Welcome to my ancient home page.
Formal qualifications:
MScSt (Computer
Science), 1992, University of Queensland.
BSc (Physics, Mathematics and Computer science), 1984,
University of Queensland.
Certificate (2 years) in Electronics and Communication,
1979, South Brisbane TAFE.
Certificate IV in Renewable Energy Technology, 1998, Brisbane Inst. of
TAFE (Ithaca).
Certificate in Permaculture
Design, 1993, Permaculture Institute (Crystal
Waters).
Certificate IV in Workplace Training (category 2), 1997, Northpoint TAFE.
Some of my interests:
For information about my
low-energy bio/UV-filtered swimming pond design.
Renewable energy technology
I have lectured and tutored and written course material for
the Certificate IV in Renewable Energy Technology at Ithaca TAFE.
I am available retired as a consultant to help you design
your sustainable home and its energy, water and waste systems, including site
selection, photovoltaics, wind turbines, micro-hydro,
batteries, rainwater collection and storage, on-site greywater
and sewerage treatment, pest control, climate control and permaculture
gardening. I can teach you how to design them yourself or I can design them for
you (in cooperation with you and your architect or draftsperson).
I have developed a computer model of rainwater collection and storage which takes historical meteorological data interpolated for a given location, supplied by Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Bureau of Meteorology at The SILO Data Drill, and uses it to predict the performance of various tank sizes and roof areas. Here's an unpublished article I've written on it: Rainwater Tank Sizing.
My friend Eddie Matejowsky and I have been doing some research into solar refrigeration.
Here's my critique of The Healthy House, a book by architects Sydney and Joan Baggs.
And a description of my
experiences of The Trouble
with Composting Toilets.
The Flame Tree
Project -- a plan to save life on Earth, by
some friends of mine.
Zometool
Visit the Zometool website to learn about this mathematically exquisite
ball-and-stick construction system based on the symmetries of the platonic
solids. Here's their patent.
I helped them design the green struts that became available in mid 2000. Here's the last of my green strut designs that I made a drawing of, but my final preference for the cross-section was for a kite shape, not the keystone. I made a spreadsheet that rotates a 3D image of the strut. This became the precursor to the musical rotating 4D dekany you will find in the unusual musical scales section below. In the end they chose Baudoin and Vienne's rhombic cross-section. By the time I proposed the reduced "toe" to relieve the visual impact of the kink, prototype tooling had apparently already gone too far. But at least George Hart and I managed to convince them to make the length set that is now called "whole greens". Baudoin and Vienne insisted that the correct length set was the one now rightly called "half greens", which George Hart and I can see no need for.
I find the "Green Line (Starter)" kit to be of doubtful value, partly because it contains these unnecessary and confusing half-green struts and partly because it contains unnecessary medium and long blue-greens and not enough short blue-greens. Even with two Green Line kits you wouldn't have enough short blue-greens to build a small truncated cuboctahedron. You need 48, not 24 as it says in the back of the (otherwise excellent) Zome Geometry book. The Green Line kit also has extra white nodes that you may not need, or you may prefer to get some coloured ones instead. If you already have the "Creator" kit I recommend adding 48 of each length of whole green (G0, G1, G2) and 48 short blue-greens (Gb1). Although these are not listed on the website they can be bought separately for US$44 (as opposed to US$70 for two Green Line kits).
If you don't already have the Creator kit, the
Advanced Math kit is the way to go. The only problem with the Advanced Math kit
is that it doesn't have any short whole greens (G0). I recommend adding 48 of
these (at US$9.60). I also recommend the bundle with the Zome
Geometry book.
Transputers and Occam
In 1991/92 I designed and built the TS1 Transputer
cards and related interface and power supply cards. 25 were sold to various
Australian universities for use in parallel processing research.
A 7-segment Alphabet with a Unique
Pattern for Every ASCII Character
Reconfigurable
computing
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), such as those from Xilinx, can be used to perform computations
directly in hardware. This allows maximum parallelism and hence incredible
speed. But unlike purpose-built hardware, these devices can be reconfigured in
milliseconds to perform a completely different computation.
From 1994 to 1996 I was hired as a consultant by Interval Research Corporation to investigate the possible application of the following topic (boundary mathematics) to this topic (reconfigurable computing). It turned out that boundary maths had little to offer in this area. I'm glad I was at Interval in the early years. Here's a story written about it just before it was shutdown completely in April 2000: Think Tanked.
Here are some of my other computer science
papers:
Learning Logic Functions Explicitly by
Back-Propagation in NOR-Nets
To dissect a
mockingbird: A graphical notation for the lambda calculus with animated
reduction
(The following is still awaiting conversion to HTML)
Symtree modelling for black-and-white image
compression
Boundary mathematics and mysticism
I am interested in connections between the foundations of
logic, mathematics and physics and the mystical world view (e.g. Buddhist,
Taoist). See the Religious Tolerance section below. Two of my papers above
(NOR-nets and graphical lambda), are related to this topic.
For an introduction to boundary notations for logic and arithmetic visit Jeff James' and Dick Shoup's Laws of Form website. This site also carries the Laws of Form bibliography, originally compiled by myself. This is a bibliography of works that reference or are related to a seminal book in the field of boundary maths, Laws of Form by George Spencer-Brown, 1969. Also see Randy Whitaker's Laws of Form page.
Check out the website of my friend Tom McFarlane for some original thinking on integrating relativity, quantum mechanics and mysticism with the help of boundary maths.
Here's a website relating to the author who has
most helped me to understand the world on all its levels, Ken Wilber.
Religious tolerance (including tolerance of atheism)
See the Religious Tolerancewebsite for
information on over 60 religions.
Some of my personal beliefs are described in my article Children and Religious Beliefs.
Richard Bach on mysticism and religion: the Pageite wars.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus
logico-philosophicus.
Nonviolent Direct Action
Here's a children's story I wrote about a hero of mine: Captain Paul Watson - The
Good Pirate.
I was an editor of Nonviolence Today magazine from 1985 until it ceased publication in 2000.
Here are some articles I have written for Nonviolence
Today:
Emotions and Aidex
A Paradox of Nonviolence and its
follow-ups: Reply to Brian Currie, Paradox Lost
Conscientious Objection to Military Tax
Conscientious Objection to the Military Use of my
Taxes and the related article by Dr Mark Hayes: Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel (including my
reply).
History of my conscientious objection
to the military use of my tax
My
Father-in-law John Briggs’ Civil Engineering autobiography