
The Rube Goldberg of Rice - Mz
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/07/the-rube-goldberg-of-rice.html
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sirgawain33
I spent two years in rural Vietnam setting rice husk on fire. [1]

Here are two pictures if you're curious what they look like in larger
quantities (the videos linked in other comments don't show them too well)

[http://ricehusk.cc/goodboiler/day7](http://ricehusk.cc/goodboiler/day7)
[http://ricehusk.cc/](http://ricehusk.cc/)

They're a fascinating material, quite unlike anything else in nature.

They've got this really high silica content and unique lattice structure that
makes them really tough. They've got a weird particle size/shape, making them
fluffy but also with a very high angle of repose (meaning you can pile them up
into an almost vertical wall)

Trouble is that it's hard to do anything economically productive with them.
Those boats in the picture I linked above float all around the Mekong delta,
not all of them dropping of the rice hull to someone that would use it.

I was surprised to see quite big rice hullers (2 stories tall) being operated
by a few guys all over rural Cambodia. The big challenge for most people
seemed to be financing the _fuel_ not the upfront capital investment of the
huller. The most prevalent technology was diesel powered hullers. Some people
were piloting gasifiers that would use the rice hulls themselves as fuel.

Anyway, I could go on and on. Very interesting to see someone in the US
playing around with this stuff!

[1]
[https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/03/08/i_spent...](https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2012/03/08/i_spent_last_year_making_fire.html)

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joshwa
What happened after day 16?

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sirgawain33
The machine worked! We boiled water for a few cups of coffee.

The write up is coming. Eventually.

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kludwig
A quick search produces many rice hullers in the $500.00 range. These are made
in China and India and other parts of the world which grow a lot of rice on
small plots. The inventor claimed not to find any hullers that were
affordable.Maybe he didn't use the interweb?

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crapshoot101
$500 is not that affordable, especially given the ability (or lack thereof) to
finance it in many parts of India and China. Obviously, this isn't a scalable
product for those needs, but its a nice start.

Edit: why the downvotes? Financing a $500 product is a major issue in India,
for example, where the cost of capital is extremely high.

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aptwebapps
It's still less than what the inventor came up with, so it seems relevant.

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zackmorris
Related:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Nut_Sheller](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Nut_Sheller)

I saw a documentary on this. The main breakthrough was flipping the sheller
upside down, so that the area of the exit was larger than the area of the
entrance, which prevented jamming.

Also it's made of concrete so once you have the molds, it can be cast cheaply
anywhere in the world.

Previously people spent an alarming amount of time pealing peanuts by hand
(especially in Africa, where the peanuts are often eaten raw/sun-dried due to
a lack of fuel) and this freed them up for other tasks.

This combined with the rolling water carrier (a plastic barrel flipped on its
side with a handle stuck on the ends) has saved countless hours of menial
labor. If only we had low tech solutions for first world problems..

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phkahler
What separates the rice from the hulls? I get that the rollers crack it open,
but then how do they end up in physically different places? The video doesn't
show that.

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DanBC
This video?

[http://www.brillengineering.com/](http://www.brillengineering.com/)

The feed system drops the rice grains and the hulls past a fan. The fan blows
the husks away, the grains drop into your collection bucket.

I'd probably want to enclose that a bit more to collect the husks.

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jqm
Good article. It's always cool to see people experimenting.

It seems like wheat or barley or rye would be a lot less trouble though if a
grain were needed. You don't have to build a vat for those, nor start them in
a greenhouse (in New York) either.

Harvest with a hand sickle and thresh on a tarp with a stick or some numchucks
and you are ready to cook and eat.

I guess sashimi with rye might not be the same though.

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dyeje
What a good story. A burgeoning market helped along by a kind soul with a love
for tinkering.

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msie
This was a joy to read. A perfect story!

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marincounty
I've gotten used to eating Brown rice. When I eat white I just picture my
sugar levels spiking.

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cratermoon
You do know brown rice still has the outer hull removed?

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gcb0
i didn't. for me the rice skin was something very soft.

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cratermoon
Here's a nice little animation showing the difference between unhulled, brown,
white, and polished rice.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#mediaviewer/File:Rice_Ani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#mediaviewer/File:Rice_Animation.gif)

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ggchappell
Nice. But note that you missed a stage. Unhulled, brown, white, and polished
correspond to stages A, B, D, and E in the animation respectively. The WP
article[1] says C is "rice with germ".

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice)

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cratermoon
My intent was not to comprehensively describe the graphic, but to give
sufficient information to understand why it is relevant.

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ggchappell
Not a problem. :-)

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elchief
You should probably have a diet of 95% of things that you can eat raw. I'm not
saying you should eat them, just that you could. Think about the things that
are good for you. Fish, greens, fruit. They can all be eaten raw. Those you
can't are often bad for you. Starchy carbs, etc.

Humans developed before fire. Our intestinal genome is ancient.

