Smallist

In Britain, the Cheshire police force is downsizing its gear to recruit more policewomen. Specifically, they’re going from a Glock to a Sig-Sauer. Lighter motorcycles will be considered too, although it wasn’t clear what models. From the article:

Liz Owsley, of the British Association for Women in Policing, said: “To introduce smaller guns and motorcycles takes a chief constable with gumption and wherewithal.

“There is no reason why police forces can’t have weapons with smaller handles and smaller motorcycles.

“Not all male officers are 6ft 6in hulks, some are small and they would benefit, too.”

Which raises the question, why would you want anything bigger than the minimum size and weight possible? Are you going to catch more bad guys with a heavier motorcycle? And don’t guns pretty much, as Homer said, kill whatever you point them at? All things being equal, you’d want whatever allows for greater mobility and dexterity. Here are the two guns in comparison:

Of course, if you really want to go small, there’s always the Lady Derringer. (warning: site contains lingerie images of the owner)

There are many versions of extremely short fiction, and the surrealists have been finishing each other’s thoughts for decades. But ficlets is a novel idea:

Each and every ficlet is modular in that, though you may have written a stand-alone story with a beginning, middle, and ending, your fellow ficleteers may choose to write a prequel or sequel to your story. In this respect, you can think of ficlets as literary Legos.

The result is a web of prequels and sequels to popular stories, branching out into every genre and spiraling into great levels of absurdity. It’s a lot of fun, and I couldn’t help but contribute a short of my own.

One petty critique:I hate that their menu rollovers are strikeouts.

So Boeing is unveiling a flying wing, and an MIT / Cambridge design team has a similar design for a silent, fuel efficient passenger jet. In the latter case, the fuel efficiency was a serendipitous side-effect of noise reduction.

Both promise fuel efficiencies, per passenger, similar to a Prius seating two people: 120 passenger miles per gallon. And they claim to do so by increasing efficiency by about 20 percent.

This made me stop and think. If a normal plane is getting 100 passenger miles per gallon, how bad can it really be? If you do a carbon footprint calculation, you’ll note that air travel is a big component of your footprint. But it’s precisely because you travel so far in a plane. It turns out that driving to california would put out roughly the same amount of CO2 as flying.

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Spousal approval factor on sinkpositive is probably 0%. For starters, the hardware looks incredibly cheap. And since it only runs when the tank needs to fill, it can’t possibly replace the sink in any bathroom. Which means you’ve actually lost the surface space of the tank lid. Plus, as germophobes will tell you, a flushing toilet is spitting bacteria into the atmosphere, so you shouldn’t be hanging over it. And finally, um, didn’t your mother or McDonald’s assistant manager tell you to wash your hands with HOT water?

This system looks a little more reasonable for saving sink runoff, but it doesn’t save any space either.

If water is at a premium, there are full-blown graywater collection systems for your house. They use sink, shower, and laundry runoff to irrigate your garden or landscaping. But they’re probably not ideal for your apartment.

And for the absolute hardcore environmentalist, check out the Earthship water system. More on Earthships later.

Like most nerds, I like to have a second computer to experiment with, especially one that runs linux. And like almost everyone, I need a daily backup solution for my work files. Until now, I’ve been using a nondescript 7-year-old beige computer to do both. It sits in my desk’s tower cabinet (where my main computer would melt due to inadequate ventilation), and it’s set to automatically back up the main computer every 24 hours.

Problem is, it’s loud, hot, and draws lots of power. Which means it gets turned off a lot. Which sort of defeats the purpose of having a computer to do backups and futz with. So I need a computer that I can leave on 24-7, that doesn’t have a fan, and that can run linux. After the jump, two enticing options…

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The tiny book Tokyo: A Certain Style features some of the smallest apartments in the world, and the way people live when space is at a premium. As with the jeweler’s workstation, the result is beautiful clutter. And it’s the opposite of Japanese minimalism: clean lines and featureless surfaces require the luxury of surplus space.

If you want to see an efficient workspace, visit a jeweler and watch him do a repair. I live near Manhattan’s Diamond District, and I’ve had to take the odd watch or necklace in for a quick fix. I’m always amazed at how everything the jeweler needs is within arm’s reach. Light and magnification are focussed where they need to be, and all the most commonly used items are laying in plain view.

Here’s a few tips I’ve gleaned from observation: (more…)

Carrie and I travelled through Santa Barbara recently, and absolutely loved the city. Real estate there is expensive as hell, though. So it’s only natural that someone would decide to build up.

The Ablitt Tower House is built on a 20×20 lot, using rebar construction typical of a skyscraper. It has its own website, chock full of photos. But the architect’s site also features the plans and model. He also builds huts.

Via the Small House Society, which we will be visiting again. It’s a gold mine.

In my earlier post about hypermiling, I referred to drafting a truck as “a bit of a hack”:

You’re just trading your own carbon emissions for the truck’s really.

My brother said this probably isn’t true, since the vacuum would be there anyway. So I asked Metafilter.

The consensus seems to be that, no, it’s not a zero-sum one-for-one tradeoff. In fact, a properly proportioned train of cars behind the truck would improve its profile and reduce its slipstream. But it’s not entirely clear whether the car’s presence actually benefits the truck. With the new shit that’s come to light, it sounds to me like it does.

OneBag is a fantastic resource for travelers despite their use of Comic Sans. Since 1996, they’ve been preaching the gospel of Smallistry, albeit in the limited domain of carry-on baggage. Here’s a rundown of my favorite tips from their site:

• “Bundle wrap” clothes to avoid wrinkling. Basically create a large roll of clothing with the nicest, largest stuff on the outside. Alternate collars on either side to keep a consistent thickness. The site has a great illustration here.
• Use the plastic bags your newspaper comes in to wrap shoes, if you’ve got extra pairs. Make sure to fill the shoes with small items, to conserve space.
• Wheels increase a bag’s weight 75% and sometimes remove almost half the storage space, so consider how useful they’ll be when considering what luggage to bring.
• If you must check baggage, remove or tape down padlocks, as they frequently get caught in the gaps between conveyor belts.
• You can get Inflatable Hangers, and they pack nice and small.

A lot of the site focuses on the needs of a third-world traveller, and may be a little off-topic for smallist, but it certainly whetted my appetite for adventure. For more tiny travel products, check out flight001.com