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Tuesday, July 10, 2007
(“Plan de Marly,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Exactly how many landmines buried in the Korean peninsula is a state secret. Some estimates put the figure at over 2 million in the 2.5-mile wide DMZ and about 1 million more in the 6-mile wide Military Control Zone. Though thousands are being removed to make way for rail and road links and many more have become non-functional through environmental wear, they can easily be replaced with the millions stored in stockpiles throughout the countryside.
Also a state secret are their locations. Of course, one only has to draw one line in the north and one in the south to generally know where not to go traipsing about. For everyone, this is enough. For military war strategists, however, maps would definitely be of some help. But then again, some of the land mines perhaps may have become a secret even to those who keep the official records, as one typhoon years ago showed what could happen.
From BBC News (7 August 1999):
As Koreans begin to clear up after the floods [caused by Typhoon Olga], they are being warned of the danger posed by landmines and other explosives dislodged by floodwaters from the heavily-fortified border zone between North and South Korea.
The South and its ally, the US, are thought to have placed about one million landmines and anti-tank explosives along the border.
Marines say they are looking for 150 mines which may have been dislodged. Reports say just four have been found so far.
Artillery shells and more than 7,000 other pieces of ammunition have been swept away defence ministry officials say.
Not clarified in the article is the fact that those landmines were washed out of the DMZ or storage sites into areas frequented by civilians. And though 150 sounds like small change, just one is needed to ruin an entire family.
Also not mentioned is that this sort of thing apparently happens periodically, not only through flooding but also from erosion, landslide, melting snow, and other natural elements.
For another case of unexploded ordnances shifting from their original locations, check out this briefing paper prepared by Human Rights Watch on the landmines in Mozambique affected by catastrophic flooding in 2000.
(Sarah Pickering, Landmine, 2005.)
(Sarah Pickering, Fuel Air Explosion, 2005.)
(Sarah Pickering, Artillery, 2006.)
*
Last year, TIME Europe reported on a remarkable research being done by Jarne Ellehold and Carsten Meier into possibly using a common type of weed to detect landmines.
“On scrubby flatland outside Copenhagen Airport,” we read, “on old army shooting ranges that have been seeded with land mines,” their biotech start-up company, Aresa, is growing large patches of thale-cress that have been genetically modified “so that its leaves turn red when the plant comes in contact with nitrogen dioxide — a compound that naturally leaches into the soil from unexploded land mines made from plastic and held together by leaky rubber seals.”
While more experiments are still needed, initial results seem to show that the weeds are indeed turning red where they should be.
Not to be outdone by the plant kingdom, some Croatian bees are learning to become mine detectors.
According to BBC News, Professor Nikola Kezic of Zagreb University and his colleagues are training honey bees to sniff out explosives that might have been missed by de-mining teams.
Training the bees to find mines takes place in a large net tent pitched on a lawn at the university's Faculty of Agriculture.
A hive of bees sits at one end, with several feeding points for the bees set up around the tent.
But only a few of the feeding points contain food, and the soil immediately around them has been impregnated with explosive chemicals.
The idea is that the bees' keen sense of smell soon associates the smell of explosives with food.
So like libidinous sows to truffles, they follow the scent of TNT while a special heat-sensitive camera tracks their every move. And if they've been trained properly, they should then “settle on areas of ground that smell of explosives,” their collective buzzing turned into an alarm bell.
But unlike those prized hogs, the weight of the insects won't trigger the discovered landmines, blowing them up into smithereens or into tonight's dinner.
Locating buried bombs is one thing; rendering them harmless is another, something which the thale-cress and Croatian bees are incapable of doing.
Fortunately, as but one example of a phytoremediating organism, there is the white-rot fungus Phlebia radiate, specifically mentioned by New Scientist in a short article about Robert Riggs' idea for what Subtopia brilliantly referred to as fungoidal bomb-hacking.
