the sense that it doesn't violate our sense of the physical world. There are just so many possibilities other than paranormal explanations, and statistics alone will never tell us what's really going on. Statistics can only inform us that it's unlikely that there's nothing but chance operating there.

ROBERT: I have a sense that in recent times there's actually less research going on in parapsychology than there was a few decades ago. Innovative research interest, today, seems oriented more toward transpersonal and other kinds of holistic psychologies. Has the experimental side of parapsychology diminished in importance?

DEAN: I don't think the importance of parapsychological research has diminished at all. It may be that the total number of people actively doing experiments is probably somewhat lower.

ROBERT: Why is that?

DEAN: I think interest in parapsychology goes in cycles. There's something like a twenty-year funding cycle.

ROBERT: It has nothing to do with sunspots?

DEAN: Well, perhaps that, too--but I don't think so. It's quite interesting that fifty years ago the usual skeptical response was that parapsychological phenomena were just impossible, full stop. But something new has occurred in the last decade or so. Barry brought out that we're now dealing with technical issues of experimentation, where we're trying to figure out whether this anomaly is psi or something more commonplace. And that's a very dramatic change.

ROBERT: Are you suggesting a subtle admission by skeptics that experimental data of parapsychological phenomena are meeting the critical tests of good science, such as tightly controlled experimental design, replicability by independent scientists and labs, and statistical significance?

DEAN: It changes the playing field from "You guys are nuts, because this stuff couldn't possibly be real" to "Let's figure out whether these anomalies are what they appear to be--because, after all, they came from people's experiences, not from strange experiments in the lab--and if they're what they appear to be, we've captured psi."

ROBERT: What do your friends and colleagues in mainstream science think of your chosen profession?

DEAN: They hold a range of opinions, but in general here's what happens. Scientist friends or colleagues will come into my lab--some claiming they're skeptics, some not--and then they actually spend time running experiments and looking at the results. When they do these steps themselves, they usually change their opinion quite quickly. This opinion change is of two kinds. First, they realize that parapsychologists are as skeptical as they are. You have to be, because after years of scrutinizing these experiments, what we do now is quite good science. Second, they witness experiments that in some cases are really quite dramatic. Real anomalies emerge right before their eyes, and so my colleagues become really interested.

ROBERT: Jim, what would it take for you to move parapsychology from where you wouldn't even mention it in your books to recommending it for inclusion in mainstream scientific discussion?

JIM: In science, there's this process of first establishing that something happens--that there really is something going on that needs to be explained, and then you try to explain it; this is what you call experimental theory. My take on parapsychology is that I'm not convinced that there's something to be explained here.

ROBERT: What would convince you to change your opinion?

JIM: I could imagine carefully controlled experiments that produced anomalous data. I haven't seen Marilyn's [Schlitz] experiments; however, I've seen others that looked just as convincing initially, but then you get into these very technical discussions of the experimental design and the statistics. The issue often comes down to what sorts of things could produce these very small effects that people are measuring--things that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with extrasensory perception but might be something in the design of the experiment or the way data was analyzed.

ROBERT: Charles, you've dealt with these issues for decades. Has the whole field of parapsychology devolved down to hypertechnicalities?

CHARLES: Meanwhile, back in the real world, real people are having real experiences that they believe are due to extrasensory perception. Surveys show that a majority of the population thinks they have had an ESP encounter personally. Of course, when you have people claiming to have had a psychic experience, you ask yourself what it means. If you ask the people themselves, you get a large range of responses. Some go off the deep end, declaring, "I'm chosen by God, because I'm so very special." Others try to make sense of what happened, but they run into skeptics who tell them that these experiences are impossible and anyone who thinks he's had such an experience is simply deluding himself. I don't think it's a particularly healthy response to invalidate people that way.

ROBERT: How would you respond to such a person describing an anomalous, seemingly psychic experience?

CHARLES: Some few of us look at the scientific literature on parapsychology and say, Well, we do have evidence for basic psi phenomena--like telepathy or precognition or something similar--so maybe this particular real-world instance was an actual occurrence. Psychic experiences are not just matters of academic interest. When people have a psychic experience, they quite often change their philosophy of life--or if they already have, say, spiritual values, these beliefs are then validated by the event. I'm not simply an experimental parapsychologist. I'm a transpersonal psychologist--which means that I'm interested in the personal, emotional applications of psychic experiences. I want us to have a good database on what happens in these experiences: What seems to be a real effect and what seems to be illusion? What kinds of people have them, and are they associated with mental illness? By the way, psi phenomena are not generally related to mental illness. Parapsychology can have practical relevance to real people's lives.

