We are only beginning to understand the complex relationships we have with the rest of the world and the degree to which evolution dominates everything.
The Wild Life of our Bodies talks about evolving in tandem with parasites resulted in a strong immune system. Recent (last century) removal of these parasites in industrialized societies has resulted in autoimmune diseases (largely absent in the third-world) as the body's immune system turns on itself. Reintroduction of parasites has been largely successful in treating and curing some very serious conditions.
The history of wolves in Yellowstone is another example of what is essentially a successful natural system that has been repeated by nature. After wolves were hunted to near extinction, elk herds expanded to the point where they catastrophically changed the environment, destroying trees, altering the landscape, and radically reducing biological diversity. Elk also became subject to disease in large populations.
When wolves were reintroduced, the elk population thinned and increased in health as the weakest animals were culled. Reduced elk herds meant recovery of aspen forests, which led to less erosion and revitalized streams. Beavers returned, as did many species of birds and native plants. The removal of a single species had widespread effects on the entire ecology.
The Wild Life of Our Bodies sounds interesting, Miles, I'll have to look for it. I have also heard of recent changes in the way we think about cancer cells, that we need to think of them less as an invader and more as a part of our own system gone awry, so it's not so much about "curing" cancer as about resetting the mechanism so cancer isn't life-threatening. Or something like that.
Sarah, fermented foods like pickles have all kinds of healthy aspects, like "good" bacteria. Same with kimchee. I'm not sure if mead and hard cider fall into the same category, but I've been, um, experimenting with a lot of products from New Day Meadery lately to see.
What? Archinect has an iPhone app?! I supposed that happened sometime during my few year hiatus. I'm looking forward to checking it out on my bus commute.
dropping in to say hi after a few days in CO and on road driving back. So far my mini-American roadtrip has been great. Haven't done as much reading as i expected on this vacation though..
DAM, Clifford Stills museum, Eldorado Springs, Hotel Teatro, Rioja (restaurant). LoDo, U of C schoolblogger Patrick and his partners FOUNDhouse project...
Headed to Bean Town in the morning to kick back a couple of beers and talk about yesteryear with a couple of non-architect friends. I was figuring leaving later in the day, now it looks like earlier due to a client moving up a meeting so I might have a few hours to kill before the meet up....Any good ideas about killing time in Bean Town? You know the latest and greatest ....with all these young firms kickin around.
Lived in the back bay in the day and the fens and moved onto the Summerville/Cambridge line when there were no students living there except for us and the two sweetheart girls down stairs from us and an apartment packed with international students living on the first floor.
Weather is going to be grand and well meeting up with old friends is always good and well doing it in Bean Town is even better.
I STILL keep getting Foxwoods Casino complex. I am so damn far away from Connecticut and I don't gamble, nor drink - well, maybe I do, and should, respectively, because I went into architecture.
For the longest time, I was getting some ad for an on-line M.Arch. from Lawrence Tech near Detroit MI. Since I already have one, it was annoying to keep seeing that ad, too.
Back Bay is now home to Saudi princes, the international jet-set, and parking spaces that sell for half a million dollars. Somerville/Cambridge line is now mostly tech startups and wealthier hipsters - a good place to go if you're looking for vegan/vegetarian restaurants.
Kill time in Boston? I'd check out the Greenway - then visit the new BSA space near south station. All the major/big firms have moved to fort point (still not a whole lot happening there aside from construction). If you had more time I'd send you to some more interesting places.
maybe you can rent a hubway - you'd get a lot further.
First, the complexity of emotions while watching this film, is still unfolding in my brain; equal amounts of outrage, vengeance, and absolute pacifism.
Second, once this is seen, you can't un-see it, and once you see it, you feel complicit - as an American - with these murderers, and really have an essential understanding about what it means, when we ask what our government and culture perpetrates abroad in our name.
I kept waiting for Christopher Guest or Ashton Kutcher to come out and shout Punk'd.
I could go on and on, but, if you have the courage to see this movie, I defy you to not be altered by it.
I think this planet deserves better than us humans, perhaps global climate change isn't such a bad thing after all, perhaps Mother Earth needs a breather from us murdering bipeds, I know I sure do.
beta I looked at a bunch of news photos from Egypt yesterday, including some very graphic images of the violence, and sorta feel the same way: it might be better if humans go extinct anyway.
Terrorism is the #1 threat of nuclear power - not waste disposal, not aging plants, not poor design and shoddy construction, not proliferation of WMD-materials and certainly not catastrophic accidents. It's much more import to gin up anti-terror "security" for these facilities than it is to do anything else.
