Summertime

The latest from Kopernik

gado gado

This week, with the workload ebbing slightly, I got up to these adventures:

1. climbing
After a terribly difficult time tracking down their contact information (I think I’m spoiled by how easy the internet makes everything), I finally got in touch with the Gibbon climbing club.

I rode my motorbike from Ubud to Kuta to climb on Monday evening. This took an hour, and the traffic was crazy. The roads were swarming with motorbikes weaving all over the place. I eventually figured out a strategy: ride slow, drift to the back of the pack of bikes, where the families with five people on a bike are, and ride just close enough to the person in front that nobody tries to cut in, but far enough away that there’s some stopping distance.

I made it to Kuta alright, and met Dani and Ika at a climbing wall in Kuta after only an hour of getting lost in the city. Ika is a tiny woman who is a deceptively good climber. Dani used to be a forest ranger (?) or something like that and now teaches climbing full time. I climbed a bit, and talked to them a lot.

The neatest thing I learnt was that the Indonesian government created a national climbing federation, and sponsors a climbing team from each district in the country. It also built facilities in quite a few of the regions. I met Dani and Ika behind a firehouse, where the government had built a 20 metre (60 foot) wall, a 15 metre wall, and a bunch of smaller boulder-walls. Pretty awesome and pretty out of character that the Indonesian government would do this.

We got along really well, I’m going to try to go climbing on some real rocks with them this weekend.

2. green school
Ewa and I visited green school, an alternative / startup school (grades K-12 (!!)) in Bali, that is built almost entirely from bamboo, and emphasises experiential-over-theoretical learning. They are currently working towards IB accredition. Central to their mission are a set of scholarships: one fifth of their student body is Balinese children on full rides.

The school is also designed to have a low impact and great environmental awareness — kids learn about cultivation, planting fields of rice and vegetables, and study the ecosystem that is all around them and often walks or flies right into their classroom. The school is also design to be a redistribution system, charging full tuition for most, to subsidise Balinese students and programs for local schools and kids, and raising money for similar ends by selling incredibly beautiful bamboo furniture and bamboo houses, to rich expats, for designer-brand prices. That’s fine by me!

John Hardy, founder, says his idea is for these Balinese kids to completely skip out on the traditional streams of education, come out green, go to the best schools for environment and public policy and urban planning, and come back to fix Bali and Indonesia. It’s an interesting idea that will be proven with time. The architecture here is just stunning.

The cafe there also bakes the best brownie I have ever tasted. From someone whose sweet tooth fell out early in life, this is very high praise.

3. mepantigan
I’ve started doing Mepantigan, a very young martial art (7 years) founded by a gentleman named Putu Witsen. He also teaches other martial arts and outdoorsy stuff at green school.

Mepantigan is great. It’s got elements of other fighting styles in it, but focuses on throws and prohibits striking. Fighters wrestle in muddy mud pits or rice fields (where landings are soft), and are applauded for aggression, politeness and friendliness (!!). The folks who do it are all swell.

Mepantigan as a dramatic art incorporates painting, music, firebreathing, acrobatics, comedy, you name it. People love this stuff. Someone once sponsored Putu to go to Denmark once to teach and perform.

This is what it looks like. I’m not in that photo nor did I take it, but I’ll do my best to do either of those things soon.

So far, it’s great. I’ve done Mepantigan twice and am getting the hang of being safely thrown (quite fun actually), and safely throwing a person to the ground (Putu says I need to be more aggressive. That figures. The other thing I’m really terrible at is making warcries of effort when throwing someone, which is encouraged, which everyone else does really well).

Rolling in mud is the perfect thing to do on a hot day. I feel like a water buffalo: content.

ramah kelinci

Life trudges on
A shadow following me
It’s a cute bunny

These Are The Vistas

The Balinese countryside is stunning. I spent a fair bit of time on the back of a motorbike this weekend as Nenga and I tried to hunt down some scrap metal to fashion into a briquetter for the charcoal we made.

I was completely shocked by how magnificent Bali is. And so big and spacious. I think my sense of scale and size is completely skewed (for islands anyway) from growing up in Singapore (how do they fit all this stuff…on an island??).

I’m surprised how beautiful rice fields can be. I imagined them as the kind of thing I’d shake my fist at and curse people for ruining the landscape, but they’re just so small and well arranged and green. People wade in them and work all day. They have a certain honesty to them, you know?

It made me wonder if farmers wake up to their rice fields, that spread from around their house to the place where they meet groves of trees, and see beauty, or do they wake up to their rice fields and see a day of back breaking work?

I clumsily shot a stack of photos from the back of the motorbike while speeding through the countryside. Some turned out okay.

People here are big into kites. Everywhere I went, I would see a sky full of them. It doesn’t look so good in pictures, but it’s amazing to see in person.

Ides of things

What in the blazes am I actually doing here?