ROBERT: Charles, you wrote very personally that your initial interest in parapsychology related to an early conflict between science and religion. Do you think this tension, or longing, influenced your conclusions?

CHARLES: No. I have two guiding forces in my life. The first is that I hate to be fooled under any circumstances. And that makes me a very good scientist. I'm more critical of methodology in psi experiments than many scientists who take comparatively skeptical positions. My second guiding force is that I'd like there to be a bigger and more interesting universe, with meaning in it. So my way of dealing with my childhood conflict between science and religion was to become a scientifically rigorous researcher in parapsychology, just like the people who started the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century. I applied the basic scientific method of observing data and testing theories to this area of unusual experiences, in order to see what's real and what's not--to ascertain what is, indeed, superstition and nonsense left over from earlier times.

ROBERT: How do you react to the increasing prominence and strength of the skeptical community?

CHARLES: I wish there were a genuinely skeptical community. I'm afraid that just about every skeptic I've ever met is what I call a pseudoskeptic. A real skeptic says, "I don't know about parapsychology and psi, and the explanations we have so far don't satisfy me. I want to look at the data." But the skeptics I've encountered claim to know already that there's nothing to it, and then they break all sorts of rules of scientific procedure to go about their debunking. Skepticism, as it is generally practiced, is neither legitimate science nor legitimate criticism.

ROBERT: Isn't it legitimate help when skeptics expose all the ridiculous claims that encrust serious parapsychology with absurdities?

CHARLES: That might have been true a hundred years ago, but the methodology in parapsychology has become so good, and parapsychologists are so thorough in their own criticism of one another's experiments, that the matter is pretty well handled.

ROBERT: But there are abundant common frauds, silly stories of ESP defying all credulity that circulate widely in the media. Furthermore, if the data are so robust, why do we have, right here, scientists on opposite sides? What is it about parapsychology that gives the field such weak acceptance?

MARILYN: I'm reminded of the joke that there are three stages in the skeptical acceptance of unorthodox ideas. First, the critics will say, "There's nothing in that data." Then, as you acquire more data, the second stage comes up: "Well, there might be something to it, but it's such a small effect that it's meaningless." And you acquire more data and show its relevance, and then the skeptical community says, "Of course, we knew it all along; so where have you been?"

ROBERT: Jim seems comfortably set in the first stage; Barry is, too, but he's also glancing at the second stage.

MARILYN: If we can give serious skeptics some education about the data, I think their stage could well change.

ROBERT: We'll arrange for Marilyn [Schlitz] to give Jim [Trefil] and Barry [Beyerstein] the results of her experiments. Then we'll get back together in the future--that's a promise.

MARILYN: I want to comment about the contribution of open-minded skeptics, because I feel that they can make a great contribution to parapsychology. There's a lot of nonsense that dominates our culture. People are led down blind alleys and come to believe very strange things. General skepticism, therefore, is good for all of us. I agree with Dean [Radin] that parapsychologists themselves are inherently skeptical, and I agree with Charles [Tart] that those of us collecting this data don't want to be fooled. But I've seen examples within the skeptical community where they are really helping us to refine our protocols and sharpen our critical skills.

ROBERT: That's a major contribution.

MARILYN: Yes, it is. There's a lot of room for healthy debate within the parapsychological community such that we can begin to move the field forward.

ROBERT: If there's genuine search for truth, parapsychologists and skeptical scientists make a great combination.

JIM: I've been involved in other areas of science where there's been a great deal of skepticism--for example, the skepticism greeting the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the effects of an asteroid impact. I saw how the scientific community, driven by data, changed its mind and generally accepted this theory over a period of time. I just don't see that happening in parapsychology--it hasn't happened for a hundred years.

BARRY: I think Charles [Tart] is making a stereotype of what skeptics are. What he said doesn't jibe with the kind of skeptics that I know. It's not just that these supposed events are weird. We all accept quantum mechanics--which is totally counterintuitive--because it produces results. Quantum mechanics is replicable, it gives better explanations, and it makes predictions that turn out to be verified in experiments. There were many skeptical physicists; Albert Einstein himself went to his grave still figuring there was something wrong with it. But quantum mechanics is not controversial anymore, because it has delivered the goods. And this is what parapsychology has yet to do. If it turns out that ESP or psi research does come up with something that tips the scales, then I don't know very many skeptics who would be any more skeptical about it than we are about quantum mechanics.