If you ever wondered why Fukushima is not a top global headline, well now you know.
no idea about terrorists but fukushima has been completely effed up from the start. the govt decided to step in this month because tepco is incompetent, but i am not sure there will be any better action taken. it is a pretty good metaphor for climate change. We think we know the answers, or that we can manage it, and seem to be continually surprised that we are behind the curve and the problems are getting worse (and multiplying). once the disaster gets bad enough someone might actually learn a lesson. in the meantime our newly re-elected PM is of the mind that nuclear power should be brought back on line in japan. not the best choice on the face of it.
Back from my flash trip to near Boston....ended up just north of Boston.....didn't see much as my day plans yesterday were affected by a client....So Arrived late, met up with friends, drank a couple of soda pops, ate a Cuban Steak at the Naked Fish....sat up and talked about old times, good times and bad times. Had breakfast this morning and hit the road back home by 10:00 this morning. So I guess I could have just as well said I had gone to Worcester....
Fukushima isn't on the front page because it would harm the profits of an entrenched corporate-industrial-political complex.
The new from there - which you likely won't hear until it's too late - is so bad that even an immediate global effort to contain the disaster might not be a able to prevent it.
Far worse than the three 100-ton core meltdown are the six spent fuel cooling ponds. These are outside of the containment structure and the most critical one contains 400 tons of spent fuel.
Meanwhile the ground beneath the buildings has been destabilized by water saturation, the condition of the foundations after the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent explosions is unknown, the fuel pool is likely damaged ... and it gets worse from there.
A unified global effort is necessary to try to contain this disaster, but that isn't likely to happen until it's too late.
its not on the front page because people have short attention spans. we don't need conspiracies to act like idiots. we do it all on our own.
that article is scary indeed. its a bit scare-mongery to me although i don't doubt the potential scenario described. The point that millions are dead already is particularly over the top and the introduction of Michio Kaku at the end is a bit of a tell. He isn't exactly the voice of deliberate thinking on this point. There is still enough to be scared shitless over though.
happy sunday. parham.baghaie seems to be quite active this morning. hopefully the name will disappear before anyone else reads this, so noone will know what i'm talking about.
it was a spammer. they almost comletely filled the first page over a span of about an hour, and necroed threads that were years old. i suspect there are moderators who deleted them.
i walked my dog. then played a video game. why would i go to church? that would be a waste of a day.
Yeah, I don't go anymore. When people ask me why, I tell him "I already gave at the office." Actually, it was my parents that coughed up the tuition dollars, but I bore the guilt.
Spending a Sunday with one's dog on a road trip, for example, would be better.
That front page ad for elevators, telling you to "Spec an elevator as unique as you are", really irks me. I do not want a unique elevator; I want an elevator that meets absolutely standard rock-solid engineering and safety requirements.
Not to mention, if it's as unique as me, then neither one of us is unique, right?
I spent way too much time trying to come up with a joke how I wouldn't want an elevator to be like me but nothing seemed to work. something about only going down when you push the right combination of buttons...
i feel a bit guilty to say this cuz i assume its the ads that make this site possible, but i have ad-blocker on firefox and have never seen an ad on archinect. the iphone version, which is my main internet access point lately has no ads yets...the intertubes are much better without ads.
Why is it that when my son plays mine craft, he has to talk about everything he is doing - incessantly! "Mom! I can spawn creepers! Mom! I can plant trees! Mom, I can walk under water. Look, there's a squid. I can spawn Christmas villagers!" It never stops!
Sorry. Just a morning rant I'm pulling my hair out over.
Angus is exactly the same, Sarah. I have to constantly ask him to stop talking if I'm doing anything more mentally demanding than making dinner.
I do ask him to explain it to me when he's not playing, like when we're driving somewhere or walking the dog, because I want to show interest in what he's interested in. But when he's actually playing I don't need a play-by-play!
you should try playing minecraft with the kids sometimes. creeper spawns are really only interesting while they're happening, so talking about them in the car is past the time they're interesting. i would almost bet if the kid is half distracted with a game, that's when they drop their defenses and tell you about the neighbor kid who bought them pot. not sure if that will happen, but minecraft is pretty much always more entertaining than TV anyway.
curtkram can you walk me through downloading Minecraft mods on a Mac? Every time I try I give up in frustration, because before I can do it I need Forge or ModLoader or something and it's all so, so unclear and frustrating!
Oh and edited to add: We did "play"together one day, he built a courtyard house of my design and to my direction. But that was only in creative mode.