The invention, according to the patent application, entails mixing dormant fungal spores encased in biodegradable pellets into the explosive material. If the bomb explodes, so goes the fungal package as well. But if it remains undetonated, moisture will eventually find its way inside, allowing the spores to grow and proliferate. As the fungi become metabolically active, they begin to eat their way out of the capsules. And once they make contact with the explosive material, they too will begin metabolizing and degrading it.
Just so they won't feel left out, here are the other fungi mentioned by Riggs that are quite suitable for his invention: Ascomycete mycelia; Bjerkandera sordidicola sp BOS55; Pycnoporus cinnabarinus; Stachybotrys; Inonotius dryophilus; Perenniporia medulla-panis; Ganoderma oregonense; Trametes versicolor; Phellinus badius; Agaricus bisporus; Pieurotus ostreatus; Lentinula edodes; and Phanerochaete Chrysosporium.
Who wants to bet that somebody is now planning, if not already in mid-experiment, to genetically modify one of those? Because why involved yourself into making yet more bombs just to make them safer when you could forgo the manufacturing process altogether?
So: after surveying the weather and cosulting your manual on the wind dispersal pattern, you spray the special spores onto a minefield using a hydroseeder, the same one that groundskeepers to seed green grass on golf courses, and which Ares also used to cover their experimental field with thale-cress. Once on the ground, and activated by the meerest contact with soil, they begin sniffing out the tell-tale chemical signs of explosives, burrowing deep into the ground, their rhizomes following the scent of nitrogen diozide until they touch metal or plastic. The feast begins thereafter.
(“Bosquets de la principale parlie des jardin,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Moving away from landmines for the moment, it is worth mentioning, at this point, this recent article from National Geographic News regarding three species of fungi that apparently “grew larger and faster when exposed to high levels of radiation, even when deprived of nutrients.”
These fungi, we learn, contain “black pigment melanin -- a substance also present in human skin,” and “observations suggest that the pigment may play a role in the fungi similar to that of chlorophyll in plants, which traps energy from sunlight and converts it to 'food energy' needed to sustain life.”
Potentially, then, with edible mushrooms containing melanin or with plants genetically grafted with genes from these self-feeding fungi, you can grow your own food without the sun or gas-guzzling artificial light sources. In tunnel cities charged with ambient radioactivity. In Martian-bound colonial spaceships constantly bathed with cosmic rays. Or on the surface of Mars itself, in barrel vaulted greenhouses half-buried in solar irradiated soil.
To quickly revert back to the earlier subject of biodetection, we'll note that the article goes on to quote John Dighton, a fungi specialist who has done research at Chernobyl. He says, “Fungi that have been previously exposed to ionizing radiation have a propensity to direct their growth towards sources [of the radiation].”
Like Croatian bees to TNT, no?
(Above is the Shewanella oneidensis eating away some bits of the iron oxide mineral, hematite. An ideal candidate for bioremediation, they can neutralize uranium, nitrates, and other substances harmful to humans.)
Having now amassed a menagerie of sorts, there is only one thing left to do: you cultivate a garden out in the DMZ.
You take Aresa's entire supply of altered thale-cress, Kezic's colonies of trained bees, Rigg's bomb-eating mushrooms, and every other pytho-Frankensteins we haven't yet heard about or still inside petri dishes unspliced and awaiting reconstruction. And don't forget to take those field-tested Dutch hydroseeders, too. Or better yet, you build a bigger, jet-powered hydroseeder that can coat a hundred football fields in 5 seconds or less with your special slurry of bioremediators and mulch.
Once the landscape has been coated, you wait for a week or two, maybe interviewing soldiers for the visitor's guide and tourist brochures in the meantime or taking in the sights. Soon patches here and there become hosts to thriving communities, lush with prismatic vegetation and bustling with activity, and whose biodiversity may only be matched by the Amazon. And because the design and technology actually works, the land mines underneath these small parcels of land are getting dissolved, folding back into the earth.