This and that…

High on diesel and gasoline

Talk about pleasant surprises, I was walking down the street the last week, actually looking for a place to buy a SIM card, in a part of town I’m never in, and happened upon a shop called CBS: Cempaka Bali Sakti, translated roughly to Magical (a certain type of) Flower Bali.

<– that's a cempaka

I like the name, because it’s cute, and because it’s more than a little misleading. CBS is really what the cool kids say when they mean Ubud Custom Cycles.

check out this bad boy!

Ketot was the first person I talked to there, he’s a hefty, mongol looking fellow with a sparse Fu Manchu beard. Pande is a scruffy, scrawny guy with a mini pigtail and faint bleached highlights in his hair, and Komang is a tough (and tiny) woman, the owner’s cousin, who Ketot and Pande both introduced to me as their boss (which she denies emphatically).

CBS does a lot of standard repairs, but the staff and clients also have a penchant for custom bikes of all kinds: choppers, street bikes, you name it. CBS is the womb and the nest for the coolest motorcycles in town, and may be the only one of its kind in Bali. I’ve got a bunch of photos of them but no bandwidth to put them on the internet. I might do a flickr thing when I’m back in Singapore.

The mechanics are always laughing and smiling, and I can feel the sheer enjoyment that they have in working on bikes. They also chain smoke, and have little regard for other shop safety. That said, they are really instinctive and talented hack mechanics and are very skilled and quick with tools and techniques, and with improvising tools and techniques.

Pande cutting a piece of metal with great precision, he’s really good with the angle grinder. He’s also cutting straight through the metal and into the floor (I guess that’s just his style)

I spent a whole afternoon talking to them, taking pictures of them at work, and refusing cigarettes.

Kid riding Pande’s crazy wasteland chopper bike. The gearshift lever is between his legs, rather than under his left foot where it is on most bikes. That’s Komang in the top left.

Grinding down the ends of spokes so they don’t poke the tube and cause flat tyres

After the first guy gets hit in the eye by a fleck of hot metal (don’t worry, he’s okay), he hands over to Ketot, who wears eye protection and has no problems with shooting sparks across the workshop

Pande welding on the monster bike.

There’s never a dull moment here.

This biscuit was an animal swam in a brook

That’s right, the third ingredient on this biscuit is ground catfish. It’s an innovation by the institute of agriculture at Bogor (one of the top universities in Indonesia, I hear) to help kids get the nutrition (protein, most prominently) that their diet lacks. Or at least, so I surmise from the biscuit. The smiley face makes it irresistable to would-be eaters.

Ewa offered me a couple and made me guess what was in them, and I couldn’t– the best I could come up with was coconut, which might not even be in it. They were actually really good by any standards, I ate the second even after I found out what was in the first. They really got it right with this biscuit: not too sweet, but not fishy in the slightest.

It turns out catfish are really easy to farm, and when in biscuit form, are part of a complete breakfast: the biscuit are one fifth protein and one fifth fat.

when i saw this.. i f4pp3d*

*homage to the greatest torrent of econometrics books ever assembled
Trivia point: “econometrics f4pp3d” is a googlewhack

Oh, the things that get me excited these days. I just learned about Village Telco, which is a super neat initiative to develop an extremely flexible and extremely low cost telephone network toolkit, which is both open-software and open-hardware.

To start at the head, we all really take our telecom network for granted. It can be a little painful sometimes, but we afford our x9.99 (sometimes y9.99 with a data plan, where y >> x), and we get to talk to our friends, figure out when to hang out, and also call in emergencies, like a flat tire, or being locked out of the house. Telecommunication is really useful, wherever and whoever you are in the world.

Now, people in developing countries face the same monopolistic telecom markets as in America (what is it, like two companies?). In fact, it’s worse: telecom companies in developing countries are even more bent on getting a high rate of return and invest in the most rural areas last, leaving the poorest people with lack of infrastructure and options that are too expensive for them. With their much tighter incomes, the poor spend a much larger portion of their money on communication. They make much harder choices on a much more frequent basis about whether to use telecom services or not.

Now, this is the case for poor people and energy as well, but the situation differs by a few details. The electrical grid is much more expensive and difficult to afford than telecom services, this is true, but it is much harder to get communication without telecom services than light without the grid. This is not to say that the options are good: the most common alternative to the lightbulb is the kerosene lantern (and kerosene is expensive), which is a terrible thing to sit next to -it’s like smoking a pack of cigarettes every night- and there are many other important amenities the electrical grid provides, but let’s get back to communication.

Here’s where we arrive at Village Telco, who have designed a most innovative piece of technology, allowing communities anywhere in the world to implement and operate their own communications networks (you could do it too!).

