Yurt Calculator | Hacker News Reader

Yurt Calculator

simplydifferently.org

221 pointsraptorraver88 comments

I lived in Mongolia for a year and got to stay a couple days in real yurts.

The round wall directs wind around the structure and local people hang a heavy weight from the center of the yurt to give it resistance to the lifting force of the wind.

They are cool in the summer with the bottom edge of canvas rolled up to allow airflow. ( but also mosquitoes)and warm in the winter when a layer of thick wool felt is layered over the whole structure and covered with canvas. In the centre is a stove that can burn wood or dried animal dung.

They are very spacious.

You can tell the time by the sun shadow on the floor via the smoke hole in the centre.

BTW if you enter a yurt and in Mongolia don’t step on the door still it is rude.

If you sleep over don’t be shocked when members of the family take off clothes to change. Modesty is the responsibility of the viewer.

What's a door still?

a door sill is the threshold of the door (like windowsill), but I'm not sure he meant it like that at all

I think he could indeed be right, I was curious about that too and came across this page[0] about Mongolian gers (aka yurt) which includes the following etiquette guidelines:

- When approaching a Mongolian ger it is customary to say, “Nokhoigo Khorioroi” which means “Hold the dog,” even if you don’t see a dog. This is because guard dogs are common and a dog may be aggressive towards visitors, but it in general alerts the occupants to your presence so they can come out and greet you.

- Never knock on a ger door. It is considered rude. You simply enter.

- When entering a Mongolian ger, step with your right foot first and never stand on the threshold. The threshold is said to be the “neck” of the ger and standing on it tantamount to “strangling” the home.

- Mongolians don't chat to each other over the threshold. Step in rather than asking things through the doorway.

- To greet your hosts say, “Sain bain uu?” (pronounced “Sey-Ben-Oo”) – meaning “how do you do?” If you are entering for the second, third, fourth time, you can just say “Sen-ooo”, meaning “Hi!”.

Today we both learned :)

[0] https://notesofnomads.com/mongolian-gers/#Ger_etiquette_The_...

Greetings in Mongolian are fun because the question and the response are so similar.

- сайн yy?

- сайн, сайн yy?

- сайн, <...>

Took me awhile to learn to hear the various elaborations on that for different types of people.

really:

  - fine, you?

  - fine.. fine.. you?

  - fine :)

heh,

The yy/uu is an interrogative that turns the preceding sentence into a question, so it disappears. Literally translated, it's just:

- good?

- good, good?

- good, <...>

But the actual meaning is:

- how's it going?

- good, how 'bout you?

- fine, <...>

There's simply a few layers of simplification going on to get from the 'correct' grammar to here. Native speakers will use small differences in emphasis between the words, but I'm not nearly fluent enough for that.

Here's the french one:

    - ça va ?
    - ça va, ça va... ça va toi ?
    - ça va :)

The `toi` is optional but there's a bit leg pulling involved.

I particularly appreciate that this is literally "Does it go? It goes. Does it go for you? It goes."

Native speakers don't generally look inside idioms the way non-native speakers do. English is full of equally odd-looking constructions. Still, this amuses me all the time in French.

One does not simply enter a Mongolian ger, evidently.

Stop writing simply <magic incantation> in the documentation ;)

> “Never knock on a ger door. It is considered rude. You simply enter.”

I suppose this is because you will be met well before you arrive at the door-the resident will come out to greet you, presumably because their dog alerted to your presence?

What do you say if you don’t want someone to enter your yurt? My dog is hungry and thinks you’re lunch?

I think that across Europe it is considered unlucky, or inappropriate to step on a door still (threshold?). I mean Europe as in European folklore.

In India, at least South India, it's considered unlucky to give or receive anything through the door threshold; either party goes to the other side and hands over (food, money, bag, etc.).

Apparently it's called threshold in english[0], which is interesting to me, since it is called the same in Slovak ("prah"). I thought prah is a homonym, since I don't see the connection to the mathematic threshold.