The thrill-seekers descend en mass, navigating around these strange arboretums which they cannot enter. Off limits, unless they are really that adventurous. Consequently, the barren interstitial zones get littered with well-worn foot paths, which consolidate, after much further use, into a highly ordered Serpentine circulation system. Hints of Capability Brown perhaps. And maybe of John Loudon, via the furnishings of “exotic” plants. Or Gertrude Jekyll's impressionistic “hardy flower borders”?
And what's a picturesque garden without framed, scenic views for histrionics and philosophical musings. They will be created collaboratively. Not accidentally, as everything here has been designed intentionally, unlike the quasi-wilderness of the involuntary park.
And fountains? Sarah Pickering has been hired.
From Google Earth, the arboretums resolve into curlicued, self-interlacing parterres. Edenic parterres, it must be qualified. For much like the first, these new Edens have been made inaccessible by our own follies. We can only gaze at them in exile, and only through acts of redemption could we possibly be allowed to enter.
(“Projet pour le Jardin Anglo-chinois du Petit Trianon,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Has your village been flooded with landmines or is it now downwind from a nuclear meltdown?
Don't panic. Let's garden!
(“Jdée d'un Jardin Chinois,” from George Louis Le Rouge's Detail des nouveaux jardins a la mode, 1777.)
Vaux-le-Vicomte @ Wikipedia
Not A Cornfield
Wheatfield by Agnes Denes
Revival Field
Pteris vitata
Edenfern™
Monday, July 9, 2007
So it started with one very minor edit to the template, specifically, to replace the four lines from a Reginald Arkell poem with a Robert Smithson quotation, but that led to another tiny edit and then another one and then another and another. It simply snowballed from there. And after a week of almost nonstop tweaking, the tweaking still goes on.
We've been using browsershots.org to see what the blog now looks like in Windows, and because it's an easy option, in Linux as well. The site checks out fine on MSIE 7.0, but on previous versions, not so well. Fortunately, we won't be concerning ourselves with those older versions of MSIE.
However, we definitely want to resolve one problem on Firefox 2.0: the images are not loading. We absolutely have no idea why that is. Is it because they are transparent PNGs? Is it because the images are set (for the moment) to “private” on our Flickr account? Is it because of the machines and the network used by browsershots.org? Is it what?
In any case, please let us know what other problems you see layout-wise.
And postings will resume shortly.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
On blogs discovered recently or otherwise.
catieblog : weather permitting
dysturb.net
Side Effects
Temporary Travel Office
The Itinerant Urbanist
Where
Monday, July 2, 2007
Tunneling into the abyss to gaze out into the firmament. It's the Super-Kamiokande once more, simply because the whole thing's so incredibly beautiful, here photographed after its reconstruction and before it was filled with 50,000 tons of pure heavy water. Once disused again, can we have it, rent free? It'll be the summer residence for Pruned.
Download some high-resolution photos from here to decorate your websites and blogs.
Unraveling the cosmos in the depths of Antarctica
Friday, June 29, 2007
Some photos of Blind Light, one of several installations by Antony Gormley now on view at The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London till 19 August 2007.
As decribed by The Guardian, it's a 10-meter glass box fitted with “oscillating ultrasonic humidifiers to create a dense vapour reducing the visibility inside.”
Says the artist, “Architecture is supposed to be the location of security and certainty about where you are. It is supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty. Blind Light undermines all of that. You enter this interior space that is the equivalent of being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. It is very important for me that inside it you find the outside.”
Obviously we won't be able to physically experience Gromley's foggy exterior-interior, so at best we can only remark here how it reminds us not only of Philip Johnson's recently opened Glass House, arguably one of the finest examples of landscapes wherein the interior and exterior spaces are collapsed together quite harmoniously, and, curiously enough, of certain 18th century French salles à manger decorated to resemble the outdoors, such as a forest glade, whereby the vault over the room appears to be formed by arcing tree limbs and the floor a grassy lawn (e.g., the upper-left rump room in Ribart's elephant-house-fountain), but also of the borderless, architecture-less void prison in George Lucas' THX 1138 to where the eponynous rebel gets imprisoned and tortured, becoming, to use Gromley's words, “the immersed figure in an endless ground, literally the subject of the work” of a different, decidedly sinister kind.