Idiocy, sheer idiocy. Hard to imagine stupidity at this level. A huge excavation project in an area absolutely saturated with water to the point that engineers are concerned with the stability of the existing structures. And a mile of 30 meter long frozen tubes - if they can build it they'll need the power from a nuke plant just to keep it frozen. Maybe someone here is clever enough to do the energy calcs for that.
In hindsight this disaster could have been averted so easily that it boggles the mind. Fukushima is the result of a virtual cascade of design failures from engineering through operation and use.
The plants shut down automatically when seismic sensors detected the earthquake. The backup power systems (diesel electric generators) were damaged, meaning that a) cooling water could not be circulated and b) there was no power available to restart the reactors, which would have provided power for their own cooling operations. The reactors themselves were undamaged, it was the loss of power and the inability to cool them that created the catastrophe.
Actually, I guess it's not all that hard to imagine this level of idiocy. All I have to do is look around.
Looking forward to those pics of DEN and environs, such as nature / hiking photos. Maybe you even have the postcard view of Denver with the Front Range in the background, with traces of snow, but Denver's air pollution problem seldom makes that possible.
Thread Central
We are only beginning to understand the complex relationships we have with the rest of the world and the degree to which evolution dominates everything.
The Wild Life of our Bodies talks about evolving in tandem with parasites resulted in a strong immune system. Recent (last century) removal of these parasites in industrialized societies has resulted in autoimmune diseases (largely absent in the third-world) as the body's immune system turns on itself. Reintroduction of parasites has been largely successful in treating and curing some very serious conditions.
The history of wolves in Yellowstone is another example of what is essentially a successful natural system that has been repeated by nature. After wolves were hunted to near extinction, elk herds expanded to the point where they catastrophically changed the environment, destroying trees, altering the landscape, and radically reducing biological diversity. Elk also became subject to disease in large populations.
When wolves were reintroduced, the elk population thinned and increased in health as the weakest animals were culled. Reduced elk herds meant recovery of aspen forests, which led to less erosion and revitalized streams. Beavers returned, as did many species of birds and native plants. The removal of a single species had widespread effects on the entire ecology.
eh - test tube meat (made from cow fetus stem-cells, btw) is still red meat - which isn't exactly good for you anyway...
The Wild Life of Our Bodies sounds interesting, Miles, I'll have to look for it. I have also heard of recent changes in the way we think about cancer cells, that we need to think of them less as an invader and more as a part of our own system gone awry, so it's not so much about "curing" cancer as about resetting the mechanism so cancer isn't life-threatening. Or something like that.
Sarah, fermented foods like pickles have all kinds of healthy aspects, like "good" bacteria. Same with kimchee. I'm not sure if mead and hard cider fall into the same category, but I've been, um, experimenting with a lot of products from New Day Meadery lately to see.
Donna, you'd enjoy Mary Roach's book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.
What? Archinect has an iPhone app?! I supposed that happened sometime during my few year hiatus. I'm looking forward to checking it out on my bus commute.
Miles, I was just going to post an addendum asking if anyone had read that book yet ha! I loved Stiff and Bonk.
Haven't read those yet. Really enjoyed Packing for Mars. She a great writer, terrific dry ironic sense of humor.
Get a room, you two.
I don't want to work today. wahaahaahaa
Donna, here is a word for you, anti-mitogenic. (I've been studying microbiology for the fun of it/so I can lead a more well-rounded life.)
hey TC!
dropping in to say hi after a few days in CO and on road driving back. So far my mini-American roadtrip has been great. Haven't done as much reading as i expected on this vacation though..
Good amount of hiking and such however.
^
So, what DID you see in Denver CO?
DAM, Clifford Stills museum, Eldorado Springs, Hotel Teatro, Rioja (restaurant). LoDo, U of C schoolblogger Patrick and his partners FOUNDhouse project...
http://archinect.com/jobs/entry/79321313/revit-3dsmax-rhino-catia-ecotect-specialist
is there a job in here?
Headed to Bean Town in the morning to kick back a couple of beers and talk about yesteryear with a couple of non-architect friends. I was figuring leaving later in the day, now it looks like earlier due to a client moving up a meeting so I might have a few hours to kill before the meet up....Any good ideas about killing time in Bean Town? You know the latest and greatest ....with all these young firms kickin around.
Lived in the back bay in the day and the fens and moved onto the Summerville/Cambridge line when there were no students living there except for us and the two sweetheart girls down stairs from us and an apartment packed with international students living on the first floor.
Weather is going to be grand and well meeting up with old friends is always good and well doing it in Bean Town is even better.
sutures......I applied....best job in the world.....wonder if they get back to me when they find
out I'm blind?
