Permanence & Wayfinding

This is something that we don't do that much anymore in our built environment, that is to make a permanent mark for something that may only have temporary value.  Here we have a north arrow set into the concrete sidewalk in downtown Boston.  Why would someone do this?  It is not a part of a larger mural or other work of art, it is simply an arrow and the letter "N".  But somehow the person funding the building project decided to spend some extra money to have this laid into the sidewalk and probably had no return on the investment.  That must've been a hell of a sell by the architect if it was in fact the architects idea.  I have clients that would never spend money on anything so seemingly frivolous.  But then, we all value things differently don't we?  I would spend the extra money to lay this in the sidewalk, yet the Freedom Trail Foundation has laid out their red line here in paint rather than the brick that they have done in other parts of it.  

Something to be excited about

SpaceX is one of the few things that I’m really excited about at the moment in relation to crewed spaceflight. I love the ISS and Shuttle, but due to the upcoming retirement of the STS that love is bittersweet. Ares/Orion/Altair is in development, but its unclear how soon that will become a reality since they are at the mercy of a political and budgetary system that are in transition at the moment.

SpaceX is a private company that is working to develop a family of low to medium lift rockets for commercial use. The Falcon 1 development had a few snags in the form of 3 consecutive launch failures, but is still riding the high of the fourth and successful launch. They’re pushing ahead on the larger Falcon 9 booster which can carry larger payloads and the Dragon capsule. Dragon has several uses, among them is rendezvousing with the ISS for resupply, cargo return, and potentially crew transfer/lifeboat capability.

The test shown above is for the orbital thruster design. It’s conducted in a vacuum chamber that SpaceX custom-built which is why you can’t actually see any exhaust from the combustion. The only way you can tell that anything is actually happening in there is because of the way the engine bell glows red hot. Awesome.

Treadmill on Wheels

I heard about this on the radio over the weekend.  The idea is basically that you are saying to yourself "Man, I want to get in shape, but I'm so tired of being cooped up inside on this treadmill!  If only there was some movable surface outside that I could run on!"  Well, if you've ever asked yourself that and not realized that entire surface of the earth is a good surface for running on (excluding water, ice and liquid hot magma) then the SpeedFit is just the thing for you!

Naturally this sounded completely ridiculous to me as a runner, but I couldn't wait to see it.  The imagery is just as bad as I thought, but then it occurred to me that all you have to do is throw some pannier on this bad-boy and you've got a great commuting vehicle!  When you think about it all a bicycle is is a stationary bike on wheels right?  

I love the last bit where he's running next to the Porsche, as if to claim equality with it....

Solar Powered Trash Cans?

This is something I've always been a a little leery of.  I like the idea of integrating solar power into every day life, as well as the idea that individual should devices create their own power and reduce the stress and demand on the larger power grid.  Solar powered traffic signs on the highway are a good example of this, especially because they are portable.  A solar powered sign replaces a gas-powered generator or connection to the power grid to illuminate the sign, this is good because it lowers demand for electricity from nonrenewable sources.  

But the solar powered trash can is a bit different.  It's adding electricity to something that hadn't been powered before.  It creates an admittedly off-the-grid demand for electricity where there was not an on the grid demand before.  And what for?  Compacting your garbage.  

What's the benefit here?  Does the city save time, money, and energy because they have to empty the can less often?  I guess that's good, unless it's putting some poor slob from Southie out of a job! 

These things have been popping up all over the metro area for years now and I wonder what the return on the investment has been.  I also love finding that some are either located in near-permanent shade or oriented with the solar collector facing north!

My dad is somewhere in this video.....

Don't blink...you might miss him.

For more on this check out out www.lle.rochester.edu.  It's great stuff.

The Vagaries of Science Fiction

A friend of mine sent me a link today to an article about how science may be putting an end to science fiction (see the article here). The basic premise of the article is that we’re at a time now, and have been for decades, where the pace of scientific discovery is going faster than science fiction authors can keep up. It’s great to think about Mars being full of wild aliens, that is right up until we send a probe there and figure out that the surface of Mars makes the Terran polar ice cap look exciting by comparison*.

I grew up reading Heinlein short stories, or rather I grew up being read Heinlein’s stories by my father, and as soon as I could I grabbed the books away from him and read them on my own. His stories are great because though they often have strange surroundings there is always something old-fashioned and comforting about the characters, I mean, they all love cats, what’s SciFi about that? But I knew as a kid that these stories were written in the 50s and actually most likely took place in the 1980s, which is the time I was reading them in, and it was clear that life did not resemble what Heinlein was writing about, nor would it any time soon. By his timeline there should’ve been multiple cities on the Moon, cheap solar power, and giant rolling conveyor belts that we used to travel between cities instead of cars. Sweet.

This wasn’t the only science fiction that I was reading; no I was consuming everything I could get my hands on. It was in the form of comic books, movies, TV shows, books, toys (lego’s especially), and even books on tape. Some of these were far from the realism of Heinlein, but all depicted a future where anything is possible. For a long time I thought that at midnight January 1^st in the year 2000 everything around me would physically change, buildings, cars, clothes, everything would suddenly become “futuristic” (for that I blame the Gobots, but that’s another story).

Somewhere along the way I became aware that I was living in someone else’s imagined future. Sure I believe in the predictive aspect of science fiction, but it is far more wrong than it is right, but that’s not what I mean. I knew that in 1948 someone imagined a certain (bleak) future in the far off year of 1984, and that future vision did not come to pass. This was very exciting to me as a kid. If it seemed real to have cities in space in 1952, then what might I see in my own time? In 1985 a trip to Mars by the year 2000 seemed very likely to my 9 year old mind, and it was something to get excited about. I was aware in my youth that I was not only living in someone else’s future, but also someone else’s past. Therefore, what bold future would find its humble beginnings in the 80s and 90s?

It is the sense of possibility and potential that makes science fiction important and relevant. The important thing about science fiction is the feeling that there are any possible number of futures ahead of us, and that we can explore them without having to live long enough to see them. This sounds overly hopeful, and I certainly view the future with hope, but also with a sense of hesitation. I’ve seen enough future histories not come true to know not to set my hopes too high.

But man, sometimes it’s too much fun not too!

*which I know is still pretty exciting from a certain point of view

Let's start with Space.

This is the first picture taken of Earth from the Moon (or at least the area of the Moon); was taken in 1966 by the creatively named satellite Lunar Orbiter 1 and was one of the most ground breaking photos ever taken. Such was the pace of discovery in those days that it was practically erased from public memory only 2 years later when the men of Apollo 8 took their own color version which may be the most popular photograph ever.

The 60s were indeed heady days of exploration, a feeling that is sorely missed, and needed, today.