Vapour City
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Trawling through the labyrinthine website of the U.S. Army of Corps of Engineers, always an enjoyable activity here at Pruned headquarters, you will eventually come across the Directional Spectral Wave Generator, an ultra-cool, hyper-sophisticated toy that can create “realistic three-dimensional waves in a laboratory environment for coastal projects that support coastal research and development and site-specific project studies.” Using this gadget you can make your own — what else — artificial waves: tsunamis, underwater explosions, anti-waves, cnoidal waves, and waves that can overturn hundred million dollar yachts.
So if you were ever to install one of these in your ex-urban sprawl, it will be the talk of the neighborhood. And if this one of a kind fountain were to be tele-choreographed by data sets from NOAA's Tsunami Center, your homestead will certainly be the talk of the county.
Towering tsunamis racing across the world's oceans simulated in real-time behind your MacMansion. There will be no need to watch CNN for updates on this major breaking news.
Or the rantings of Midwestern bloggers -- over their tax dollars being spent to replenish beaches inaccessible to the public and to protect coastal properties built or bought by idiots who know full well the risks and go begging for federal money (our money) when disaster strikes to rebuilt yet again on the same, no-less risky post-disaster sites, even when those wealthy bastards can afford to pay for the repairs! -- retransmitted to that fountain as swells and ripples.
Summertime backyard barbecues will never be the same.
And then there's the 10-ft and 5-ft Wave Flume Facility, and the Flood-Fighting Products Research Facility, and the Ice Engineering Flume Facility. What fun engineers must have during off-hours.
But let's move on to the main subject of this post, to a research facility that is better documented photographically: the 17th St Canal Physical Model.
The model measures 14,500 sq feet and replicates at 1:50 scale one of the New Orleans canals whose floodwalls failed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was constructed to help develop “time histories of local wave and water level forces acting on flood protection structures, including flow over the levee or floodwall, wave overtopping, and static and dynamic pressure forces on the structures.” To explain why the levees failed miserably, in other words.
If there is ever going to be a design competition for a Hurricane Katrina Memorial — and there definitely will be one — someone should propose repurposing this canal model, its bold yellow pigment preserved, into a park-fountain-memorial-plaza, programmed to be flooded and drained periodically. It's the anti-WTC Memorial. Less of an absence and more of an event.
You can be sure that its shallow pools will be very popular with kids during the hot, muggy summers. They might even get a lesson in natural and man-made hydrology.
But with every artificially-generated wave cresting and rolling over New Orleans one immediately becomes aware of what is being memorialized, without the intermediation of silly, obtuse symbolism, which in only two years time people will need Fodor's to decipher, or the semiotic screams of a post-modernist banshee.
Hopefully the project site will be along the banks, because rather than purchasing an expensive wave generator, you simply let the fluctuating water level of the Mississippi River inundate this city in miniature.
Or the next Category 5 hurricane?
In the ad-laden documentary Building the Future: The Quest for Water, produced by and broadcast last week on the Discover Channel, there was a featured segment on the Teatro del Agua, or Water Theater.
It's a desalination plant of sorts, designed by Grimshaw in collaboration with Charlie Paton for the post-industrial port area of Las Palmas in Spain's Canary Islands.
How does it work? According to Grimshaw: “The essence of the idea is to couple a series of evaporators and condensers such that the airborne moisture from the evaporators is then collected from the condensers, which are cooled by deep seawater. This produces large quantities of distilled water from seawater and is almost entirely driven by renewable energy. The structure is orientated perpendicular to the prevailing northeasterly wind to obtain a supply of ambient air. The flow rate is controlled by louvres on the leeward side, which also incorporates solar panels to provide heat for the evaporators.”