What pop-up ads do you get?
I STILL keep getting Foxwoods Casino complex. I am so damn far away from Connecticut and I don't gamble, nor drink - well, maybe I do, and should, respectively, because I went into architecture.
For the longest time, I was getting some ad for an on-line M.Arch. from Lawrence Tech near Detroit MI. Since I already have one, it was annoying to keep seeing that ad, too.
Hahaha nice one snook. Yeah, there's no job in there.
Back Bay is now home to Saudi princes, the international jet-set, and parking spaces that sell for half a million dollars. Somerville/Cambridge line is now mostly tech startups and wealthier hipsters - a good place to go if you're looking for vegan/vegetarian restaurants.
Kill time in Boston? I'd check out the Greenway - then visit the new BSA space near south station. All the major/big firms have moved to fort point (still not a whole lot happening there aside from construction). If you had more time I'd send you to some more interesting places.
maybe you can rent a hubway - you'd get a lot further.
Friday!
What can I say about this film? Plenty.
First, the complexity of emotions while watching this film, is still unfolding in my brain; equal amounts of outrage, vengeance, and absolute pacifism.
Second, once this is seen, you can't un-see it, and once you see it, you feel complicit - as an American - with these murderers, and really have an essential understanding about what it means, when we ask what our government and culture perpetrates abroad in our name.
I kept waiting for Christopher Guest or Ashton Kutcher to come out and shout Punk'd.
I could go on and on, but, if you have the courage to see this movie, I defy you to not be altered by it.
I think this planet deserves better than us humans, perhaps global climate change isn't such a bad thing after all, perhaps Mother Earth needs a breather from us murdering bipeds, I know I sure do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing
http://archinect.com/news/article/79437171/timber-in-the-city-competition-design-students-imagine-a-mixed-use-complex-for-red-hook#CommentsAnchor
really? this is what it takes to win?
beta I looked at a bunch of news photos from Egypt yesterday, including some very graphic images of the violence, and sorta feel the same way: it might be better if humans go extinct anyway.
not to change the subject too much, but that doggy is going to get in trouble!
http://youtu.be/By-CKsffwKA?t=30s
Be afraid, be very afraid ... of the terrorist threat to US nuclear power plants!
Report: All U.S. Nuclear Facilities Vulnerable to Terrorism
Terrorism is the #1 threat of nuclear power - not waste disposal, not aging plants, not poor design and shoddy construction, not proliferation of WMD-materials and certainly not catastrophic accidents. It's much more import to gin up anti-terror "security" for these facilities than it is to do anything else.
If you ever wondered why Fukushima is not a top global headline, well now you know.
Sushi, anyone?
no idea about terrorists but fukushima has been completely effed up from the start. the govt decided to step in this month because tepco is incompetent, but i am not sure there will be any better action taken. it is a pretty good metaphor for climate change. We think we know the answers, or that we can manage it, and seem to be continually surprised that we are behind the curve and the problems are getting worse (and multiplying). once the disaster gets bad enough someone might actually learn a lesson. in the meantime our newly re-elected PM is of the mind that nuclear power should be brought back on line in japan. not the best choice on the face of it.
Hand me a lightsaber, curtkram!
Back from my flash trip to near Boston....ended up just north of Boston.....didn't see much as my day plans yesterday were affected by a client....So Arrived late, met up with friends, drank a couple of soda pops, ate a Cuban Steak at the Naked Fish....sat up and talked about old times, good times and bad times. Had breakfast this morning and hit the road back home by 10:00 this morning. So I guess I could have just as well said I had gone to Worcester....
little known fact about Boston is that it's a great place to get Caribbean food.
here's a bit of PSA:
don't use electronic devices while you're driving.
Fukushima isn't on the front page because it would harm the profits of an entrenched corporate-industrial-political complex.
The new from there - which you likely won't hear until it's too late - is so bad that even an immediate global effort to contain the disaster might not be a able to prevent it.
Far worse than the three 100-ton core meltdown are the six spent fuel cooling ponds. These are outside of the containment structure and the most critical one contains 400 tons of spent fuel.
Meanwhile the ground beneath the buildings has been destabilized by water saturation, the condition of the foundations after the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent explosions is unknown, the fuel pool is likely damaged ... and it gets worse from there.
A unified global effort is necessary to try to contain this disaster, but that isn't likely to happen until it's too late.
