The Rube Goldberg of Rice | Hacker News Reader

The Rube Goldberg of Rice

newyorker.com

84 pointsMz30 comments

I spent two years in rural Vietnam setting rice husk on fire. [1]

Here are two pictures if you're curious what they look like in larger quantities (the videos linked in other comments don't show them too well)

http://ricehusk.cc/goodboiler/day7 http://ricehusk.cc/

They're a fascinating material, quite unlike anything else in nature.

They've got this really high silica content and unique lattice structure that makes them really tough. They've got a weird particle size/shape, making them fluffy but also with a very high angle of repose (meaning you can pile them up into an almost vertical wall)

Trouble is that it's hard to do anything economically productive with them. Those boats in the picture I linked above float all around the Mekong delta, not all of them dropping of the rice hull to someone that would use it.

I was surprised to see quite big rice hullers (2 stories tall) being operated by a few guys all over rural Cambodia. The big challenge for most people seemed to be financing the fuel not the upfront capital investment of the huller. The most prevalent technology was diesel powered hullers. Some people were piloting gasifiers that would use the rice hulls themselves as fuel.

Anyway, I could go on and on. Very interesting to see someone in the US playing around with this stuff!

[1] https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/03/08/i_spent...

What happened after day 16?

The machine worked! We boiled water for a few cups of coffee.

The write up is coming. Eventually.

A quick search produces many rice hullers in the $500.00 range. These are made in China and India and other parts of the world which grow a lot of rice on small plots. The inventor claimed not to find any hullers that were affordable.Maybe he didn't use the interweb?

$500 is not that affordable, especially given the ability (or lack thereof) to finance it in many parts of India and China. Obviously, this isn't a scalable product for those needs, but its a nice start.

Edit: why the downvotes? Financing a $500 product is a major issue in India, for example, where the cost of capital is extremely high.

It's still less than what the inventor came up with, so it seems relevant.

Tabletop rice hullers on taobao for <$50:

http://s.taobao.com/search?initiative_id=staobaoz_20140712&j...

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

I saw a documentary on this. The main breakthrough was flipping the sheller upside down, so that the area of the exit was larger than the area of the entrance, which prevented jamming.

Also it's made of concrete so once you have the molds, it can be cast cheaply anywhere in the world.

Previously people spent an alarming amount of time pealing peanuts by hand (especially in Africa, where the peanuts are often eaten raw/sun-dried due to a lack of fuel) and this freed them up for other tasks.

This combined with the rolling water carrier (a plastic barrel flipped on its side with a handle stuck on the ends) has saved countless hours of menial labor. If only we had low tech solutions for first world problems..

What separates the rice from the hulls? I get that the rollers crack it open, but then how do they end up in physically different places? The video doesn't show that.

Indeed it doesn't, traditionally (it's mentioned the article) it's simply a flow of air that throws the hulls away from the grains.

Perhaps the handle is hooked up to a fan at a high RPM to generate this airflow? I think I saw a little desk fan in one of the images ...

This video?

http://www.brillengineering.com/

The feed system drops the rice grains and the hulls past a fan. The fan blows the husks away, the grains drop into your collection bucket.

I'd probably want to enclose that a bit more to collect the husks.

A fan underneath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDlHiet3ZQ#t=108

Good article. It's always cool to see people experimenting.

It seems like wheat or barley or rye would be a lot less trouble though if a grain were needed. You don't have to build a vat for those, nor start them in a greenhouse (in New York) either.

Harvest with a hand sickle and thresh on a tarp with a stick or some numchucks and you are ready to cook and eat.

I guess sashimi with rye might not be the same though.

What a good story. A burgeoning market helped along by a kind soul with a love for tinkering.

This was a joy to read. A perfect story!

I've gotten used to eating Brown rice. When I eat white I just picture my sugar levels spiking.

Maybe you'll get used to the cancer from all the arsenic you're getting from brown rice.

Well, according to the FDA, the amount of inorganic arsenic in brown rice is slightly higher than that in wheat pasta, on average, but the difference is small: http://www.fda.gov/food/foodborneillnesscontaminants/metals/...

It doesn't say that. It's not slightly higher, it's a lot higher. If you disagree then post numbers for wheat pasta and a source.

That is completely wrong. They are referring to RICE pasta. Not WHEAT pasta.

You do know brown rice still has the outer hull removed?

i didn't. for me the rice skin was something very soft.

Here's a nice little animation showing the difference between unhulled, brown, white, and polished rice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#mediaviewer/File:Rice_Ani...

Nice. But note that you missed a stage. Unhulled, brown, white, and polished correspond to stages A, B, D, and E in the animation respectively. The WP article[1] says C is "rice with germ".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice

My intent was not to comprehensively describe the graphic, but to give sufficient information to understand why it is relevant.

Not a problem. :-)

Take iodine, it will help sugar regulation.

Yeah, and with the large amount of white rice various Asian populations eat, it's easy to explain their propensity for diabetes, cancer and obesity that doesn't exist.

You seem to be reading more into his comment than is there?

Speaking only for myself, I’m not really worried about diabetes/cancer/obesity when eating rice, but if I eat a large quantity of rice (e.g. the amount typically served to each person in a Chinese restaurant in the US) I invariably feel very tired about 40–80 minutes later, and it throws off my mood and my ability to focus for a few hours. The same thing happens for a plate of spaghetti, a large bowl of oatmeal, or too much bread or cake.

I haven’t found brown rice to be much better though.

If I stick to 1/3 or so of that portion, there’s not much noticeable effect. (e.g. eating a sandwich or hamburger made with 2 pieces of bread, or putting curry on a smallish amount of rice, or eating some dumplings doesn’t seem to be a problem).

You should probably have a diet of 95% of things that you can eat raw. I'm not saying you should eat them, just that you could. Think about the things that are good for you. Fish, greens, fruit. They can all be eaten raw. Those you can't are often bad for you. Starchy carbs, etc.

Humans developed before fire. Our intestinal genome is ancient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com