Anyway, many south-east Asia temples have the same rule - don't step on the door threshold.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_(architecture)

>"Modesty is the responsibility of the viewer."

This reminds me of what my father - from a very rural, poor, small community - told about my grandparents and his upbringing. Tiny house, not many bedrooms but many kids (in the end 10 children), so it was common for many of the youngest ones to sleep in the same bed as my grandparents. And yet they still conceived new babies (they're all 2 or 3 years apart from each other)! Sounds a bit crazy in these modern times.

Ya can have sex at times other than while the kids are in the bed too, presumably.

Kids sleep pretty soundly.

> BTW if you enter a yurt and in Mongolia don’t step on the door still it is rude.

I'm sorry, one is expected to step on the door still? Here in South East Asia that'd be considered rude.

Legends say Genghis Khan's horses were trained to be so fast because they were also used to transport bytes to and from such sites, to calculate their yurts.

This site could be an excel spreadsheet running on a laptop in a saddle bag!

I'm so glad there are still sites like this.

From the Wikipedia page:

> Yurts take between 30 minutes and 3 hours to set up or take down, and are generally used by between five and 15 people.

I wonder if there is any military application of using Yurts-alike tents, considering them being more resilient to extreme weather yet easy to set up and take down.

I'm not sure of other militaries but the Finnish army indeed uses very yurt-like tents, "puolijoukkueteltta"[0].

[0] https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puolijoukkueteltta

Yes, same tents in Sweden and Estonia as well. Mainly used in the winter, with a stove in the middle, which gives it rigidity.

Militaries in various countries already use simple canvas tents when in the field. I don’t see how switching to a similar-looking yurt setup would be an improvement.

Many militaries, including the US, use rectangular tents. Yurts are round. The entire point is the shape difference potentially being better for wind. This is why chatgpt is going to take over..

I don’t know the first thing about the US army, but several others have this figured out already. I’m Swedish and our tents have been round for … well I don’t know how long.

Are you proud you are ignorant about the miliatry operations of the world's most active military for the last 50+ years? You never saw a movie with a huge rectangular shape and thought "hey, that's different than ours here in Sweden? Let me jot that down, not everyone is like Sweden" ?

My post was about how the assumption that a yurt would be an improvement over current technology makes some weird assumptions. Like, that current army tents are square.

I don’t think it’s my responsibility to read up on how foreign armies operate in details like tent shape. Movies don’t generally dwell on such details. At least not the ones I watch. I don’t know what floats your boat — maybe there are movies about military logistics?

None about logistics, other than often showing the bases in basically every single one ever made.

german youth movement and scouting developed a tent system almost 100 years ago that allows to build yurt-like tents. it is modular so that with four sheets of a kind of triangular shaped canvas you can build a tipi like tent, and six triangular sheets plus 6 rectangular sheets build a yurt. multiple yurts can be connected to build even larger structures.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzzelte_der_deutschen_Jug...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jurtenburg&iar=images

See also, Desert Domes for their highly useful Dome Calculators and related dome formulas, material & assembly tips, and other resources for all your geodesic dome needs:

http://www.desertdomes.com/domecalc.html

From that link:

> Go see Benny and the elves for some Electroluminescent wire to decorate your dome!

What. Let’s see the Photo Galleries. Ah, eight groups of photos – five from Burning Man and three from Mardi Gras. I see.

Yeah that's more glamping than an earnest discussion about long term occupancy considerations.

This website fills me with nostalgia! I used it many years ago to make a tiny 8ft yurt, which was a fun little project. Putting up a yurt is really satisfying- the way the lattice walls flex is very cool, and seeing the way tension works across the structure is fun.

So, what keeps the Yurt from planar movement? Is it anchored via stakes somehow?

From the website:

> While living in the yurt experienced 2-3 strong storms, at my site up to 120km/h I would estimate. I'm kind of a slow learner at first as I had to fix and fasten the yurt while the storm was underway as I often hoped the ropes I used were sufficient, and experienced they were not.

> It's worth noticing, the storms affects the roof mostly, no impact to the wall as I noticed, me using 90° lattice angle and bamboo, with stretching the rain wall cover below the floor and use one rope on that height, almost on the ground, all around to fasten it (as seen on a photo above already). Some people put some small laths on the floor to fixate the lattice wall on the floor, or screw the door frame on the floor, both which I didn't do.

https://simplydifferently.org/Yurt_Notes?page=6#Storm%20Prep...

Seems to be fastened somehow, but it's not specified how.

> up to 120km/h I would estimate

That's the bottom end of the windspeed of an F1 (weakest grade) tornado.

I have no doubt the architecture of choice of people's who lived in the steppe regions of Central Asia, a place where extreme winds are pretty common, would obviously need to be able to handle these winds but it still feels hard to believe that an amateur yurt builder could get one able to withstand a weak tornado on their first build...

The structure seems to be ideal for withstanding winds, the winds would go around the building as it's round rather than rectangular. Seems professionally built yurts commonly can withstand ~220km/h or more, so I don't think it would super farfetched that a amateur built one could withstand half of that.

For Hexayurts (https://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt) one can create a rope halo that goes around the top of the roof, with a series of anchor ropes going down to the ground. Very effective at keeping foam structures well anchored at Burning Man, where the wind can be quite fierce.

Some of the poles are stuck into the ground just a bit, and then it's probably because the wall grates stick into the ground too, under the weight of the yurt. Here's an example:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvmZ6ipVExg 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCr6TnsJ1kA

BTW, here's the process of making the whole yurt set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YikFc0INaMg

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to buy some cheap land and throw up a yurt (or maybe a Quonset hut if you're more fancy), rather than take on a 30-year mortgage.

The problem is finding a place where they won't nail you with building codes, zoning or other ordinances, etc.

Quite often the places with cheap land are also the ones that don’t have building codes.

Up here in Alaska, land can be had very cheap (but construction costs are high), particularly if you don't care to be on the road system.

Where can I find this cheap land? When I check online zillow, or via Alaskan state land auctions, the price of building lots even without road access in the deep interior is more than that of a suburb in Texas!

https://dnr.alaska.gov/mlw/landsales/parcels/details/470-143... seems pretty cheap to me at about $4,200 per acre. A quick search of building lots in San Marcos, TX as an example shows prices are around $200,000 per acre, or about 50 times higher than the land in Alaska: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/San-Marcos...

Can you share the lots you were looking at?

San Marcos is one of the most overpriced and fastest growing markets in Texas, right next to Austin, priced to the stratosphere since the Californians moved in. Austin is my home town, but I couldn't afford to live in San Marcos.

For typical Texas land priced around the same per acre as Alaskan land:

https://www.land.com/property/Fox-Hunters-Club-Rd-Bon-Wier-T...

$19,708 - 3.79 acres On a public road, with electricity (water you'd need a well). Remote East Texas, and by remote I mean you're 20 min drive from the nearest city (Kirbyville with some gas, food, small department stores) and 40 min drive from the nearest Walmart SuperCenter (the real sign of civilization in rural America).

Or if you prefer something closer to a city, the desert just outside Del Rio, you can see:

https://www.land.com/property/Windmill-Rd-Del-Rio-Texas-7884...

$15,997 - 2.05 acres On a public road, I see electricity nearby but you'd have to run it to your land ($15k+ probably), or just do solar since there's plenty of sun there. Well water and septic. Bordering the Rough Canyon national recreation area and Lake Amistad, if you like boating and hiking (watch out for rattlesnakes). I'd say a "suburb" of Del Rio, an apartment building and single family homes 7 min drive away as well as a cafe. The nearest Walmart Supercenter is 30 min drive away in Del Rio, as well as the city of Del Rio and the general aviation airport is by the Walmart, if you wanted to fly to San Antonio or Monterrey.

Now you might be saying, I want true suburban land, like surrounded by other single family homes, with water hookups and neighbors, and commuting distance to a major city. That's going to cost you more - but not much more, especially given it's already got all utilities:

https://www.land.com/property/1631-Old-Henry-Court-Angleton-...