If you have a distaste for textual descriptions and rather watch an animation, simply head on over to here. It's the third one on the list.
Disappointingly both video and project statement do not give estimates on water production. Will it really provide, as the video says, “enough for a city”? At all times or only during particularly high humid and windy days?
We also hear from the video that it “needs no fuel.” Is it really self-evaporating and self-condensing? No fossil fuel is needed?
The very curious really want to know.
Quoting a bit more of the project statement: “The intention is to exploit the natural resources of the island, focusing on its two unique geographic features: steep beaches meaning that the cold water of the deep ocean is close to hand and can be siphoned off for air conditioning, and a steady wind direction that can be harnessed for the production of fresh water. The result should be the world's first harbourside development that is entirely cooled and irrigated by natural means.”
And here we are left to wonder why this “dramatic sculptural form” is relegated to a corner of the marina when it should invade the whole island, bifurcating up to the mountains, snaking out to sea, invading the entire archipelago and nearby Africa, recoiling, perambulant, up and down the Atlantic coast of the parched continent, crossing the Sahara towards the Middle East, saving all from the devastation of the Global Hydrological War.
Obviously.
Fog Water Project
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Paul Torrens is someone after our hearts, for he has developed a realistic computer 3D model that can predict crowd behavior in various spatial configurations.
It can simulate, for instance, how people navigate through busy city streets, shoppers through urban shopping centers, and tourists through unfamiliar landscapes.
For the greenish, this has obvious practical applications. According to a press release from Arizona State University, “the project will develop simulations to explore avenues of sustainability in downtown settings, such as how cities can promote walking as an alternative to driving, and how pedestrian flow can be better integrated with transit-oriented development.”
Of course, you can also use the 3D model to simulate far less quotidian, obscenely more interesting scenarios.
“The goal of this project is to develop a reusable and behaviorally founded computer model of pedestrian movement and crowd behavior amid dense urban environments, to serve as a test-bed for experimentation,” says Torrens. “The idea is to use the model to test hypotheses, real-world plans and strategies that are not very easy, or are impossible to test in practice.”
Such as the following: 1) simulate how a crowd flees from a burning car toward a single evacuation point; 2) test out how a pathogen might be transmitted through a mobile pedestrian over a short period of time; 3) see how the existing urban grid facilitate or does not facilitate mass evacuation prior to a hurricane landfall or in the event of dirty bomb detonation; 4) design a mall which can compel customers to shop to the point of bankruptcy, to walk obliviously for miles and miles and miles, endlessly to the point of physical exhaustion and even death; 5) identify, if possible, the tell-tale signs of a peaceful crowd about to metamorphosize into a hellish mob; 6) determine how various urban typologies, such as plazas, parks, major arterial streets and banlieues, can be reconfigured in situ into a neutralizing force when crowds do become riotous; and 7) conversely, figure out how one could, through spatial manipulation, inflame a crowd, even a very small one, to set in motion a series of events that culminates into a full scale Revolution or just your average everyday Southeast Asian coup d'état — regime change through landscape architecture.
Or you quadruple the population of Chicago. How about 200 million? And into its historic Emerald Necklace system of parks, you drop an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, a pedophile, an Ebola patient, an illegal migrant worker, a swarm of zombies, and Paris Hilton. Then grab a cold one, sit back and watch the landscape descend into chaos. It'll be better than any megablockbuster movie you'll see this summer.
Equally plausible, Chicago does not suffer total critical system failure. In fact, the built environment is surprisingly malleable, so very accommodating to a wide range of extreme radical transformations, that the city actually thrives during this catastrophe and in the end successfully expels the intruders. Far from being a vector of apocalypses, cities will save the world.
In any case, the resulting video from the simulation will be entered into a film festival near you.
The Kumbh Mela Array
Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge
The vortex
Advertisement: Crowd Dynamics Ltd.
The Parkless Park Resurfaces
The Parkless Park
Counting Crowds
Subtopia: Urbanization of Panic
City of Sound: Robert Krulwich
