[Rezwan]

Using desalinization technology will be very helpful to reversing desertification, but more important is how we use land. In fact, even without major power plants, we may be able to reverse desertification. Animal impact plays a key (and highly misunderstood) role in the growth of grass and in maintaining ground cover: http://managingwholes.com/animal-impact.htm

The grass is very important to the water cycle. Here is a great flash slideshow on the water cycle which explains how ground cover affects the lands ability to capture water and build aquifers. So, even if you have all these fusion powered desal plants, but the ground cover isn’t there, the water is just going right back into the atmosphere: http://managingwholes.com/flash/wcSlideshow.htm As the show says:

In the next few minutes, you’ll learn about basic processes that cause most of the world’s floods and droughts. These processes are widely ignored or misunderstood.

Dams, irrigation, and deeper wells cannot solve the real problem: wasted rainfall

Other stats:

Many landscapes lose over 90% of rainfall from a combination of evaporation and runoff.

Healthy grasslands can absorb 75% of rainfall. That’s 7 1/2 times more rain to grow plants and recharge rivers!

Now we just need a flash slideshow about animal impact. Seeing is understanding.

And finally, a great book: Gardener’s of Eden – http://www.oaec.org/node/125?PHPSESSID=9962160c3ad7cfe38019d92666f9f9b0

I got turned on to this stuff by the holistic management folks. http://www.holisticmanagement.org

[Rezwan]

I think the issue here isn’t the net energy generated by the process for consumption, but rather a misunderstanding over how the billion degrees is achieved, and if it needs to be cooled down:

Luis Ernesto Schmidt wrote: we are talking about ONE BILLION DEGREES of heat in each reactor. Even with adequate cooling, there would be still a lot of remnant heat.
Friendly, Luis Ernesto Schmidt

Isn’t this heat something that happens in a very small space? It’s not like you would walk into the room with the reactor and would feel a blast of billion degree heat. And you don’t have to cool it down, once you turn off the power – this is what needs elaboration. It’s like a whole different state of being.

[Rezwan]

Thanks Henning! Great info! I have posted an article about this on the website proper.

[Rezwan]

And we also need keywords to help the search engine. When people come onto cafe press looking for shirts about energy, what key words would they enter that will cause them to stumble upon us and serendipitously discover fusion? This is a good way to get people to discover us, as these sites are searched by many people.

Keywords/Key Phrases

Be descriptive! Think about what keywords you would enter to search for your products from Google or other external search engines. Brainstorm by listing all the possible keywords/phrases your target customer would enter to search for your products.

So far, I’m drawing a blank. I have:

Focus Fusion, Fusion, aneutronic, clean energy, it’s closer than you think, global warming…

PS, the store is now premium, so we can have a gazillion products. Have yet to customize it, though.

[Rezwan]

OK folks, I’ve set up our preliminary cafepress store: http://www.cafepress.com/focusfusion

I plan to upgrade to premium so that we can have every kind of product with each of our designs (e.g., I haven’t set it up for all the products yet, this is an initial sampling with a variety of images on a variety of things. If we go premium I think we can have it all).

Before announcing the store on the website proper, I’d like it if you T-shirt designing and comentating folks can chip in with some final suggestions and improvements. The store is online, of course, so you could rush out and buy a T-shirt right now.

Some concerns I have:

1) The default product description. It’s limited to a certain number of characters. Right now I have there:

Fusion: It’s closer than you think! The T-shirts and other products are already here! Each item depicts a proton (hydrogen) and a boron molecule, stripped of electrons (in a plasma state) fusing an

It cut off in the middle of “and”. We could just stop at “fusing.” Or say something different entirely. Keep it short. They don’t give us much space to explain the design. Perhaps I can include a hyperlink.

2) The back: Seems a little strong compared to the front. I experimented with the Jr. Baby Doll T – I assumed the red is supposed to match with the pink front, but it’s much too strong. Also, for that shirt I put the image on top in the back instead of center, which makes the image get very small. In any case, I think just plain text on the back for some of the shirts might be just fine. In fact, the thing we have for the back of some T-shirts could be a front design.

3) The buttons and clock. Clock is nice for “it’s closer than you think” motif. The only thing here is we need to get the http://www.focusfusion.org line to also curve so it can fit on the button and clock. Need a separate design for the round objects.

4) Mug image placement. This has always bugged me w/ cafepress. You can’t have a front and a back on the mug. So, is it better for the person drinking to see the image, or the people the person is hanging out with to see it? Left handed or right, center…

Looking forward to your feedback.

[Rezwan]

Glenn Millam wrote:
As most print processes use CMYK, this may be the result if we use the original design. I believe they use an inkjet based process that may have a wider color gamut (HP uses a 6-color process, Epson uses an 8-color process), so itt may not be as bad as shown here. The only way to know is to make a shirt, order one, and see how it looks.

By “they” use an inkjet based process are you referring to Cafepress? Are you sure you can’t have the starburst over transparency (not white) and it will print out OK on black? Like fireworks against a night sky?

Regarding the back design, perhaps you can have that in different colors so that it matches the front. If a person gets the yellow peace symbol T-shirt, the back will have a yellow oval with writing in it, etc.

Great work by the way!

[Rezwan]

No period, either.

