Sep
8
25 Times a Second
A feast in a time of plague.
Sep
6
“the production and assembly of many brand name consumer goods takes place in Chinese industrial regions that have been expressly designed to promote efficient transnational commercial flows. They are regulated according to the spatial logics of international trade. At the core of the Tianjin Economic Development Area lies a bonded logistics park. It contains high-security production zones that simultaneously function as transport depots and customs stations – blurring distinctions between “local” and “global” and complicating any conventional sense of geographic scale. Tracking the movements of cargo containers through the port can help determine the complexity and reach of such global networks. They are important physical fixtures of international trade; the shipping container and containerization protocols are what made the global economy possible. They underwrite it, and they sustain it.”
via Shipping Containers and the Future Internet of Things by Greg J Smith in the new Current Intelligence.
“let’s talk about player psychology: predicting what the player is going to do and then designing around that.”
“Now a few planners and politicians are starting to try something new: embracing shrinking. Frankly admitting that these cities are not going to return to their former population size anytime soon, planners and activists and officials are starting to talk about what it might mean to shrink well. After decades of worrying about smart growth, they’re starting to think about smart shrinking, about how to create cities that are healthier because they are smaller. Losing size, in this line of thought, isn’t just a byproduct of economic malaise, but a strategy.”
Heathdale House in Toronto, Ontario by Teeple Architects. via A Daily Dose of Architecture: Today’s archidose #437)
Sep
4
“The lofty discourse on “cyberspace” has long changed. Even the term now sounds passé. Today another overused celestial metaphor holds sway: the “cloud” is code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses packed with computers, called data centres, and distributed over the internet. Most of the talk, though, concerns more earthly matters: privacy, antitrust, Google’s woes in China, mobile applications, green information technology (IT). Only Apple’s latest iSomethings seem to inspire religious fervour, as they did again this week. Again, this is a fair reflection of what is happening on the internet. Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces.”
The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution | The Economist
“One way to think about the difference in complexity between fossil-fuel driven economies, and agrarian economies is that fossil-fuel driven economies collapse distance, increase speed of physical goods, and find more effective ways to store capital over longer periods. Agrarian economies are more tied to geography, contend with distance as a significant factor, and are not able to store capital for long periods of time. The effect of these two types of economies on credit, and complexity, are therefore starkly different. Our contemporary, fossil-fuel economy has not only maxed out complexity and credit to a much, much higher multiple than would be allowed by an agrarian cycle–but it has also got itself hooked in to super high agricultural yields, and food from a variety of distances and sources”
Paris Over Amherst: Food, Energy, and Credit | Gregor.us
Sep
3
“Long before Alice Waters introduced the concept of students growing their own food in Berkeley kids were putting hoe to soil at schools in the Philippines. School farms in the island nation go back at least to World War II. Many were, and still are, born of necessity. Others are started not only to feed kids but to teach them life skills and engender a respect for farming.”
Fantastic Flickr set of New Orleans’ abandoned Six Flags location. Seen first at Selectism..
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