cconcepts

I confess that I don't have much curated data to share but have often thought about this, even from a safety perspective. I was in a serious storm once that tore my tent apart and I spent 48 hours in serious cold with little shelter - I later found out that there was a very large overhanging rock that provides great shelter less than 1km from where I had been. It's only a marginal feature so not worth including on maps but a potential lifesaver in certain circumstances.

A quick scan of your kind of site prior to heading into a certain catchment could result in less incidents and more people safely experiencing the outdoors and thus becoming more informed voters about our resources.

How would one go about contributing to this with New Zealand data?

Haha, so true. Have an upvote

You're right, and I wasn't saying it was a strictly Indian behaviour. But I must say that I expected relief from her, not attack. I only hit the dude once - to make him stop.

I recently intervened in a situation where a husband was wildly punching his wife in broad daylight. When I walloped him with my umbrella (yelling at him didn't make him stop), his wife got up from the ground where she was being repeatedly punched, and began attacking ME. Saying things to the effect of "how dare you intervene in our issues" and "don't dare touch my husband".

This only reflects a tiny part of the Indian population but, within some circles, Indian women will stick by their husbands sides despite ANYTHING. A saying in Hindi is "Pati dev" which roughly means "your husband is your God".

I'm not trying to insinuate anything by sharing this here except that it was an interesting (albeit anecdotal) experience that I had. I have close friends who have had arranged marriages which are thriving respectful relationships.

Strange comparison, I've never heard of an elevator, driven or otherwise, run over kids....

Unfortunately I can't come up with a better analogy myself but comparing this to an elevator seems weird.

Thanks for the resources - great TED video

I would see the average farmer as a little different to your average car/cellphone user. As the article points out, getting things fixed quick and the ability to do it yourself for cheap are critical factors for many farmers and an integral part of their daily lives.

I've worked on many farms and always spent a large chunk of my time fixing a tractor or other farm implement.

Opportunity for a startup to build a "hactor" that uses modern tech but is open source and easily modified with support of online communities etc?

EDIT: I've got patent dibs on the name "Hactor"

Wow, great information, thanks very much.

Do you have any info on the raspberry pi graphing arrival/departure times?

Agreed - I'm sure they can drop the price of steel in the short term. But when they're eventually forced to go back to paying Australians $100/hour to dig the ore out of the ground for them, the economic prospects of pulling ships apart for recyclable steel will improve.

There is a lot not shown in this article. Ship breaking is extremely dangerous and thrives in these parts of the world because you don't need to provide safety equipment or procedures and when one of your employees gets killed/maimed in the process there is someone else eager to take his place and no lawsuit from the deceased's uneducated family.

If one country tightened controls on ship breaking then, by the laws of capitalism, the work would just go to the next country with the lowest labour costs who has less overheads so can pay more to buy the ship from its owners in the first place.

Global(ish) controls mean temporary disruption to the status quo but hopefully eventual improvement of working conditions for the people doing the grunt work at the bottom.

Obviously China can't keep producing dirt cheap steel forever so ship breaking will bounce back, hopefully with slightly less misery for its employees.

Great reporting. Am grateful for Open's work in talking about often unspoken issues.

Well put. As the adage goes "talk is cheap" or should I say "presentations are cheap".

Ok, personally I really like the conversations that staggered comments allow - one group of people can go off on their own little tangent while the rest of the users attend thier own conversations within the topic thread without having to randomly create new conversations

Yeah the challenge is the way we attach value judgements to the different things genders tend (generalization) to be better at.

This is purely anecdotal, but in my extended family many members believed the "we're all the same" view. I was given whatever toys I wanted whether they were considered masculine or feminine. It challenged people to see me grow up and be obsessed with heavy machinery - something they obviously saw within a masculine stereotype.

EDIT: I'm male

Wow, this is really cool. I feel the quote on the front page is apt for a lot of us here at HN:

"And somewhere there are engineers helping others fly faster than sound. But, where are the engineers helping those who must live on the ground?"

We live in a world where return on capital and/or time invested is the common measure of success, but someone like this is having untold impact on many people's lives simply by applying their brilliant mind in a less commercially incentivised way.

Yeah I've learned to show respect to Gates too

Yes, it all just seems so well executed. I find it hard to imagine that level of cool is achieved without a well oiled PR machine working in the background...

(At least thats my cynical initial reaction)

Yeah, I had heard a rumour that approximately 10 out of every 10 people end up dying...

All reflections of a pretty weird state of affairs if I take a step back and try to look at things objectively. I guess achieving big strides in longevity for a wealthier few would just be an extension of the trend.

Bill Gates had this to say: "It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer. It would be nice to live longer though I admit"

Not the authoritative word on the issue but interesting considering he has the opportunity to do either yet is focussing on malaria, TB etc

Im not advocating sitting by idling. I just think it reflects our innate priorities when we put so much effort into extending our own lives when it doesn't take as much effort to greatly extend someone else's life who is less resourced than I am.

Well put. I'm happy to face the frailties of old age if I can just spend the hear-and-now trying to do something that matters for people less fortunate than me.

If we ever got to a point where some people had greatly extended their lives and/or eliminated death for themselves whilst others still faced premature death from a basic lack of the necessities of life, well then, we'd be an even more narcissistic race than I originally thought.

I think the difficulty of such problems is what frustrates me about them. If asked me to build a whole new computer operating system there are 100s of books I could turn to to get me started. When it comes to these big social issues, I don't even know where to begin.

Good point, on the surface the big world problems seem more straight forward because they're technically less complex. But they are much more than technical problems. Social, geopolitical etc...

Truly extraordinary stuff. But does anyone else lie awake at night wondering why we can do amazing stuff like this yet can't provide everyone clean drinking water or enough protein to eat?

This is really cool. I also like the "no frills" way it is presented.

I got into making stuff kinda by default when I finished formal training and realized my qualifications were just going to put me in a job doing the same thing over and over again. I taught myself SketchUp (or youtube taught me) and began offering my 3D design services to anyone who would give me the time of day.

I've had the opportunity to work with architects, engineers, designers, basically people from all different fields who make physical things. I have tried to go into every job as a learning opportunity and have learned so much.

I consider my work now as a problem solver for design projects of different kinds and MIT making this kind of information available makes it a lot easier for people like me who use google a bazillion times a day but have to sift through a lot of unreliable info to find the practical method that just allows you to get the job done.

Love it

Whatever you're going through; "this too shall pass".

That is applicable at any time in your life. Things will change.

Please hang in there.

Cool, thanks for that. It was a knee-jerk reaction to bail on you folks the way I did but I thought perhaps I wasn't the only one.