Built For Change Part Two - Built To Fail

So many of the good ideas of the 1960s weren't all that good.  Many of the domes A-frames and contemporary designs are now abandoned: too difficult to work with or they leaked or were just uncomfortable to live in.  Here are a few pictures that underscore the idea of architectural failures from the past.  First is this dome in Arizona.

Next is a water park in Russia.

An abandoned apartment complex in Taipei.

And the Grandaddy of all fails, Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Waters which leaks like a sieve and is falling apart because of the stresses inherent in the design.

How Buildings Learn Part Three - Built For Change

Most buildings exist in a state of change, whether they are amenable to it or not. People change buildings, the elements change buildings and laws change buildings. Some buildings just resist change more than others.

In installment three, Brand tells you why the new architecture of the 19060s (domes in particular) failed and why traditional architecture works. Some simple and profound lessons here.

Low Road Part Two - Tiny Houses Movement

There's a movement across the world of people who are dedicated to the idea that we don't need to live in huge monster McMansions. These are the tiny house people. They promote the idea of living in small dwellings. By small I mean as little as 60 square feet. And boy do they have some neat looking houses. 

Here is a selection of some intriguing tiny homes. Just think of how life can be simplified by going smaller. Less heat, electricity and water used. Less upkeep and quicker to clean. Easy to add on to. Easy to find room for. These are just a few examples of the tiny homes people are building and living in today.

Think of how many people that can't afford a standard half million dollar mortgage, can afford a home like this. They might be cramped when the kids come, but hey, just build another right?

Below are some links to these four examples and to some websites that might be of interest.

Photo One - Kjellander + Sjoberg Arkitektkontor Designs
Photo Two - Arkiboat Houseboat by Drew Heath
Photo Three - Caree de'Toiles
Photo Four - Stefan Doll House by Lloyd House
Tiny House Design
The Tiny Life
Coming Unmoored - One woman's adventure in tiny living

How Buildings Learn Part Two - I Take the Low Road

The most easily adaptable buildings are low road buildings. Easy to change. No one cares what you do with them. Building 20 at MIT.

In part two of How Buildings Learn, Brand shows us how people takes cheap marginal buildings and make them home and work space.

Can You Hear Me Now?

As a little side trip in our inquiry into how buildings learn, this video shows how pirate radio stations in London adapt to an urban environment to provide music, news and other information not covered by commercial, licensed stations. Although it is mostly about the stations and their operation, the adaptations they make to a city's buildings to accommodate a station is obvious.

If you can wade through the accents, you'll see some plucky, talented young people create programming for an unserved audience. I especially like the comment about how the underground stations feed commercial radio content.

As cities in developing countries (and the developed world) grow, I'm sure we'll see more homebrew broadcasting of all sorts.

How Buildings Learn

Stewart Brand is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. I just finished "Whole Earth Discipline" and will blog about it in the next week. Today I want to write about his 1994 book "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built."

A building has a lifespan. It starts with design. Then comes construction. After that, habitation. Now the really interesting things happen. As people use the building, it goes through growing pains. People like to change things. A building either welcomes or resists change. This, along with the march of time, causes it to age. Eventually it will be reborn or die. That is what this book is about: the process and progression. People like buildings that are easily adaptable to their needs. People don't like buildings that aren't. That is also what this book is about.

In 1997 the BBC created a six-part, three-hour series based on the book featuring Stewart as the host and narrator. It is as enjoyable as the book itself. Over the next few months I will be posting a lot about buildings, as architecture and simple utilitarian structures have always fascinated me.

This video is the first of six, which I will post sequentially. It is entitled "Flow" and concerns the fluidity with which buildings must adapt (and be adaptable) to be useful and loved. Have a look.

Tiny Robot Destroys Cancer

It seems that nanoparticles have been created that target and destroy cancer cells. Trials are going on that show promising results so far and it appears that there are no side effects. If this is successful, it could be the end of one of mankind's greatest plagues.

Here's a link to the Caltech press release about this breakthrough.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

I often contemplate why people are so stupid. Why they are willing, as the old saying goes, to cut off their nose to spite their face. I came across this enlightening article on the subject about fifteen years ago in Whole Earth Review and I thought it would be fun to point folks to it and see what they think.

Briefly the laws are:

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2. The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

and its corollary............

A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

The full article is here.