Read more here if you dare:
Fukushima apocalypse: Years of ‘duct tape fixes’ could result in millions of deaths
its not on the front page because people have short attention spans. we don't need conspiracies to act like idiots. we do it all on our own.
that article is scary indeed. its a bit scare-mongery to me although i don't doubt the potential scenario described. The point that millions are dead already is particularly over the top and the introduction of Michio Kaku at the end is a bit of a tell. He isn't exactly the voice of deliberate thinking on this point. There is still enough to be scared shitless over though.
happy sunday. parham.baghaie seems to be quite active this morning. hopefully the name will disappear before anyone else reads this, so noone will know what i'm talking about.
Noone? It's only 11 here.
Curt,
Is this an architect, a politician, or an Eastern spiritual leader you speak of?
And did you walk your dog and/or go to church this morning?
it was a spammer. they almost comletely filled the first page over a span of about an hour, and necroed threads that were years old. i suspect there are moderators who deleted them.
i walked my dog. then played a video game. why would i go to church? that would be a waste of a day.
Yeah, I don't go anymore. When people ask me why, I tell him "I already gave at the office." Actually, it was my parents that coughed up the tuition dollars, but I bore the guilt.
Spending a Sunday with one's dog on a road trip, for example, would be better.
Gave what at the office? Blood?
Good morning and happy Monday. Beautiful day here.
Money.
That front page ad for elevators, telling you to "Spec an elevator as unique as you are", really irks me. I do not want a unique elevator; I want an elevator that meets absolutely standard rock-solid engineering and safety requirements.
Not to mention, if it's as unique as me, then neither one of us is unique, right?
I spent way too much time trying to come up with a joke how I wouldn't want an elevator to be like me but nothing seemed to work. something about only going down when you push the right combination of buttons...
I wouldn't worry about it Donna. The elevator won't be posting here, at least not with the same flair that you have.
Like this?
lol.
i feel a bit guilty to say this cuz i assume its the ads that make this site possible, but i have ad-blocker on firefox and have never seen an ad on archinect. the iphone version, which is my main internet access point lately has no ads yets...the intertubes are much better without ads.
Donna and Miles re: Mary Roach. I'm currently reading Spook. I love her books. Can't wait to dig into Gulp.
Morning all.
Sorry. Just a morning rant I'm pulling my hair out over.
Angus is exactly the same, Sarah. I have to constantly ask him to stop talking if I'm doing anything more mentally demanding than making dinner.
I do ask him to explain it to me when he's not playing, like when we're driving somewhere or walking the dog, because I want to show interest in what he's interested in. But when he's actually playing I don't need a play-by-play!
you should try playing minecraft with the kids sometimes. creeper spawns are really only interesting while they're happening, so talking about them in the car is past the time they're interesting. i would almost bet if the kid is half distracted with a game, that's when they drop their defenses and tell you about the neighbor kid who bought them pot. not sure if that will happen, but minecraft is pretty much always more entertaining than TV anyway.
curtkram can you walk me through downloading Minecraft mods on a Mac? Every time I try I give up in frustration, because before I can do it I need Forge or ModLoader or something and it's all so, so unclear and frustrating!
Oh and edited to add: We did "play"together one day, he built a courtyard house of my design and to my direction. But that was only in creative mode.
hi all! back at work and loving every minute of it :p Don't have my photos up yet but will share link as soon as I do.
seriously though re: Fukushima has everyone seen the latest plan to build a frozen wall of soil in attempts to contain radioactive groundwater currently spilling into the Pacific Ocean
Idiocy, sheer idiocy. Hard to imagine stupidity at this level. A huge excavation project in an area absolutely saturated with water to the point that engineers are concerned with the stability of the existing structures. And a mile of 30 meter long frozen tubes - if they can build it they'll need the power from a nuke plant just to keep it frozen. Maybe someone here is clever enough to do the energy calcs for that.
In hindsight this disaster could have been averted so easily that it boggles the mind. Fukushima is the result of a virtual cascade of design failures from engineering through operation and use.
The plants shut down automatically when seismic sensors detected the earthquake. The backup power systems (diesel electric generators) were damaged, meaning that a) cooling water could not be circulated and b) there was no power available to restart the reactors, which would have provided power for their own cooling operations. The reactors themselves were undamaged, it was the loss of power and the inability to cool them that created the catastrophe.
Actually, I guess it's not all that hard to imagine this level of idiocy. All I have to do is look around.
TEPCO admits leakage of 300 tons of water with monstrous radiation level
Nam -
Looking forward to those pics of DEN and environs, such as nature / hiking photos. Maybe you even have the postcard view of Denver with the Front Range in the background, with traces of snow, but Denver's air pollution problem seldom makes that possible.
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