Morning: After a fall rainstorm

Even in Southern California there are delightful, crisp days when the sun comes pouring in the south windows to take off the chill. The trellis overhang allows the winter sun to come in, and in the hot summer it blooms with trumpet vine flowers to provide shade and keep out the heat.

The trees and plants temper the environment when they're planted strategically, and the fruit-bearing trees and shrubs (Pomegranite!) are drought tolerant, too. Nothing like the right kind of garden to spend the long summer afternoons in, watching our local wildlife darting around in the mulch and through the branches.

From the Gadget Lab at Wired: Antikythera

An ancient Greek computer comes back to life. A British museum curator has built a working replica of a 2,000-year-old Greek machine that has been called the world's first computer. Featured on the History Channel in December 2004, the complete reconstruction now also has further inscriptions replicated. A Conference was held on it in 2006 in Athens. See the article, a video and historical links here.History reaches to us in the present, in many forms. Just like the Intihuatana - the sun's hitching post at Machu Picchu - the brilliance of early cultures in understanding the cycles of the natural world led to astonishing constructs that expressed the nature of the physical world. This knowledge was used to harness a place and its resources to human purpose. Its purpose carried human meaning as well as consequences of use and its influence on the natural environment.

Is it possible in this era to now capture the intelligence that will allow humanity to inhabit the earth in balance? Can we take biomimicry to the next level in human affairs? Can we express our purpose so that it benefits all living things and embraces life instead of destroying it?

Update 12/7/16: Built by more than one person on the island of Rhodes, it shows that the ancient Greeks were apparently even further ahead in their astronomical understanding and mechanical know-how than we’d imagined.

Update 11/13/18:  While scientific study continues,  the discovery has drawn attention to both the existence of this ancient ‘calculator’ and its amazing history.

Update 1/27/19: In 1900, sponge divers stranded after a storm in the Mediterranean discovered an underwater statuary on the shoals of the Greek island Antikythera. It turned out to be the wreck of a ship more than 2,000 years old. During the subsequent salvage operation, divers recovered the remnants of a puzzling clocklike contraption with precision-cut gears, annotated with cryptic symbols that were corroded beyond recognition. For years, the device lay unnoticed in a museum drawer, until a British historian named Derek de Solla Price rediscovered it in the early 1950s and began the laborious process of reconstructing it — an effort that scholars have continued into the 21st century. We now know that the device was capable of predicting the behavior of the sun, the moon and five of the planets. The device was so advanced that it could even predict, with meaningful accuracy, solar or lunar eclipses that wouldn’t occur for decades.

Update 3/24/21: Scientists may have finally made a complete digital model for the Cosmos panel of a 2,000-year-old mechanical device called the Antikythera mechanism that's believed to be the world's first computer.
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Coalesce & Tragedy of the Commons

A timely article about the evolution of capitalism by Hazel Henderson of Ethical Markets can be found on the Corporate Social Responsibility Wire. The importance of evaluating investment systems against several benchmarks, not simply dollar tracking, is important in our now global society:
"Money is merely one form of information, and now the pure information-trading platforms are providing the needed extra bandwidth for trading, e.g. e-Bay, Craigslist, Freecycle and thousands of similar electronic trading systems, cellphones, and local scrip "currencies" used to match needs and resources and clear local markets starved of credit. Wall Street's single-minded focus on money led to its demise. Money was equated with wealth and ignored all the other forms of wealth, from human skills and ingenuity to the productive systems of nature in which all economies are embedded. Money, like gold, will remain a useful store of value and medium of exchange, but now as part of a new broader, more inclusive regime dominated by pure, information-based markets."
A former corporate executive now restrained for the benefit of the commons.

Sustainability: A Permaculture approach to whole systems

Sustainable principles are critical to the design of human environments that interconnect with nature. This includes the approach to studying the site and implementing principles of environmental vectors in order to maintain the system's integrity. An early proponent of this kind of design analysis, Ian McHarg, lays out his methodology in Design With Nature.

An example of applying this analysis in our local Southern California foothills to arrive at a solution integrating permaculture is to use watersheds in their natural state, collect the excess during rainy season and channel that into urban areas. These (exisitng) urban areas then need to reuse and recapture the water and return it to the aquifer below as a means of storage for urban use. This completes the cycle and replenishes the aquifers at the same time that urban systems are rebuilt and enhanced. In this way the built environment can be regenerated and replaced in a manner that actually reduces the human footprint, providing economic investment opportunities as well. This is known as the "soft path" infrastructure approach.
An issue that's been a local problem with aquifer recharge systems and grey water use has been LA's draconian regulatory framework about it in the early 1990's, covered here in the LA Times. With regulatory reform and intelligent development of these systems, plus urban bioswales that are installed by sustainable landscapers and non-profits, this region can rebuild its infrastructure to deal with a dry future. Orange County's integrated water and waste management strategies have paid off in this manner

We have to become part of the natural world again, in an intelligent way that lets us bring the human gift to the natural order, as stewardship. This approach is best implemented with a "triple bottom line" view of economic growth, as well as an understanding of the limitations of the natural resources and the implications for development sprawl.
From Lee Barnes (former editor of Katuah Journal and Permaculture Connections), Waynesville, North Carolina:

Permaculture (PERMAnent agriCULTURE or PERMAnent CULTURE) is a sustainable design system stressing the harmonious interrelationship of humans, plants, animals and the Earth. To paraphrase the founder of permaculture, designer Bill Mollison: Permaculture principles focus on thoughtful designs for small-scale intensive systems which are labor efficient and which use biological resources instead of fossil fuels. Designs stress ecological connections and closed energy and material loops. The core of permaculture is design and the working relationships and connections between all things. Each component in a system performs multiple functions, and each function is supported by many elements. Key to efficient design is observation and replication of natural ecosystems, where designers maximize diversity with polycultures, stress efficient energy planning for houses and settlement, using and accelerating natural plant succession, and increasing the highly productive "edge-zones" within the system.

Contemporary Architecture and urban context

There is a local Pasadena issue that's creating a conflict in the community regarding appropriate design for a property expansion in the City Center. It's the proposed expansion for All Saints Church, next to the City Hall. My discussion emphasizing the need for a vision as an opportunity for a design response is posted here.

New structures are commonly integrated into existing structures (ruins!) in Europe, but they respect the prior construction/design and "knit together" the old and the new contemporary design vocabulary. An example is Carlo Scarpa's Castelvecchio restoration/addition in Verona. I've been there twice now, have a lot of resource books on the guy, have been to almost all of his structures in Italy.

http://www.veronissima.com/sito_inglese/html/tour-museums-castelvecchio-scarpa.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castelvecchio_Museum

My photos:

The Silos of the BIMs

The role of technology should really be to improve communications between people and improve task efficiencies. People can quickly and easily solve problems when the appropriate technologies are put into place, which need to be intuitive and speak the language of the specific profession involved. However, the myriad digital gadgets and software exist mainly to drive sales in our free market economy. Mis-applied and complex systems that don't interface simply add to a ballooning cacophony of informational noise.

What has yadda, yadda, yadda done in terms of streamlining work effort?

Beyond nada. When you manually deploy digital technology, it multiplies the work effort exponentially, instead of controlling it. It literally explodes. That's not understood yet, for some reason, probably due to the advertising push for all of the tech toys.

This is why the business model of a management portal that restricts communications to specific channels and responds only to those channels for professionals was premature. People don't get that part yet, and are chasing chat/text and mashups. Beyond overload, nothing has priorities, which we all know from CPM charts, etc. requires an org structure which communicates the mission-critical stuff, then appends the little stuff so only the folks involved with that part have to deal with it.

This is the achilles' heel of the big BIM software packages and all the complex interactive platforms being pushed by IAI. There's no priority organization of design and planning process, it's just all one huge blob of information being pushed at architects and contractors that's unmanageable except by teams of CAD jockeys. The managers need a communication system appended to an engineering/design system that's grounded in ESRI information-capable databases from which to begin the engineering. It needs to be simple, graphic and organized to follow the methods used to comply with the State Practice Act, beginning with design sketches that continue all the way through to building construction, commissioning, and post-occupancy evaluation. The emphasis on a digital replica of the actual structure is a direction that serves the building maintenance and construction cost management to the detriment of the process that paves the way for effective decisions about the property or the project and its scope and design. It limits the approach to problem analysis, and produces necessarily canned solutions, which are appropriate in some areas but not in many others.

The intuitive feedback loop is critical, and that means a communication system. This communication can more effectively deploy virtual machine technologies instead of the old database silos, and be graphically interactive as well. Here's a screenshot from my earlier development of this approach:



I am dumbfounded at the lack of understanding of how simple technologies deployed in effective structures can magnify the "social networking" impact of new avenues of communication. It's the Google model instead of the Microsoft model. Or perhaps, more appropriately, an open-source/Mozilla approach; the new Chrome "browser" application is an example of this evolving model.

A baby step has been taken by the interoperability agreement between Bentley and Autocad, at long last. The old software model is finally beginning to accommodate the real industry needs.

Probably will take years before everybody gets it. I hate to be a pessimist, but when you have eyes you have to see.

Update 7/27/20: A substantial number of leading AEC firms wrote an open letter to Autodesk CEO

Update 7/28/20: Architecture firms to Autodesk: We're no longer happy with Revit

Independence Day

Judge Orders YouTube to Give Data to Viacom

Posted: 03 Jul 2008 08:00 PM CDT from Crooks and Liars, by Nicole Belle

(Re-posted here 04 July)

It’s a brave new world, I tell you…

New TeeVee:

If you wanted to keep your obsession with hyperactive YouTube phenomeon “Fred” a secret, you’re in for some bad news. A federal judge yesterday ordered that records of every video watched on YouTube be handed over to Viacom as part of its ongoing $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google.

According to the ruling:

The motion to compel production of all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website is granted.

In case you were wondering::

Defendants’ “Logging” database contains, for each instance a video is watched, the unique “login ID” of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer (”IP address”), and the identifier for the video.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is up in arms over the ruling and has a breakdown of how this decision may actually violate federal law.

(See the entire article with comments at New Tee Vee)

This appears to have spurred the evolution of Chrome and Firefox add-ins that run in "no-track" mode...