Jeux Sans Frontières

There is a shocking video up on BBC News today. It was an experiment disguised as a pilot for a new game show in France in which a "contestant" is apparently given progressively stronger electrical shocks when they answer questions incorrectly. The person giving the shocks is one of "80 people taking part in what they thought was a game show pilot.......they were told they wouldn't win anything, but they were given a nominal 40 euro fee. Before the show, they signed contracts agreeing to inflict electric shocks on other contestants."

The electrical shocks are fake. The "contestant" is an actor feigning pain and convulsions. The person giving the fake shocks is being tested to see if and how far they will obey orders.

If this at all sounds familiar, it is. This is an update on Milgram's 27, a famous psychology experiment done in 1961 in which students were asked to do the same thing. Stanley Milgram was trying to see how people related to authority figures and how people who were basically good could be made to do unethical or even evil things.

In the French "game show," only 16 of the 80 participants stopped before the last, potentially lethal shock.

Hitler would have been proud.

Cars Lose Rights

I have often joked that if aliens surveyed our world they would conclude that automobiles are the dominant species. The resources that we allocate to the use and maintenance of our cars is truly staggering. Just look at all the roads and an entire energy system dedicated to their operation. Some folk's garage is larger than their living space.

As an enthusiastic walker, I find it heartening that at long last, the feds have finally placed the needs of pedestrians and cyclists alongside, not behind, those of motorists. The Department of Transportation, now says that the automobile will no longer take complete precedence in federal transportation planning.

Wow, how refreshing. Or maybe we've finally seen that cars aren't the future.

Read more at: DOT Policy Statement on Bicycle and Pedestrian Accommodation

Something Smells Fishy Here

Did you know that most of the fish we eat is farmed? That it's fed chicken parts? And we wonder why it doesn't taste all that good.

In this funny talk, Dan Barber tells us about a fish farm that doesn't feed its fish, measures its success by the health of its predators and is also a water purification plant. It's a radical recipe for the future of food, where it actually tastes good.

More Food News

Last month I was blogging about food and mentioned a recent study about GMO corn being linked to liver and kidney failure in rats.

Well, I like nothing more than poking holes in things, especially my own thinking. I have continued to follow this story and have found more troubling information.

It seems that the study did not exactly prove the previous assertions. In fact, the study may have been tainted by one of its funding sources (Greenpeace). Following are quotes from Discover Magazine's article criticizing the study.

"On Wednesday, we covered the overreaction by a few important online sources to an International Journal of Biological Sciences article claiming to find “signs of toxicity” in three varieties of genetically modified (GM) corn produced by Monsanto. We posted some caveats that made us uneasy about the study, such as the funding sources, the unknown quality of the journal, and the fact that the toxicity claims rely on reinterpreting statistical data that Gilles-Eric Séralini and his coauthors themselves note is not as robust as it needs to be.

"1. Cherry-picking. “They were picking out about 20–30 significant measurements out of about 500 for one of the sets of data they analyzed,” Haro von Mogel tells DISCOVER.

"2. “False Discovery Rate.” The battle over these corn varieties has been cooking for years; Séralini and others published a paper in 2007 on the same issues, and after statistical criticisms like the ones just mentioned the authors came around with this new edition. One of the main shots scientists took at the previous paper, Haro von Mogel says, was that the team didn’t employ a “false discovery rate”—a stringent statistical method that controls for false positives.

"3. “Insignificant” results. As you can see in the study’s chart, there a significant effect shown in “Lar uni cell” (large unnucleated cell count) for female rats fed the GM corn as 11 percent of their diet. But for female rats fed three times as much GM corn, it’s not there. “Are they highlighting random variation or finding genuine effects?

"4. Lack of corroboration or explanation. The government organization Food Standards for Australia and New Zealand (which disputed Séralini’s 2007 paper [Microsoft Word file]), also disputes the recent study, in part because there is no other science corroborating the statistical data—data that was challenged in the previous points. Their response concludes by saying, “The authors do not offer any plausible scientific explanations for their hypothesis, nor do they consider the lack of concordance of the statistics with other investigative processes used in the studies such as pathology, histopathology and histochemistry…Reliance solely on statistics to determine treatment related effects in such studies is not indicative of a robust toxicological analysis. There is no corroborating evidence that would lead independently to the conclusion that there were effects of toxicological significance. FSANZ remains confident that the changes reported in these studies are neither sex- nor dose-related and are primarily due to chance alone.”

I don't care for Monsanto either but, wow, bad science in the service of anti-corporate interests. Who would'a thought?

Duh

Today's post concerns our future as a nation. Much political hay is about to be made about the Common Core State Standards Initiative which is aimed at developing a national framework for core curriculum in our schools.

We're not talking about political indoctrination here (that's probably why Texas isn't interested). We're talking about national standards of achievement in math, reading, science; core skills that ALL children will need to be effective in our future. Alaska (and Texas, of course) have already refused to sign on, on the pretext that this is an attempt to federalize education.

This is why we are failing and why other nations are surpassing us intellectually and economically. Our hubris will not protect us, although it might advance the careers and agendas of various demagogues in America.

This fits in well with a conversation with John Sexton on Bill Moyer's Journal this last week. One of the things that he said strikes me as particularly pertinent.

And I quote..................

"This is a pattern that I see: an allergy to thought, to complexity [and] nuance - a kind of collapse into an intellectual relativism where opinions become fact... It's a dangerous thing... I think there's a growing hostility to knowledge in this country... Our national progress is being retarded because we have fallen into this discourse by slogan. We have fallen into this relativism where it's a conversation to stop and say, "Well, that's your opinion."

I remember that someone, somewhere once said, "And so goes a great nation."

Things Fall Apart or Entropy 201

In early February I posted a video about what your neighborhood would look like in 500 years. Continuing that theme, today's post is a link to a page that further illuminates what will happen after we are gone. Have a look, gain some perspective. Remember, all things must pass.

The World Without Us

A Look At The Scale of Our Universe

This video gives you a look at the true scale of the universe, starting in the Himalayas and stretching out to the edges of what we know is there.  A very grand scale indeed.  Beautifully rendered by the American Museum of Natural History.

Buenos Aires's Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid

I love books and bookstores. I also love old theaters. As we knock down old buildings and replace them with new, modern ones, a lot of the beautiful, ornate theaters of the past are destroyed.

This old movie theater located in downtown Buenos Aires was slated for demolition, but saved and is now a bookstore.  Click on the picture to see it full size.

Kids Say The Darndest Things

This video shows us what children really think of same sex marriage. That we all could be so accepting. Ping pong anyone?

Oblivion Is Almost Here. Its Cause? Neglect.

I am not often shocked. Having seen so much foolishness, stupidity and outright malice, I think that I am inured to humanity's dark side. But not today. In yesterday's online edition of Slate, William Saletan wrote Game Over, an article about a couple in South Korea who let their real baby starve while they cared for a virtual child in an online world. I just don't know what to say beyond read the article, weep for us.

And I thought yesterday's post was bad.

Scooting Toward Oblivion

When I read things like this I am always reminded of the Roger Water's album "Amused to Death." Steve Mirsky, writing for Scientific American, has written this hilarious and frightening analysis of the the scariest thing driving on today's highways: the multitasker. This particular offender was WAY off the meter.

Scooting Toward Oblivion

Whole Earth: My Original Source

I so often reference The Whole Earth Catalog, Co-Evolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review that I thought it might be good to introduce my readers to its wonders.

As a young teenager living in rural Virginia, the dearth of ideas offered to me threatened to shrink my head to the size of a peanut. When I discovered Whole Earth publications, I finally had an unending resource for cutting edge ideas from the most forward thinking people in America and around the world. Funny thing is, much of what was in its pages is still relevant today.

So every so often, I'll be posting links to selections from its pages, starting today.

One of my favorite writers was the late Donella Meadows. Her articles on economics were prescient and timely. This twelve year old piece on Nicolai Kondratieff's theory of The Long Wave predicts the situation we are in right now.

These were some of the things he said we could expect during this time, the very things we are currently experiencing.

1. Stagnation in the real economy and volatility in the money economy

2. Social distrust, selfishness, isolationism, scapegoating

3. Deflation of real asset values

4. Retreat to "basic values" and yearning for the strict imposition of law and order

5. Cutthroat economic competition globally, erosion of social compassion locally.

Any of this look familiar? I'm sure going to be re-reading her work.

Mommy, If Flipper Can Eat Seakittens, Then Why Can't I?

Two very interesting asides on the animal rights debate, both from the GOOD.IS site.

First, Mark Peters discuss the movement to declare dolphins as non-human people, in his column, "What Is a Person, Anyway? " This is an interesting issue since the Supreme Court recently decided a case that grants full rights of personhood to corporations. Under these circumstances a sane person would have to ask, "If Burger King is a person, then why isn't Flipper?"

Second, PETA is now trying to rename fish "seakittens," to discourage (and probably attempt to criminalize) the eating of them. Andrew Price covers this in his blog post, "PETA Tries to Re-brand Fish as "Sea Kittens"."