$33,000 - 1 acres About 15 minutes drive from the nearest Walmart Supercenter in Angleton, as well as an HEB (gotta have that HEB), and 40 min commute to Pearland where you could actually find city jobs, or 60 min if you want to go all the way to downtown Houston (I used to have a manager who did just this drive every day for 10+ years, so she could live on a working horse farm).

That's where my disconnect is for Alaskan land prices. I can only surmise it's because the federal and state government own like 99%+ of the land in Alaska and only sell a very small amount at any time to rigidly control the prices and development. Like an Uber-California in that way.

> Well water and septic.

I think the killer app is finding a place that lets you do graywater and an incinerating toilet. I just hope they drop in price. $4k for the nice ones, but can still be cheaper than running septic for light-use.

$4,200 per acre seems absurdly expensive to me for land out that deep in the boonies without electricity or roads. For $4,200 an acre I can buy rural land around me with road access, guaranteed electrical access, and within the last 2 and upcoming 5 years, fiber connections (just got mine 2 weeks ago).

Where are you?

GP: don’t say, the HN crowd will move in and your land will be 10x more expensive.

However, please tell me only :)

Rural Michigan

A cursory look reveals that there is acreage in Maine for less than $2K/acre.

https://www.landwatch.com/maine-land-for-sale

They also lack various things highly correlated with presence of building codes, such us road access, electricity, running water, clean water, water, food variety, healthcare, ER/ambulance, fire protection/prevention, crime protection/prevention, schooling, after-school activities, nightlife, pool for potential mates, (edit: was supposed to be "pool of potential mates", but in this context both work), and in general, people.

I mean, not paying for/depending on/having half of those networks sounds pretty awesome

I’d add lack of internet to your list. Much harder (but not impossible) to provide yourself.

Absolutely! Unfortunately, they are all mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing, so you can't opt out of some without opting out of the rest.

Cf "A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear": https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/matthew-hongoltz-he...

>much harder to provide

That's the real problem. HN forgets not everyone is remote.

The "provide" is easy these days, apparently, thanks to Starlink.

The "yourself" bit is a tricky bit, as where it comes to utilities, you can sort of DIY your own supply of everything else, but Internet is as much a social construct as it is technical.

Have they resolved their scaling issues that folks here have been raising red flags about?

Seems to hugely matter on which cell you're in. Haven't seen a proper public geo-driven approach to data collection to figure out what's really going on.

Should be able to do a lot with an HF link anywhere running at like 1200bps or 2400bps, which should be reliable on the same continent. (Not supposed to do that in USA, and won't work if everyone does it, but HF is kinda dying and different places have different rules, sooo...).

terminal, HN would be fine, a console reddit and the carbonyl chromium browser for everything else you need 'live'.

Too bad things have moved onto Discord from IRC.

Thank you for the valuable reminder that not everyone sees the world identically! To me, an avowed city lover, all of those things are essential to a high(or even medium!)-quality life - well, except "schooling, after-school activities", as I'm not a parent and never will be. Your evaluation's no less valid, though! I hope you get to find and enjoy your ideal rural retreat soon :)

Internet is MUCH easier than clean running water or access to healthcare. Just need a Starlink rather than needing a helicopter and a water treatment plant (or 50 miles of piping with pumps every mile).

You sound dismayed by the "features".

It's not building codes, it's zoning/permitting. You can't just toss up an structure and live in it without going through some approval process with your county/city.

Sometimes the only requirement is to meet code, but even that creates issues when you want to build something for yourself.

We have some really far out places that are still "unorganized" in Ontario Canada and therefore no permitting req'd, but you're still supposed to follow the building code for anything over 108sqft.

Especially in California

You'll find it is!

That said, many might face some challenges in doing so in a place they want to live. It's non-trivial to find a cheap piece of livable land in a city. In a more rural areas, you can expect some possible complications in things like water, electricity, and internet access.

Water: dig a well, buy a kettle.

Electricity: solar panels + batteries. You will need a lot of them if you want to run a small fridge. Forget about a gaming desktop.