ROBERT: Dean, let's go on to something different. What is field consciousness? Give us some examples of how it may work.

DEAN: Field consciousness is a relatively new finding about what may happen when people get together in a group--say, as a choral group or a sports team--and they feel that something "just gels." Everyone is working together perfectly and there's a sense of coherence within the group. The same technology that we use to study mind-over-matter [psychokinetic] effects in the laboratory are applied to these situations to investigate whether there's something paranormal happening here.

ROBERT: Give us an example.

DEAN: Take an electronic random-number generator, which is like a coin flipper. The traditional experiments are one-to-one, with one generator and one person who tries to change the distribution, essentially, of heads and tails. The only difference, in field consciousness studies, is that you take this random-number generator and put it in the vicinity of a group that's doing something together, where there are moments of strong coherence--for example, during group meditation. The objective is to ascertain whether the act of coherence among a group is reflected as statistical anomalies in the random-number generator. There have been now something like seventy or eighty experiments of this kind in the past two years, and the grand accumulation of data suggests that something unusual does happen.

ROBERT: You've also used events on a grander scale, where very large populations are involved--such as when much of the world was tuned into the opening of the Olympics or the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial--and come up with what you think is compelling data.

DEAN: This is the beginning of a new experimental area, but initial experiments suggest that something like a "mass mind" effect might really exist--that when we have millions of minds thinking about the same thing, something happens.

ROBERT: Charles, give us some real-world examples of psychic phenomena.

CHARLES: During the Second World War, a friend of mine came home very tired from her defense job and fell sound asleep. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, she finds herself leaping out of bed and standing in the middle of the floor with a feeling of absolute horror. She has no idea what the absolute horror is about, and so she starts to feel silly after a while. She stands there for about thirty seconds, and then the house rumbles a little bit. She thinks maybe it's a minor earthquake, and she looks at the clock and goes back to bed. The next day she discovers that the Port Chicago Munitions Shipping Facility had blown up at the time she leaped out of bed, and the little rumble was the time it took the shock wave to go from Port Chicago to Berkeley. Was she responding to the horror of hundreds of people suddenly being killed and maimed? This is the kind of anomalous experience that happens to people in everyday life.

ROBERT: You've heard the following argument: Because every night so many people have so many nightmares about so many things, random coincidences like your friend's sudden waking timed with the munitions explosion must occur rather frequently. It's statistically mandated, though it's surely random. But when the random coincidence happens to one individual, it feels very special, even though it isn't. An analogy is winning the lottery--that's completely random, but to the winner it's very special.

CHARLES: The argument is a correct one, which is why we parapsychologists took all this psychic stuff into the laboratory almost a hundred years ago. We knew what coincidence was, and we had to rule it out conclusively.

ROBERT: Dean, do you have any amazing stories?

DEAN: Most of my amazing stories happen in the laboratory, for exactly the reason that Charles [Tart] just said. But the anecdotes are really compelling. I've had experiences like that in my life, and you're absolutely right: it could be coincidence. So as a scientist I want to know whether, in principle, these coincidences could be some form of parapsychological phenomena.

ROBERT: The challenge is to investigate spontaneous, real-world psi phenomena in a controlled, scientific manner.

MARILYN: One parapsychologist did a study correlating the numbers of people who rode on trains on days when there were train wrecks with the numbers of people riding trains on average, safe days. Over the course of time, it looked as though there were significantly fewer passengers riding on the days of train wrecks. He also did some interesting work with business executives, assessing the incidence of psychic phenomena among people who were at top levels. The results indicated that high-level executives scored better than the average population on ESP, which suggests that these very successful people may be using certain kinds of psychic abilities in everyday life, in ordinary practice. Maybe they aren't labeling it psychic; certainly they don't considering it weird. But these successful executives may be, in fact, harnessing and employing psychic ability every day of their lives.

ROBERT: Dean, if a person is psychic but feels funny about admitting it, he may say he has a hunch or is just intuitive. That's our social protection. What are the standards of good science here? We normally talk about the replicability of evidence.