:coolsmile:

[Rezwan]

Jolly Roger wrote:
I suggest changing the question mark to an exclamation mark! We are making an emphatic statement, not asking a question.

Hold the punctuation there. No ? or ! – I think it has most power as a categorical statement.

[Rezwan]

This is fantastic! Only final edits I can think of:

1) make the (c) line: (c) 2006 Focus Fusion Society
2) The Peace design looks amazing – and I think the larger size of the reaction is part of it. Can you make the reaction larger on the other ones? Not as much space, though.
3) The nuclear waste one, try one in which you make the circle with red line darker. Maybe that will make it clearer that we mean NO nuclear waste.
4) The image on the back is great and I love all the extra info. The only thing is that it doesn’t seem to match the design on the front. It’s too solid, or something. Maybe use something that evokes the eclipse of the sun, e.g., have a solid block like the eclipse, with some solar flares behind it like the radiating circle in front. Fusion is what the sun uses, after all.
5) Probably not enough room for it, but how about “A Billion Years of Clean Energy” – add the word clean?

6)Oh, someone wants black T’s. Are the images set up for that? http://www.cafepress.com/cp/learn/blackshirts How would that look?

OK, other than that, I need to go set up a cafepress store, and you need to prep the images for upload. I’m sure you’re all over this: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/images.aspx

Too cool! You rock! I agree with you, yellow is my favorite of the Fusion T’s, but the Peace one is my overall favorite.

[Rezwan]

Glenn Millam wrote:
Nuclear Power Without Nuclear Weapons?
(peace symbol with the reaction embedded in it)
It’s Closer Than You Think.

Also, “Nuclear Power without Nuclear Waste: It’s closer than you think.”

[Rezwan]

Should the arrows of “H + B” going into the center also have the same “3D” effect that the Helium atoms get? I think they should for consistency.

Yes, that would be nice. Also interesting if they looked like they were coming from the other end, THROUGH the hole in the center and out, except that means they would have to be behind the pink and it would be hard to see. Oh well.

Copyright notice shouldn’t be necessary. AFAIK, U.S. Copyright need not be printed on a work, as anything by default has copyright. It’s a common practice in some areas like books, but not in others. Looking at other “branded” clothing for other things I know of, like “Firefox”, “Slashdot”, “Digg-nation”, “Debian GNU/Linux”, etc., I never see the copyright printed on the clothing.

Yeah, but somehow I want the date up there.

I want a button! It’s already a perfect shape. Or a bumper-sticker. I have to wear “respectable” button-down shirts and slacks at my workplace, and alternative forms of promotion would be great. …Is this circular logo going to be small or large on the front?

Buttons, coffee mugs, tiles, bumper stickers, underwear – we can slap the image on anything at Cafepress. We can have it small on the front pocket, and big for the whole T-shirt. Once we get the image up, we can do multiple manifestations of it. Very convenient.

Any thoughts on the font & layout for the back of the shirt?

Same font as front for consistency, right? Keep it simple.

[Rezwan]

Also, could we have that in several different color flavors? The plasma burst can have any color. A whole rainbow. If it’s easy to change colors, give us a few. It’s a simple matter of uploading images on cafe-press. Then we’ll see which colors are most popular.

Also, if you’re inspired, it might be nice to have this designed for black T-shirts, so inverted colors?

My whole wardrobe is going to be fusion T’s : )

[Rezwan]

Genius! That’s a fabulous tagline. Let’s see the Peace T-shirt!

The fusion T-shirt looks just about done! The only thing is about the line on the bottom. Seems redundant with focusfusion.org, and then (c) ff.org. Could we have (c) 2006 www. just once? Or would that look funny? Perhaps this is the standard way to do T-shirts (c) notice.

Maybe just the little copyright notice on the front, and the big url on the back of the T-shirt with the equation and “aneutronic fusion”. Speaking of which, is that the correct equation & best way to portray it? p + 11B –>3 4He +8.7 MeV ?

Final input, people, and then I simply have to open up our cafepress store.

[Rezwan]

Glen, you’ve done so much work here, and yet I want to make more suggestions:

Can you make the arrows of the bottom 3 heliums more uniformly spaced, and also 3D, like thinner at the base and thicker at the head like using perspective – they are getting big as they come out at us. Likewise, the arrow from the boron hydrogen a bit smaller than the arrows to the Helium, so it looks further behind in perspective.

Also, perhaps for the boron + H arrow it can have a forked base, showing the molecules coming together, instead of a plus sign.

And now I’m getting wacky. This would be really cool if the purple part could also work with 3D glasses. And the arrows, too. I love the shadow effect you have with the lettering. Perhaps the tagline on the bottom could be a wee bit bigger.

You’re the best! Even as is, this picture rocks!

[Rezwan]

But of course! It’s perfect irony. Beating the nuclear sword into a nuclear ploughshare. End Nuclear war (which is really oil war), via nuclear peace. Too perfect!

But thanks for bringing this to my attention. This was all subconscious. I didn’t know the history of the symbol.
Looking it up on this website, we read that:

Gerald Holtom, a conscientious objector who had worked on a farm in Norfolk during the Second World War, explained that the symbol incorporated the semaphore letters N(uclear) and D(isarmament). He later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, explaining the genesis of his idea in greater, more personal depth:

I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya

[Author]

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