Some friends of mine had these last year, and they were great. Obviously, well insulated means warm at night, and cool in the day – all wonderful things at BurningMan. However, they also kept the dust down, and kept the light out, so you could actually get some sleep after the beginning of sunrise.

Lets see how this experiment goes. So far, we’ve got all the parts cut, and taped. We’ve even tried some initial test placements, but never yet actually put it all together yet. Just in case, we’re still bringing tents from last year – after all, “what could possibly go wrong”!?!

Note:

• For some background, and for possible uses of Hexayurts in large scale disaster situations, click here.

• Here are some video clips of people assembling and disassembling their hexayurt. There’s even a more advanced one about how to fold the hexayurt origami-style so it can be constructed on site with minimal effort!

Stay tuned – I’ll let you know how it went.

The source data is freely published on afterburn.burningman.com, but I really like how they visualize the data. This layout is immediately familiar to burners and is visually intuitive – more incidents of a specific type == larger area for that type. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version, and spend a few minutes skimming details; it was interesting reading!

The authors (GOOD and Hyperakt) end with “Try not to get flown out by helicopter”!

Excellent advice!

One story that struck me particularly was “Burn on the Bayou” about Burning Man 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast. This brought memories flooding back of people leaving Burning Man as news of the destruction spread; some driving all the way from Burning Man in Nevada, some flying to the nearest still-working airport, then figuring out something; some people trained disaster professionals going to do what they’d been training for, some people just going because they had to do something to help. Most ended up living there for months – one person from my camp moved there for a few years – and this became the start of Burners Without Boarders.

Five years later, the reconstruction continues. There are still BurnersWithoutBoarders helping along the Gulf and now facing the new problems caused by the BP oil spill. There are also BurnersWithoutBoarders in Haiti and other locations. If you are able to donate time or equipment or money, check out their website; these are hardworking folks in very trying circumstances making a difference each and every day.

This picture from flightradar24.com posted a more understandable summary of the scale of the disruption. The combination of flight data with maps summed up the situation in a very intuitive way, and I really liked how they did this. Nice job, flightradar24.com .

(Oh, and before you ask why close entire country airspace for “some dust”, you should check out the stories about BritishAirways Flight#9 and KLM Flight#867 during other volcanic eruptions. Both ended well, but still…)

Watch this space – at some point focus of news will shift from the flight and economic disruption of this eruption to how this will change weather patterns.

Fell out of bed this morning, and still half asleep, wandered down the street to the local boulangerie… While standing in line, trying to decide between all the yummy pastries and breads, I noticed lots of people would buy a baguette, and they all did the exact same thing. They’d be quickly handed a narrow paper bag with about 2 ft of baguette sticking out the top, pay, put change in pocket, turn to leave and then *chomp* take a bite out of the top. Now happily chomping, they would march through the crowd to the sidewalk and out to continue their commute, proudly carrying their baguette in front of them. While I was there, not one baguette left the store intact, and they sold a *lot* of baguettes. In London, the sterotype is bowler hats and umbrellas. In the US, the stereotype is jeans and a latte-in-a-paper-cup. Looks like in Paris, it should be baguettes-with-a-bite-out-the-top?!?!

Ambled back to the apartment, through crowds of people carrying baguettes-with-a-bite-out-the-top, to have orange juice, some fresh strong coffee, fresh croissants and pain au chocolat. mmmm…. Great start to the day!

Just found a list of boulangeries to try out: http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/best-boulangeries-in-paris. This could take a while!!

Looking out the window, I realized that the cafe was on the corner of a couple of streets, with evening rush hour traffic in full swing just the other side of the metro steps. It was all behind us as we came up the metro steps, so I could only see the surface roads now for the first time. Slowly, I realized it was a 7 road intersection (zoom in on google map for details). And a complete free-for-all.

There were no lights, no stop signs, no yield signs, no roundabout in the middle, no lines in the road. Just a large empty space where 7 roads meet. So, for example, cars zipping through from R.duTurbigo to R.Beaubourg had to duck-and-weave around cars going from R.Reaumur to R.Bailly. It was all done at a fast pace, with no indicators, no horns, no squealing brakes, and amazingly enough, no accidents! It just looked like a busy smooth flowing intersection, until you looked in detail and realised that there was no stop-and-go in the flow because there were no lights controlling any cars entering the arena. All of the 7 roads seemed to have similarly large volumes of traffic, adding to the whirling dance-of-hubris feel.

In a nod to practical reality, at least the city planners explicitly did not paint any road markings in the center of the intersection. At first, I thought that added to the hazard, but I later changed my mind. Beats me what way they could have painted lines, anyway, even if they wanted to. Honestly, I now think that if they had painted lines in the intersection, that would give people a false sense of security, some sense of “what is right, what is wrong”. Instead, by leaving it completely unmarked, all drivers were equally on edge, equally unsure of his right-of-way status, which is probably the best you could hope for. Each road connecting in/out of the intersection was painted correctly, but when they reached the edge of the intersection, the road-line-painters just stopped.

Once the initial surprise wore off, and I stopped wincing at some of the near misses, I noticed some interesting details:

• There was a traffic island on the NorthEast corner, so cars going from R.duTurbigo to R.Reaumur had to do a U-turn around the island, all in the middle of the arena. It wasn’t painted, had no signs/bollards, so was easy to miss in all the excitement, yet no-one hit it.
• There were pedestrian crossings all over the place. Mostly, they were near the edge of the arena, and conveniently blocked from sight by advertising billboards on the sidewalk. This meant that a driving zipping through the intersection had to also be prepared to stop suddenly at the zebra crossing if they turned the corner and found a pedestrian right in front of them. And the car behind had to be prepared for that also!
• Occasionally, a car would weave through the arena to reach its chosen exit road – only to realize that it was the wrong exit road! At that point, they just stopped and reversed back into the arena, until they had a clear shot at the correct exit road. They would then swing forward to the correct exit road and leave. This happened 6+ times while I watched, and no-one even honked at that.

Despite all the duck-and-weave driving, there were no accidents over the course of the beer-and-chips. Not sure what it says about the standard of driving in Paris, the same situation in Ireland or the US would have been a complete disaster. If that cafe ever setup a streaming webcam, it would be well worth watching! I left the cafe, carefully looked both ways before hurrying across the zebra crossing, and vowed to never drive in Paris!