DEAN: Right. The gold standard of empirical science is whether an effect can be independently replicated by lots of people over a long period of time, and also whether conceptual replication can be shown--because, obviously, if you do exactly the same experiment and the experiment has a flaw in it, you just repeat the flaw. So in my book I focused on meta-analysis, combining many experiments in different classes of parapsychology to see whether replication exists, and comparing the results from parapsychology with those from other areas of science. The answer, very clearly, is yes, there is replication by many different people over long periods of time, and conceptual replication, in at least a few classes of parapsychological work.

BARRY: My trouble is that for the last twenty years I've been asking my psychology students to try replicating classic parapsychological experiments, without any positive results whatsoever. Since I have a random-number generator in my lab, other people from the community would come to ask my help in conducting ESP-type experiments. I've had psychics try to beat my random-number generator.

ROBERT: How have they done?

BARRY: Zip. Nothing. I just can't get any replication in these things.

MARILYN: To that I would argue that one can make the same kind of case for musical ability. To conclude that there's some genuine anomaly present, it doesn't necessarily have to be distributed evenly among the entire population.

BARRY: But I've done that. We've had people come in who claim to have psychic ability and they fall flat on their faces, too, just like my students.

DEAN: Are you claiming that you never get significant results?

BARRY: I'm saying [I get] nothing more than chance would predict.

DEAN: OK, but you're getting a distribution of results, some of which are positive and some negative.

BARRY: Individual trials and even individual persons may produce skewed results. If you run the random-number generator a hundred times, five of them, on average, will come out above chance. So the results match our statistical predictions for random behavior.

MARILYN: My experiments with Richard Wiseman--who is a member, recall, of the skeptical community--suggest that maybe there's something inherent in the experimenter's ability to elicit these kinds of phenomena.

BARRY: I like to take students who come to me because they want to prove me wrong. I give them the equipment, send them off and say, "OK, if it's bad vibes from me, fine--I'll be gone." Some of these students have actually refused to give me their data, because they were so embarrassed when nothing nonrandom happened.

DEAN: One of the problems here is that many scientists don't understand the meaning of statistics in the behavioral sciences. They're thinking of the type of precision you get in the physical sciences--which, of course, is substantially more precise than that in the behavioral sciences. Most conditions of human behavior are so variable that you need a much higher power of statistical analysis in order to pull out the significances.

ROBERT: This means more trials in the experiments and different mathematics in the analysis.

DEAN: Yes. If the underlying effect is very small, you need the right kind of statistics to come out with a significant result.

ROBERT: It makes me nervous when such a small effect is supporting a field that's challenging basic assumptions of the physical world.

DEAN: The effect is not so small. Sometimes the effects look small, but this is because the sum totals are the combined results of positive correlations and negative correlations canceling each other out.

ROBERT: A correlation of minus-one, which means a zero-percent relationship, is just as strong as a correlation of plus-one, which means a hundred-percent relationship.

CHARLES: If something is consistently wrong, it's just as useful as if something is consistently right. You just reverse the predictions.

BARRY: It's consistency that's the problem.

ROBERT: There are two opposing points here, both rather fun. On the one hand, it's conceivable that positive and negative correlations exist often in parapsychology, each representing massively significant psi; but since the positives and negatives are so entangled and can't be teased apart, they're constantly canceling each other out, so that the combined effect always appears minuscule. On the other hand, this argument does seem the perfect rationalization for little or nothing going on.

ROBERT: Jim, why are mainstream scientists reluctant to get involved, either as skeptics or participants, in this whole field?

JIM: It's about as risky as you can get.

MARILYN: So little money is allocated to parapsychology compared to any mainstream science.

ROBERT: Since the implications of parapsychology are so potentially momentous, why is a little risk such a deterrent to adventuresome scientists?

JIM: Let's look at this from the point of view of the scientist. The one bit of capital you have as a scientist is your research time, which is always limited. In building your career, you have to decide where you're going to spend your time and what the chances are of a payoff. When I look at parapsychology, I see a long history with no payoff. I don't see any payoff upcoming. Speaking personally, I wouldn't do it. I have great admiration for people like Barry [Beyerstein] who get involved in the skeptical analyses, but frankly there's very little reward for such work in the scientific community. You don't get career-making points for skepticism.

ROBERT: Do you think that's good?

JIM: No, I don't think it's good, but it's a fact, OK? An individual scientist is much better off putting effort into normal research in a mainstream discipline than going off into a field like parapsychology, or even getting involved in opposing it, as a skeptic. There's just no payoff.

