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Saturday, March 22, 2008
Blogs, blogs, blogs, except when they're not.
1) Three by “arcady”: gardenhistorygirl, good church design and playscapes.
2) СОВЕТСКАЯ АРХИТЕКТУРА, or Soviet Architecture, as documented by other cosmic communist constructions photographers.
3) Materialecology, by Neri Oxman.
4) At 168 Elm Ave., there is a sustainable pilot project with green stormwater management technologies, best management practices (BMP's) and Low Impact Development (LID) principles.
5) Grist has a special series on the Army Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River. There are 8 articles.
* New convertible version of the Ford Shelby GT available beginning this summer
* New signature Vista Blue exterior with Shelby GT Silver stripes
* Production of 2008 Shelby GT aimed at 2,300 to assure exclusivity for collectors
* Ford Mustang is America's top-selling convertible
Friday, March 21, 2008
To coincide with tomorrow's World Water Day, the day chosen by the UN “to draw attention to the plight of the more than 1 billion people world wide that lack access to clean, safe drinking water,” Nature has published a special issue on the present and worsening global fresh water shortage.
Our planet is facing a water crisis in public health: more than a billion people in developing nations lack access to safe drinking water, and more than 2 billion lack proper sanitation. And in the near future, water shortages are likely to spread into other key sectors — notably agriculture and energy.
While not merely pointing out the obvious, the issue also takes a look at some of the ways the crisis is being tackled. For instance, you can read about some of the new methods to disinfect and decontaminate water; new efforts to increase water supplies through the safe re-use of wastewater; and new strategies to increase farmers' yield in places where rains are often unreliable.
There is also an article on new technologies to greatly reduce the impact of desalination, called “the most energy-intensive form of water supply,” on the environment.
Every article is available online to non-subscribers but only temporarily, as some of them will be taken behind Nature's pay-per-view firewall in a week's time. So it's a good idea now to download the PDFs and save them in your archives.
Meanwhile, while they are still freely accessible, we'd like to take a closer look at one article about India's gargantuan endeavor “to link the majority of its major river basins through a vast network of canals, diverting billions of litres from the country's more water-rich river basins to those that are water-deprived.”
As if imagined by rogue Army Corps engineers driven out of town after the Katrina fiasco, the project would re-knit the country's hydrological network “through a 10,000-kilometre long network of 30 canals, several of which will intersect with more than one river. The project, which is estimated to cost about US$200 billion, also includes the construction of 32 major dams.”
It's terrestrial reconfiguration as a means to control weather. A recontoured landscapes where the effects of the monsoon cycle are distributed throughout the Subcontinent. A new geography where “dry seasons” and “wet seasons” become less of a temporal experience.
[T]he interlinking project will put an additional 35 million hectares under irrigation — close to doubling the area fed by major irrigation projects in 2003, according to a press statement by Suresh Prabhu, then chairman of the NWDA Taskforce on Interlinking Rivers. In doing so, he stated, the project will combat drought in 250,000 hectares across the country, and reduce flood damage along the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers basins by some 20–30%. The perennial flooding of these two rivers, which together carry 60% of the nation's freshwater resources, last year caused $850-million worth of damage and killed more than 1,000 people.
Moreover:
[T]he project could also supply about 34,000 megawatts of hydropower — roughly doubling the current level of hydropower, which lies at just over 25% of the country's current electricity needs.
While hard facts are hard to come by, some are nevertheless considering the scheme as the biggest water project in the history of the world, even surpassing China's South-to-North Water Transfer Project.
Of course, as with any new hydrological project of this magnitude, there are calls for less monumental schemes. As but one example of a low impact strategy put forward to solve the water crisis, we read:
The solution lies in better management of existing water resources, rather than importing water for irrigation. A simple way to do this is by using large tanks to collect rainwater, which is later supplied to fields during dry periods. Indian irrigation practices could also be made more efficient. A lot of water is lost in evaporation or through drainage from unsealed irrigation canals, and the common practice of flood irrigation is wasteful compared with drip irrigation, which supplies water directly to the plant's roots. But the water used for irrigation is free, so Indian farmers have little incentive to adopt more economical methods.
But this is India, where “disciplines such as physics and engineering are highly respected” and the environmental sciences are the “untouchables: unseen and unheard.”
As Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, once said, dams are the “temple[s] of modern India.”
So one wonders what new deities will spring forth from these concrete rivers and what new rituals will be created to celebrate the wonders of moving water against topography, against gravity.
Will these canals be lined with ghats, like those steps found in the holy city of Varanasi, on which pilgrims descend to “launch religious offerings of sweet-meats, fruit and flowers downstream on a small straw mat” without wading through fecal matter, garbage and strange odors?