What they’ve designed fits in the palm of the hand, runs on just 2.5 watts of power, is resistant to rough handling, the weather, five different natural disasters, and civil war (and is also flexible to a range of power sources). It works out of the box with existing technology, like ordinary landline and WiFi phones (it’s a WiFi based system), and automatically connects to multiple other units like itself to form a linked network or relay for communication. It does all of this for just $120. They call this little marvel a “Mesh Potato“, and it’s cheaper than most cell phones– it’s probably cheaper than some landline phones.

This means that an entrepreneur could set up a local telecom network on a very small budget (the system is designed to break even in 6 months — where traditional telecom infrastructure can take decades to pay back), without the need for cell antennae or land lines, and can grow the meshed network Potato by Potato as subscription and demand increases.

This is the 2.0 of telecommunications, where users can take control of their own communication infrastructure. Yee haw!

This is easily the coolest piece of technology I’ve seen all year.

On the topic of communities taking control of their own infrastructure, Husk Power Systems is a homegrown company in the Indian “rice belt” installing powerplants that supply electricity to rural villages that don’t get the national grid. These plants are powered by rice husks, an agricultural byproduct. It’s beautiful, a perfect re-use of outputs from the food system, that produces an invaluable commodity and creates no food/fuel conflict. If anything, there is a certain peace, and a mutual encouragement on both sides of the equation.

mari kita makan

I could go on forever about how awesome masakan padang is. Although google translates it to “culinary field”, the actual meaning is closer to “farmer’s food”. Masakan padang is rice served with the eater’s choices from a spread of vegetables, eggs, soy, fish, meat and other accompanying foods.

One of my favourite things about masakan padang is how all the foods are arranged in plates carefully balanced on an elaborate arrangement of other plates, so that all the food is visible in the front window, even at a distance. It also makes it really easy to serve, by reducing the reaching distance.

Padang is really cheap and also allows vegans and vegetarians (this post is tagged “animals”) to eat to their satisfaction and choose from great variety, eliminating the hassle of modifying menus or limiting their choices. In fact, it’s got infinite customisability. It’s also really tasty, easy and unassuming. A comfort food of sorts. I eat it every day.

Padang of the week:
Price: Rp 10,000 (about $1.12), where I ate it (price can vary slightly)

This one’s got rice, vegetables, tempe, a deep fried egg, and chile*. A good place is more than happy to (as pictured) give you extra veg, and drown everything in coconut curry with no extra charge.

The tempe in Bali is consistently amazing. It’s firm to the tooth like well done pasta, and yet has a certain creamy texture. It’s got that wonderful nutty savouriness to it without the mal-fermented funk that sometimes comes with tempe in the US. And, it’s super cheap. The tempe pictured cost about 20 cents. Next time, I’m getting two.

Deep fried egg! is a delicacy all across Southeast Asia. It’s got all the nutrition of an egg, with all the delight of a french fry, this one topped with hot chiles and onions.

*There’s more! Bali has red and green chile, just like New Mexico does. What a weird coincidence. The recipes are remarkably similar, the green consisting mostly of ripe fresh chiles and the red consisting mostly of ripe dried chiles. They vary in taste from place to place, just like in New Mexico. Some are mild and savoury, others taste like a molotov cocktail.

And whilst die hard New Mexicans like myself swear by green, in Bali, you just have to get both.

Merry christmas!

Real big on quarks

It’s official: century gothic is the “greenest” font, using 30% less ink than Arial, and even more economical than some eco-fonts.

It’s so green that the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay changed their default email font to century gothic to save the ink, the environment, and most importantly, money: 30% greater text-for-ink efficiency is a lot, since printer ink costs about $10000 a gallon.

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I’ve also heard, but found conflicting arguments, that dark coloured webpages save energy. Whether they do or not, mine’s dark because I find gentle lights and dark backgrounds easier on the eyes.

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Finally,

This is super awesome: Loband is something like a browser-in-a-browser (perhaps not an accurate description) written by a bunch of really smart guys one of whom I saw speak at this class (which is really awesome and welcoming to audit-ers and not-MIT / not-students). It’s neat because it allows an internet user to load all of the content of a webpage text-first, and then waits for instructions to load pictures, sounds and flash…

Okay, I figured it out. It’s a service that’s run on a high-bandwidth server, to be accessed by users in low-bandwidth areas. It filters websites requested through the service down to their core content at the server before sending it to the user, reducing the amount of information that needs to be transmitted. As the name suggests, this allows for efficient and judicious use of bandwidth in situations where connection speeds are low.

The original business idea was for a whole bunch of high speed servers running loband in Europe-near-Africa and Asia-with-internet-near-Asia-without, allowing users in these countries better access to the internet, and easing congestion in those networks. I can’t remember who was supposed to pay for it– perhaps internet providers in those countries, who benefit from less traffic? I don’t recall, but I do remember it made a lot of sense when I heard it.

I don’t know how that worked out. In any case, Loband is a useful card to have up your sleeve.