Internet access: LTE via a tall antenna if you're lucky, Starlink otherwise. Add more solar panels.

You'll have to limit your diet mostly to foods that store well without a fridge. A tiny fridge can still fit the power budget.

I'd say that sewage and trash disposal are going to be bigger problems. Having a shower, too, especially in winter.

Sewage is easy, get a septic tank

Even easier than that... just don't treat it as "sewage". In Japan all the way up into the 20th century landlords often claimed a right to their residents "night soil". In pretty much everywhere except (parts of) Europe, human manure was seen as a very valuable resource.

Start a compost pile and get the correct Carbon:Nitrogen ratio (~24:1). Using the Berkeley method it can reach heats of up to 200°F (93°C) within a week. You'd be surprised how quickly something like human feces can neutralized in conditions like these. The recommended wait time before direct handling is usually about 2 months but this is mostly because it's hard to be sure you've got the right ratios, temperatures, etc.

Regardless, anyone trying an "offgrid" life would be wise to stop pouring effort into throwing away one of the most valuable resources humans produce

I've done experiments (with items from the catbox, not my own) with vermi-composting night soil. A healthy colony of E. foetidia with vanish a turd in less than an hour or so.

Hmm I'm not quite sure this would actually neutralize parasites however. In composting, the actions of the microbes themselves allow the pile to reach temperatures high enough to burn your hand. These temperatures can actually be sustained for quite a while too. Even the very microbes that cause temperatures to reach that high themselves die and the only lifeforms left are some specialist thermophilic species.

Vermicompost setups never reach those temperatures so I don't see how it could possibly be safe to vermicompost human feces in them...

It's a good point. The "Humanure Handbook" guy hasn't developed a prion disease, so there's that...

A quick search turned up this...

> As for pathogens, while there has been considerable research demonstrating the effectiveness of vermicomposting as a means of destroying pathogens, I still recommend taking a cautious approach with any material removed from the system. You may want to further process it via hot composting before using it – and you may want to avoid using it as fertilizer for food crops (even with additional measures being taken).

https://www.redwormcomposting.com/worm-composting/human-wast...

> The "Humanure Handbook" guy hasn't developed a prion disease

As much as HN loves obsessing over prions they're still an extremely rare phenomenon and there's few real solutions to resolving them regardless of how you deal with organic matter. Your poop is also not the only way it spreads. Saliva, urine, blood, etc all spread it. Ultimately a prion is just a protein malformed in a very specific configuration. If anything, exposing organic matter to high heat might actually reduce the risk of prions spreading than collecting all sewage together and washing it many miles away in underground tunnels

But yes, there are definitely other pathogens worth thinking about that can be spread from human organic products and I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.

That being said, vermicomposting is a wonderful way to quickly turn food waste and other less dangerous organic waste products into usable soil

The prion thing was a joke. (Not prion disease, that's objectively terrifying.)

> I would really caution against relying on any composting strategy that doesn't get hot for treating it.

Oh yeah. If I were to use this system for human poop I'd probably go a step further and use the resulting compost only on plants that were themselves destined to be (hot) composted.

FYI, prions aren't damaged by a mere 200F compost pile. It's a problem in hospitals too, where their ordinary autoclave temperatures only kill bacterial spores and other less hardy things.

I'm not sure but I think he's putting humanure directly on crops that he then eats. It's a pretty tight cycle, and it seems to me (with ZERO expertise) that if human prions are a thing that's a good way to find them.

But as I said in sib comment, it's mostly a joke.

You're not necessarily throwing away the output from a septic tank. Composted liquid flows down output pipes and into a buried drainage field. Anecdotally, in my parents house this drainage field was located directly under a paddock full of cattle, and the grass above the drainage field was always green and lush.

> dig a well, buy a kettle

Digging a well can end up costing more than the price of the land if you have to dig multiple times to find water

One issue: bathroom.

Not an actual bathtub, of course, but at least a shower and a toilet.

Yurts are fundamentally portable. You can set up on blm land and live indefinitely for free if you are decamping every three weeks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com