Is the spatial ordering of this vast network of canals, as illustrated in the map of India above, really just a 21st century free-form interpretation of the mandala or some other formalized symbol of Indic mythology?
If not, could they be the markings of new pilgrimage routes?
Perhaps when and if the project ever gets finished, a new chapter of the Mahabharata will be written, its epic tales of demons and gods, sages and wise men, civil servants and bureaucrats, hydroengineers and environmentalists largely taking place in these new landscapes.
Dispatches from the Super-Versailles
Floridian Theatrum Machinarum
Notes on Some Selections from the Visual Images Database of the Mississippi Valley Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers
Need to get to another city really fast? Just drive your car to the nearest airport, take off, land in your destination city, and drive to where you want to go. That's the scenario envisioned by Milner Motors as it unveils a prototype of its AirCar, coupled with its ElectriCar, at the 2008 New York auto show.
The AirCar prototype won't fly you anywhere now, but you can drive it, and it could be your transportation of the future.
Check out CNET Car Tech for more coverage of the 2008 New York auto show.
This past Wedneday evening, the Audi Forum in New York City hosted a gala party attended by celebrities and the weary automotive press in town to cover the New York Auto Show. The beautiful people on hand included Tom Brady (celebrity status: A), Tyson Beckford (celebrity status: B), Will Arnett (celebrity status: A-), Denise Rich (celebrity status: ?) and members of the Gossip Girl cast (according to my fiance, celebrity status: better than Tom Brady). Though Autoblog was not in attendance (thus reducing the list of A list celebrities), Audi was kind enough to send us pics of the special A5 it revealed that night (and Tom Brady sitting in the R8 TDI Le Mans concept from the Geneva Motor Show). Custom-painted by New York artist Hunt Slomen, the coupe features a swath of art that flows from the car's hood and down across the driver-side door. The artwork is abstract, but we can make out white birds, which our single semester of Art History 101 tells us represents doves, which in turn represents peace. Or it could represent the jobless rate of carrier pigeons in this age of digital e-mail. The custom-painted A5 will be donated to Denise Rich's G&P Foundation for Cancer Research and auctioned after it tours the country for a bit.
[Source: autoblog]
Thursday, March 20, 2008
According to The New York Times, scientists at Case Western University have created a material that stiffens from a soft state when stimulated. It can also do the reverse, from pliable to rigid. This material, we read, was inspired by the skin of sea cucumbers.
That skin is a nanocomposite material, consisting of tiny fibers of collagen embedded in a softer matrix. When the animal secretes certain chemicals, the fibers form bonds and the whole matrix stiffens.
In their work, described in Science, Dr. Weder and his colleagues used cellulose nanofibers in a polymer matrix. A major difficulty, Dr. Weder said, was having the nanofibers distributed properly, “like a three-dimensional spider web.”
For the time being, experiments on it mainly involve finding new ways to treat Parkinson's disease and other neurological disorders.
Hopefully to no one's surprise, we wonder if they can be used as a building and landscape construction material. An entire city built on sea cucumber-like skins.
Perhaps in next year's City of the Future competition, a brash, up-and-coming design firm will propose encasing San Diego in “stimuli-responsive polymer nanocomposites” so that when the next 10.1 earthquake comes along, the whole city contracts to protect itself.
No, wait — shouldn't that be the other way around? From a hard state to a more elastic state to better ride out the tectonic hurricane? When the tremors end, houses, highways and sewers revert back to their solid state with nary a crack. But if there are any, the sea cucumber polymer matrix will simply patch things up, healing itself, as it were.
Or has someone proposed this already?
In between seismic events, some kind of architectural hacking might ensue.
SpongeCity
Japan's Best Car magazine must have the most well-funded art department in the entire world of publishing, if their prolific renderings of as-yet non-existent cars are anything to go by. This time, they've given their take on Toyota's successor to the Supra.
According to BC, the 2010 Supra will most likely make use of a naturally-aspirated 3.7-litre V6 driving through the rear wheels (natch). Power should be around the 350 metric horsepower mark and forced-induction may very well become an option. The overall proportions are a close match with the FT-HS concept, except this time the body design reprises the wide n' curvy haunches of the last-gen JZA80 Supra.
The front lights even replicate the lamp placement of the JZA80, and the C-pillar also echoes that of its predecessor. BC's rendering even showcases the FTHS's trick carbon-fibre rims, as well as its bonnet "bulge", however one thing we'd liked to have seen carried over from the FTHS concept was its sexy rear light cluster. Instead, Best Car chose to go with some kind of Ferrari/Elise type arrangement.