ROBERT: Charles, have you had a payoff?

CHARLES: Speaking as a parapsychologist, it's even more complicated than that. Not only don't you get any points for doing parapsychological research, you'll probably lose your university job if you do! This is especially true if you get positive results. This is historical fact; it's happened in many cases.

ROBERT: That sounds contrary to the ideals of scientific inquiry.

CHARLES: The academic world is not as open-minded as it's supposed to be, sad to say. But there's a deeper level that, as a psychologist, interests me greatly. It's only been a few hundred years since we burned people at the stake who we thought had strong psychic powers. Some of my own research shows that many people, under their conscious exteriors, harbor diffuse fears and emotional ambivalence about psychic results. Parapsychology is not a neutral topic--it affects people quite deeply.

ROBERT: Nobody will be burned at the stake today. We're going to take predictions. One hundred years from now, will parapsychology be recognized as a mainstream science?

DEAN: I think the answer is yes, but it won't be called parapsychology anymore. It'll be absorbed into mainstream science.

MARILYN: I would agree with Dean [Radin], and I think parapsychology is going to be applied to things like health care.

BARRY: I would actually like to agree, too, but I don't hold much hope that it will actually happen. If the data are there, then it's no longer "para" anything, it's part of physics or part of physiology, or both. If data come in a way that skeptics can accept, then parapsychology can fold its tent and become part of mainstream science.

ROBERT: But that's not going to happen?

BARRY: No, I'm not expecting that to happen.

JIM: I think we'll go along in the next century pretty much as we've gone along in the last century. There will be people who keep trying to establish parapsychology as a legitimate field of science, and it just won't happen.

CHARLES: I'm between the optimists and the pessimists. I think we'll have reasonable practical applications in which psychic abilities can help. Even more important, we'll be looking at the implications of psychic phenomena for our transpersonal or spiritual nature. That's what will be really important.

ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

ABOUT one fact there is no dispute. Paranormal phenomena have persisted in virtually every culture, and the varieties of such puzzling events are endless. How to explain it all? I think there are three possibilities. One, the paranormal does not exist and all the perplexing reports can be dismissed as illusion, delusion, misguided hope, mistaken belief, laboratory error, or furtive fraud. Two, the paranormal does exist and science will ultimately solve all these puzzles, perhaps using the counterintuitive concepts of quantum theory or something similar. Three, the paranormal does exist, but science in its present form can never get at it. We will have to wait, until one of these alternatives brings us closer to truth.

Editor's Comments:

Marilyn Schlitz notes that

"One parapsychologist did a study correlating the numbers of people who rode on trains on days when there were train wrecks with the numbers of people riding trains on average, safe days. Over the course of time, it looked as though there were significantly fewer passengers riding on the days of train wrecks. He also did some interesting work with business executives, assessing the incidence of psychic phenomena among people who were at top levels. The results indicated that high-level executives scored better than the average population on ESP, which suggests that these very successful people may be using certain kinds of psychic abilities in everyday life, in ordinary practice. Maybe they aren't labeling it psychic; certainly they don't considering it weird. But these successful executives may be, in fact, harnessing and employing psychic ability every day of their lives.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn notes that

"If a person is psychic but feels funny about admitting it, he may say he has a hunch or is just intuitive. That's our social protection."

Charles Tart notes that

"It's only been a few hundred years since we burned people at the stake who we thought had strong psychic powers. Some of my own research shows that many people, under their conscious exteriors, harbor diffuse fears and emotional ambivalence about psychic results. Parapsychology is not a neutral topic--it affects people quite deeply."

Beneath our veneer of rationality, atavistic fears lurk, unacknowledged. In fact whatever PSI abilities modern humans have inherited from our ancestors and have retained into the modern era, are entirely natural and "normal." As Marilyn Schlitz notes, these abilities may even have enormous, unrecognized survival value. It is only our prejudicial "rationalist" mindset that has cast them in an undeservedly negative light.

-- Bevin Chu

Explanation: What is Parapsychology?
Illustration(s): Barry Beyerstein, Dean Radin, Marilyn Schlitz, Charles Tart, James Trefil, Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Author(s): Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn
Affiliation: CLOSER TO TRUTH (CTT)
Source: http://www.closertotruth.com/topics/mindbrain/212/212transcript.html
Publication Date: N/A
Original Language: English
Editor: Bevin Chu, Registered Architect