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"A colleague tries to explain why the site they're visiting on this hot May afternoon might work: It's big enough to accommodate a 750,000-square-foot complex - equivalent to seven Costco stores and three times the size of the megacenter Equinix is buildi
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"Exodus' Bay Area operations consume 12 megawatts of electricity -- as much as 12,000 houses. And data farms typically rely on diesel backup generators in case of a blackout, which generate more pollution than most power plants."
April 2008 Archives
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when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature—if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm—they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch
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"The Ladies' Diary, one of the most respectable of the English almanacs of the eighteenth century, was commenced in 1704. Disclaiming astrology, prognostications, and quackery, the editor undertook to introduce the fair sex to the study of mathematics as
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Improved technology allows programs to better protect bicycles. In Washington, SmartBike subscribers who keep bicycles longer than the three-hour maximum will receive demerits and could eventually lose renting privileges. Bicycles gone for more than 48 ho
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Electricity Metering Pot
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Body Technology Interfaces
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Fantastic Lilypad Arduino-based embroidery that totally undoes the usual assumptions about tech aesthetics - neither steampunk nor faux '80s nor blobtastic nor CAD-y. The interaction could be more thought-through, but as a first prototype it's lovely.
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Your own Nature Journal provides an opportunity to study the natural world, to grow a deeper relationship with the Earth, to develop a greater awareness and caring for the Earth. A Nature Journal is an opportunity for personal growth and to study the evol
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Analogous Spaces refers to the fact that every science or knowledge, every thought, every memory, every action creates its own space and that these spaces are organised according to a similar structure or architecture.
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"Moreno's chief innovation was to devise the 'sociogram' as a way of representing the formal properties of social configurations. The latter could be represented in diagrams analogous to those of spatial geometry, with individuals represented by 'points'
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Finally, in February, 1807 the Common Council asked the state legislature for help in planning future streets. In a memorial sent to Albany the Council set forth its ultimate goal as "laying out Streets... in such a manner as to unite regularity and order
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Many of these projects are familiar but it's a good collection of the past four years' consensus.
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"Ethical consumerism sometimes feels like the new Catholicism — a system for generating new sins, new guilt. Is that fair-trade coffee you’re drinking? Have you sorted your trash for recycling? Offset the carbon released by your flight? How much Virtu
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"Over the 12 years that I've been doing this, the motivations have changed from a facile postmodern remix, to an attempt to come to grips with the experience of being an American in an America that does not represent my values. A yearly meditation on beli
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“What we’ve discovered is that the Sims is a very private experience for a lot of people,” Rod Humble, head of the Sims studio, said in a telephone interview last week. “It’s private because it’s set in real life.
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"So, 13 years ago, he tossed over a career in academia (teaching philosophy) and traded in the subtle mysteries of Wittgenstein for the joys of tracking down vases from manufacturers like Roth ceramics, renowned for its blob-like lava-glaze."
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"CASSIE is a powerful, easy-to-use, integrated solution that automates the management of the computers and printers in your public or academic library."
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"VSCS, or Automatic Vehicle Monitoring (AVM) systems, provide operational support to public transport operations, through regular real-time location of the vehicle within the system."
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"we propose to employ classical techniques of field biology such as tagging and specimen collecting, and to build on NSF supported research to develop and deploy a new class of internet-accessible telerobotic "observatories" to systematically photograph a
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L. Andrew Coward and Nikos A. Salingaros
Nicholas Blomley, (2005) 'The borrowed view: privacy, propriety, and the entanglements of property', Law and Social Inquiry 30 pp.617-61
A few notes on a great article by Nick Blomley:
"The garden is a symbol of both privatism and exclusion, yet is also expected to serve public functions that transcend the self-regarding owner."
Gardens and lawns are a way to understand a relationship between personal and communal interests
- gardens are both private spaces
- American lawns are owned by collectives
- we'll call this space semi-public: privately owned space that nonetheless remains part of the public experience of street life
- lawns, front gardens, window boxes, the space next to front windows
Concerns
- rights and
- difference between renting and owning
- difference between front and back garden
- appraising their own gardens, and other people's
- show pictures of good and bad gardens
gardening is an action vs gardens as places
Some thoughts in response:
- that gardens have something to teach HCI about designing for sustainability (which requires a notion of the common good)
- "the borrowed view" -- using others' property for our own spectacular pleasure is a window on visualization
- a more nuanced view of the pleasures and pressures of living together for something other than ourselves
- and something to teach us about designing for pleasure
- perceived values of gardening: cultivation, taste, stewardship
- social role of gardening: mediation of public and private interests, exhibition of self
- symbolic role of gardening: a way out of the "natural" vs "technological" divide
- technologies of gardens: automatic systems, expert advice websites and forums, email lists
- a look at the limitations of our field -- what do we not touch?
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"Thinking about the internet has been bedevilled by a range of metaphors such as the 'information superhighway', 'digital divide' and 'broadband gap'. This page considers conceptual challenges and particular memes."
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"The internet is, of course, a product of of human action and intention, as in 2. But could the experience of cyberspace be altering our sense of the physical world, as in 1? I'm curious about the synergies between the virtual and the natural, especially
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"The Los Angeles Forum's Dead Malls Competition called for the redesign of malls that risked obsolescence. With malls as such major parts of the North American landscape, the competition is very forward looking and optimistic about a more efficient use of
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"This competition, Flip a Strip, asks how we can reject numbness. How might we re-think and newly envision the potential of the Strip Mall (a building stock of which we have a cross-continental abundance)? With collective energy and creative design expert