If Dolphins are people and PETA gets its way, won't Flipper be prosecuted for having dinner? Didn't Rome kinda' get like this just before it fell to pieces?

Possum Living

As a teenager I relished anything that smacked of a return to simpler times. I ate up any book that told me how to live simpler and a little closer to the ground. The Whole Earth Catalog figured prominently in this discovery process as it gave me access to tools promoting sustainability. In its pages I discovered a book by a young woman (17!) who, along with her father, showed steps to do this for real, as they were both doing it for real. The book, which was published in 1978, was entitled "Possum Living."

In its pages were all kinds of tips to living a frugal, but full life, high on the hog (literally) without all that much money (also literally). Its author, desiring neither riches or fame, went by a pseudonym: Dolly Freed. Being that we were in tough economic times then, the book was a big hit. After a little publicity and an appearance on Merv Griffin's talk show, Dolly disappeared.

I always wondered what happened to her. Every once in a while I would put her name into Google with no results. Two days ago Dolly finally popped up. It seems that she grew up to have a wonderful life. After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, she went on to go to college and then become a NASA engineer, helping to answer how the Challenger shuttle tragedy occurred.

She reemerged because she thought that she should publish a new edition of the book since we are in tough times again and it would once again be relevant (as if it had ever ceased to be).

She is still publishing it under a pseudonym. And she still relishes her freedom. And I still have her book. It is a first addition and I do wish I could get it autographed.

But I respect her freedom and anonymity too much.

Here is a link to an excellent story on "Dolly's" life today, a link to her website (where you can buy the new edition of the book) and a link to YouTube video of a documentary done when the book was first released, which also contains her interview on the Merv Griffin show (in Part 3).

You Gonna' Eat That Food Or What?

We throw away a lot of food every year. Estimates run from 25% to 50% of what we produce. On top of that is the 4% of US oil consumption used to produce that food. That's an unconscionable amount of waste and there are things we can do about it. Composting your food scraps is one, but there are even better places to put what you don't eat, instead of just throwing it out.

This article in Scientific American outlines the full problem and some possible solutions. Maybe mom and dad were right when they told us to finish what was on our plates.

What Gets You Fighting Mad?

As someone who studies human behavior, I am always interested in the way people react to information that they either don't agree with or don't like.

Let's take the civil rights movement during the '50s and '60s for example. Those that did not like the information they received about the end of segregation tended to react with threats, bullying and intimidating behavior toward those they perceived as their opposition.

Let's now look at today's climate debate for comparison. You don't tend to read about anyone that proposes that our climate is being affected negatively by man's influence displaying threatening behaviors toward those that don't think the world's climate is changing or is changing for that reason.

Now let's look at some quotes from yesterday's Scientific American article entitled, "Cyber Bullying Intensifies as Climate Data Questioned".................

"The e-mails come thick and fast every time NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt appears in the press. Rude and crass e-mails. E-mails calling him a fraud, a cheat, a scumbag and much worse."

"The purpose of this new form of cyber-bullying seems clear; it is to upset and intimidate the targets, making them reluctant to participate further in the climate change debate," (Clive) Hamilton wrote in a column published last week by Sydney's ABC News. "While the internet is often held up as the instrument of free speech, it is often used for the opposite purpose, to drive people out of the public debate."

"What's clear is the e-mails show anger and hostility. There's no effort to ask questions or seek what (Kevin) Trenberth called "the truth." Scientists aren't the only target; journalists covering the issue also routinely find their inbox stuffed with epithets.

"They do not tend to be reasonable," said Rudy Baum, editor-in-chief of Chemical and Engineering News, who has been covering science for the magazine for 30 years. "They do not seem to be interested in dialogue. They are shrill, they are unfriendly, and they are bullying."

"Increasingly," wrote Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. in the Miami Herald recently, "we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth." Added Trenberth: "In science there's a whole lot of facts and basic information on the nature of climate change, but it's not being treated that way. It's being treated as opinion."

If you take the words "climate change" and substitute the worlds "civil rights," I do believe there are some parallels to be drawn here.

Could You Scoot Over? I Need A Little More Room.

Here are two competing views of our future world when it has nine billion people in it.

Which do you think is a more accurate view. I do know that one comes from a source that has an almost flawless record of predicting the future.

Tell me what you think.

First, a three minute look at this world from Stewart Brand................



Now click below to open a photo essay on the subject by Jonas Bendikson of Magnum Photos.............

The Places We Live