Climber Derinkuyu Clearhouse Dawn

I remember a line I heard, I’m not sure if it was a book, YouTube video but it was “the mother of all invention is necessity” and I remember that when I saw a clip of this Indian farmer who made this great invention for climbing palm trees. There’s also an underground city in Turkey that’s amazing and talking about cities and design, I saw a beautifully designed modern home. I love modern architecture. And there’s this cage in Japan that’s run by robots, but what’s even more amazing is… who’s controlling the robots. So stick around for that.

In India there’s this farmer and I guess he’s farming some sort of nuts the nuts are up in a tall palm tree, and so he created a machine to shoot up to the top quickly There’s three wheels on it and it attaches to a palm tree and it has a motor on it, and he sits on it and when he gives it the gas, it goes straight up. I think he calls it a tree scooter or a climbing scooter, it’s absolutely amazing. He just sort of gives it the gas and it goes straight up because the wheels are mounted on the palm tree and when they spin, the entire thing goes up the tree. I live in Florida and there are guys that do palm tree maintenance all the time and they have to get a bucket truck and they have to drive over to where the palm tree is and then put the bucket truck up and then go and cut it. I don’t know if this is a thing in the United States, but this seems like a great invention if you need to get to the top of a tree quickly, and this guy invented it because he needed to get to the top of the tree. So, great story out of India, and I hope he makes a lot of money selling it!

Today, all buildings are built upward towards the sky but back in the day, at least in the area of Derinkuyu, Turkey they built down into the ground. There’s a diagram that shows there’s multiple ways to get into the underground city, and there’s multiple levels underground. It’s about seven layers deep underground and it looks like they just carved it into the rock.

But what’s even more amazing is that it could accommodate up to 20,000 people complete with their livestock and food storage. It was built between 780 and 1180 A.D. and there were no power tools back then! I’m assuming they had to manually chisel this away and carry it up to the surface. This underground city even had wine and oil presses, stables for livestock, underground sellers, storage rooms and chapels. It is a very cool idea. It seems to be the opposite of what most companies and most humans do today. They probably wouldn’t do it now because of earthquakes, but it’s visually interesting nonetheless.

Talking about homes and architecture, Stuart Parr Designs in New York designed an incredible house called the Clearhouse. The house is on a hill, and there’s a giant lake or maybe it’s the ocean behind it. It’s very modern with lots of clean lines, lots of glass and the siding looks like it might be metal. The overall shape of the house looks as if you took the top horizontal part of an uppercase letter T with about five percent of the vertical part of the T where the two intersect. The exterior walls are all glass, so you have beautiful views everywhere.

Some of the interior walls are glass as well, towards the back of the house is a thick forest and on the front is unobstructed views of water. The shower is right up against one of the exterior walls so you can take a shower and have an amazing view, and the bedroom is like that as well where it’s just all glass. I hope that there’s some sort of curtain in that room! Overall, you’d probably feel like you were living outdoors within nature. It’s probably very, very nice. The only thing I don’t like about this is that it’s in New York and it’s going to snow and get really cold. But visually, I love this design, it’s very modern. I love it!

Talking about really incredible things, I saw this cafe in Japan called the “Dawn Avatar Robot Cafe”. Even if this was just robots serving coffee, that would be super-cool but what’s even more exciting is who is controlling these robots. These robots are actually controlled by people who have disabilities and are bedridden at their home. Now, I don’t quite know the technology behind this but I’m assuming it’s some sort of mouth thing. Now, I don’t know if it’s a translation thing but I really don’t like how some of this is phrased, it actually sounds pretty terrible, but it does get better, it says, “Once bedridden, it is not possible to live a full life.” That doesn’t sound good, they should have made that better. “We are sure many people have felt this way. Since 2012, the Ory Laboratory has been working towards one goal: the elimination of loneliness from the human race. We have been working with people with disabilities, searching for ways to create a society where people can meet, work, and live like oneself, even if one is bedridden or housebound.” 

That is so beautiful.

“The elimination of loneliness” I’d imagine when you have these types of disabilities, you’re probably very lonely. You probably don’t have a lot of self-confidence. You probably don’t feel like you’re contributing. But here you can work in a cafe via a robot, that’s got to make you feel good. And you can make some money doing it. 

They also have a page on their site called “Our Pilots” and these are the people that are the disabled folks that are controlling these robots. You can see all these pictures of these people, you know, a lot of them look like they’re strapped to a bed or they’re in a wheelchair or having some limb issues. Some of them have oxygen masks, some of them don’t look like they might not move very much, but here they’re able to contribute. And I thought that was such a beautiful and wonderful way to operate this business. Robots! Like I said, I don’t know the technology behind it, but whatever they’re doing, it’s amazing. 

If your organization can figure out a way where disabled people can help out and earn some money, that’s a great thing. Another thing about Japan that I saw online is that only blind people can become massage therapists. I thought that was great too! Number one, how many jobs can a blind person get? Probably not that many. And number two, you know, if you’re going to get a massage, I’m sure there’s some sort of level of self-consciousness there. But if you know the person is blind and they can’t see you, you probably feel much more relaxed. So, it works for the customer and it works for the professional. And it’s so great! I love everything about that.