Crazy mind, able hands!

Holy cats. Back organizing IDDS again, and this year has new levels of insanity -- IDDS is running for 5 weeks in Kumasi, Ghana, instead of MIT.

I like this article on IDDS 2009 a ton: Crazy mind, able hands.

All the organizers are pulling 18+ hour days again, but somehow it feels much more cheerful and thrilling to me this time around. Third time's a charm? I feel completely alive, vibrant. I've never felt this charged before ever in my life, I think. It's as if the energy of the summit completely replaces the sleep and food I'm missing. Flow. Maybe I'm finally getting a handle on this stress management thing?

I'm collecting expressions of agreement. For example, Americans say "uh huh" or "yeah" to indicate that they understand or agree with the person they are talking to. Ghanaians say "ah Haaa" rather enthusiastically. Zambians say "ey ey" (which means "yes" in Nyanja, a common language in Zambia). My favorite may be the Tibetans who make a short sharp inhaling gasp. To my American ears it sounds like the noise I would make if I stepped off a stair that I didn't expect to be there.

I love the IDDS participants this year. So many good conversations, and some of them in Spanish! I'm fantastically excited to see that I've learned a ton of Spanish since the first IDDS when I could barely talk to Carlos. Aw man, if only my French were anywhere as functional. I really desperately want to learn it so I can travel and work in the French-speaking African countries.

I love Kumasi. It's home of the Suame Magazine, a region where roughly 1.3 million people crowd in small workshops, hammering, welding, cutting, casting, lathing, milling the day away. I think it's the largest informal manufacturing area in the world. Other things make me smile, like the Twi word for thank you, "medase", literally means "I lay myself before you." Eggplants are called garden eggs here. And I'm stunned that I've seen both men and women carrying huge 100 lb loads on their heads.

It is the 3rd official day of IDDS and it feels as though it began eons ago. Or, as we say, IDDS--a month of Fridays...because every day feels like it's a week long.

Thus, I have several hundred untold stories...which I'll hopefully be able to post sometime in this lifetime...

For better coverage of IDDS, check out Nathan and Niall's blogs.

Looking glass

Masdar city opened its first 10 MW solar photovolatic plant and conncected it to the grid on June 1st, apparently on budget and on schedule. It's currently the largest PV plant in the Middle East right now.

We're all still living/working in temporary spaces, though. I think they've been pretty clever about finding space...which is incredibly scarce and expensive in Abu Dhabi city. Currently, the Masdar Institute is housed at the Petroleum Institute (PI)...in an old warehouse Masdar recently retrofitted. You might never know just by looking, though. Here's what it looks like inside:

I witnessed how they turned this room from a dark dusty corner of warehouse to a slick office space in about one week. Here's what the same room looks like from the top, you can still see some of the old warehouseness:

The white pizza boxes are actually the tops of the fluorescent lights in the first picture. There's other signs of the old warehouse, like this side door:

At the top, you can see how it was once one of those rolling sliding warehouse doors, and then they stuck another panel underneath with a double door. And here, where the ceiling isn't quite completed yet, you can look up and see the warehouse:

Actually, we're only in half of the warehouse. Apparently, the other half was empty until ADNOC (the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, they run the PI) saw what Masdar had done with the space and was so inspired they decided to retrofit the other half for ADNOC offices. There's also a rumor that once we leave this space, they're just going to tear down all our retro-fitting, which is quite a pity. Here's what the building looks like from the front:

Green things! Which are wonderful...even though the PI likes to water them in the middle of the day with great giant puddles that leak out onto the street, which is awesome because the UAE has one of the highest water consumption rates per capita in the world, which is even more awesome because all the water here is more energy intense because it needs to be desalinated.

Meanwhile, back at the city construction site, they have mods! Two-story office mods. (For non-Oliners, mods were temporary housing units for students when Olin was in the middle of construction.) Here's the Masdar version, complete with circus tent:

Isn't the tent neat? It shades the building so it doesn't need as much cooling. Here's the solar PV test site, where they have all sorts and brands of PV to test it in real world conditions with incredible heat and dust.

You would think that the desert would be an ideal place to have a solar plant (I did) but it turns out that dust is a huge problem. There's trade-offs between energy production and how often the panels should be washed. This site is how they chose which brand/type of solar to use in their 10 MW PV plant. And here's a solar cooling experiment:

See how seriously that dust has caked onto the panels?! The dust settles on the panels and then becomes cemented on when the air passes through the dew point at dawn and dusk. I think this pilot has largely run its course, so it's no longer being maintained. You can also see in the background how deserty it is around these parts.

Why is it that "deserted" sounds like "desserted" and not "desert-ed"?

Here's what our school looks like now:

Apparently, we'll be moving in, oh, 2 months. Right.

Wha?

Government-sponsored TED talks?!  This is cool.  What kind of alternate reality have I wandered into?  

Addendum

Also, the Coca-Cola distribution chain may soon be put to work for distributing medicines and supplies in Africa.  

Band Aid Kool Aid Marmal Aid

I just found Beyond Good Intentions, a series of short episodes about rethinking aid for the developing world.  I think it's super well done, it looks at a lot of issues like religious-based aid, social entrepreneurship, using randomized experiments to measure the effectiveness of aid (yeah, J-PAL!), the Peace Corps, and there's even a critical look at micro-finance and Kiva.org.

I also enjoyed looking at the bonus material for the episodes, and there's a good road map of what each episode is about at the Beyond Good Intentions Blog, where there is also extra commentary.

Your mother should know

I MADE SOY YOGURT FROM SCRATCH.  and it worked.  I took dried soybeans and turned them into yogurt.  I feel so accomplished.  

By far the best set of directions I found comes from the i eat food blog.  Instead of using an incubator or leaving it in the oven, though, I read "110 degrees" and thought, "Perfect!" then left in in a cooking pot outside on the back porch for some hours.  The world is my incubator.

There were a few mishaps.  Soymilk likes to sneak up and overboil like mad when you're not looking.  Virtually my entire 2 L pot of soymilk disappeared over a 5 min period when I stepped out of the kitchen...I was puzzled that it could evaporate so quickly...but I later found the soymilk lake in the grease trap beneath the burners.  Good thing I made too much soybean mush to begin with, so it was easy to make another batch of soymilk, but I watched it like a hawk the second time around.

I'm really happy.  It's one of those open-up-the-black-box moments where I take something mysterious (yogurt) and figure out how it works.  Like opening up an old TV set.