Urban Speculation Links

Been reading a bit lately on urban architecture and design, which turns out to be a much more active field than I'd have expected. The work I've read comes from an interesting perspective-- there's the creative mindset of art and design students (which also lends itself to an unfortunate affinity for lovely but impractical concept art), mixed with a love of new technology, and an interest in complex city infrastructure and human culture, particularly the way cultural boundaries develop and shift over time and the way behavior is controlled by environment.

While there are certainly some fun ideas floating around, the focus is more on these concepts than their realization, and as such things can get pie-in-the-sky fairly quickly. But if you keep this in mind it can be interesting reading, and it will at the very least introduce to you a new way of thinking about the way we shape and are shaped by our surroundings.

Some introductory links:

• Bldg Blog is a popular blog dedicated to architectural conjecture and urban speculation
• the Architectural League of New York hosts occasional events and exhibits; their current exhibit Toward the Sentient City touches on ubiquitous computing in cities
• Subtopia discusses the impact of architecture on social structure, and the resulting military implications (current posts have mostly been link compilations, but there's a good about page here)
• grinding.be occasionally posts pieces of urban-minded futurism
• and back in June I linked a talk put out by the Complex Terrain Lab on urban warfare and infrastructure
• Also technology-wise (much as I cringe to use half of these buzzwords) concepts discussed include QR codes, wireless sensor networks, geotagging, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing, among others

May have to post in more detail on some of these in the future. Fun times!

Population dynamics in Yemen

From the beginning of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom comes an account of how population and cultural forces drove human geography in early 20th-century Yemen. I have no idea how realistic this account is, but as an engineer I think it's kind of inspiring to see this kind of systems-minded analysis used to describe complex human behavior-- and so poetically, at that.

In Yemen the solution was different. There was no foreign trade, and no massed industries to accumulate population in unhealthy places. The towns were just market towns, as clean and simple as ordinary villages. Therefore the population slowly increased; the scale of living was brought down very low; and a congestion of numbers was generally felt. They could not emigrate overseas; for the Sudan was even worse country than Arabia, and the few tribes which did venture across were compelled to modify their manner of life and their Semitic culture profoundly, in order to exist. They could not move northward along the hills; for these were barred by the holy town of Mecca and its port Jidda: an alien belt, continually reinforced by strangers from India and Java and Bokhara and Africa, very strong in vitality, violently hostile to the Semitic consciousness, and maintained despite economics and geography and climate by the artificial factor of a world-religion. The congestion of Yemen, therefore, becoming extreme, found its only relief in the east, by forcing the weaker aggregations of its border down and down the slopes of the hills along the Widian, the half-waste district of the great water-bearing valleys of Bisha, Dawasir, Ranya and Taraba which ran out towards the deserts of Nejd. These weaker clans had continually to exchange good springs and fertile palms for poorer springs and scantier palms, till at last they reached an area where a proper agricultural life became impossible. They then began to eke out their precarious husbandry by breeding sheep and camels, and in time came to depend more and more on these herds for their living.
Finally, under a last impulse from the straining population behind them, the border people (now almost wholly pastoral) were flung out of the furthest crazy oasis into the untrodden wilderness as nomads. This process, to be watched to-day with individual families and tribes to whose marches an exact name and date might be put, must have been going on since the first day of full settlement of Yemen. The Widian below Mecca and Taif are crowded with the memories and place-names of half a hundred tribes which have gone from there, and may be found to-day in Nejd, in Jebel Shammar, in the Hamad, even on the frontiers of Syria and Mesopotamia. There was the source of migration, the factory of nomads, the springing of the gulf-stream of desert wanderers.

Rite of Spring

On a bit of a modernism kick; really such interesting stuff. Quoth Peter Childs (from wikipedia), "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair." Or as Fitzgerald put it (at 23, goddamn I feel like an underachiever now), a generation "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

So anyway, here's the Rite of Spring:

part 2 | part 3

And here's a snip of a documentary on the music.

The Squeeze

And now it is time for the Holding Tide horrifying underwater exploration vocabulary word of the day: the squeeze (on page 55) (yum).

Cargo Cult Science

Richard Feynman's address on Cargo Cult Science. Starts off in deceptively simple language talking about general pseudoscience silliness (and also girls; this is Feynman after all), but then later goes into more serious discussion of some troubling shortcomings seen in big university research programs. The rat maze example in particular stuck with me the first time I read this-- it's a real reminder to think critically about the assumptions you make in designing experiments.

Swine Flu Aftermath in Egypt

Hmm, and Egypt is now dealing with the repercussions of their decision during last May's swine flu panic to cull over 300,000 pigs in the country: before the cull, the zabaleen were Christian pig-farmers living on the outskirts of Cairo and other cities who went door to door collecting trash, which they either sold to recycling facilities or fed to their pigs. Now that they've been driven out, the streets of Cairo are filling with excess garbage which the city lacks the infrastructure to handle properly, creating a health hazard far worse than the flu itself.

Computational Neuroscience Links

Computational Neuroscience on the World Wide Web-- a pretty comprehensive resource on comp neuro labs, tools, and conferences.

Ferrofluid Friday

An old video, but still fun. Dynamic sculpture using electromagnets + sound waves + magnetic fluid.

The New Settlers of Detroit

The economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on the American auto industry, and cities like Detroit which were once central to the industry have been gutted by job losses and home foreclosures in the past year. This effect has been so extreme that property in Detroit must practically be given away: Yahoo Real Estate shows dozens of homes around the city selling for mere hundreds of dollars. And still the population of Detroit, a city designed to support roughly 2 million people, has dwindled to less than a million, while the shutdown of many supermarket chains has created a food desert in the city.

Detroit's plight has been well covered in the news, and organizations are already forming to take advantage of the area's collapsed economy. Artists, sustainability enthusiasts, survivalists, and hippie-types in general are coordinating the mass purchase and transformation of land in and around the city. And since this recession coincides with a period of increased interest in locally-grown produce and sustainability, many efforts have a heavy focus on urban farming-- a fact which has received attention from Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture, the Beeb, and NPR among others.

Naturally there's a lot of hype surrounding the whole thing, and it will be interesting to see how this new influx impacts the culture of the city in coming years. For further reading, here are a few people and organizations currently involved in settling the area and documenting their impact:

• Andrew Kemp is a resident of East Detroit who has bought up five lots in his neighborhood and is now farming four of them


• Urban Farming is an NPO which farms vacant lots in Detroit and gives collected produce to the needy


• Detroit UnReal Estate Agency is a group which tracks cultural development in Detroit and inventories cheap property in the area


• the Yes Farm is a collective of artists and urban farmers living and creating in Detroit


• the Power House Project is a social art project attempting to develop an efficient, sustainable home in the city for under $99,000

Lau Nau: Painovoimaa, valoa

I've got a couple posts brewing on augmented reality and architecture and modeling, but the days have been just packed lately. So here's this instead: