All posts by Tim De Chant

A car, exploded ∞

Crystal Bennes, reporting for Domus:

The press release doesn’t specify how it was exactly that Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda came to meet Mitsuru Kariya, project designer for the new Honda Civic, but I bet that it wasn’t in a cloakroom in Davos. Swipes at the AccelorMittal Orbit aside, for Ikeda’s newest work, data.anatomy [civic], Honda stumped up a lot more than mere cash: Kariya’s team handed over the complete set of CAD files and wireframes for the brand new, ninth-generation Honda Civic. Ikeda said it was like being given a secret file from the FBI.

 

The pond beneath the Empire State Building ∞

Geoff Manaugh:

Something I’ve long meant to post about—and isn’t news at all—is the fact that there is a lost lake in the basement of the Empire State Building. Or a pond, more accurately speaking.

One of many sad stories of street grids running roughshod over the landscape. But still a great ghost of geography.

Chicago, the bane of trains ∞

John Schwartz, reporting for the New York Times:

Shippers complain that a load of freight can make its way from Los Angeles to Chicago in 48 hours, then take 30 hours to travel across the city. A recent trainload of sulfur took some 27 hours to pass through Chicago — an average speed of 1.13 miles per hour, or about a quarter the pace of many electric wheelchairs.

And I thought rush hour on the Kennedy Expressway was bad. The good news is, they’re in the process of fixing it. Amtrak and the Metra commuter rail should benefit, too. The commingling of freight and passenger rail traffic is one of the American rail system’s many flaws. Separating the two—even if only in the tangled parts of Chicago—should help smooth operations throughout the country.

One question, though: Why has this taken so long?

Pub shed ∞

Mapping your five minute stumbling distance. An unconventional approach to urban planning.

Interactive web map of urban resource use ∞

Two clever MIT grad students have built a web mapping tool that allows you to explore population density, energy usage, and material usage at the neighborhood scale for 42 U.S. cities.

They earn bonus points for providing web map service (WMS) links so you can plug their data into your next geospatial project.

Who killed men's hats? ∞

The great Robert Krulwich:

Until cars became the dominant mode of personal transport, there was no architectural reason to take your hat off between home and office. With Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highway system came cars, and cars made hats inconvenient, and for the first time men, crunched by the low ceilings in their automobiles, experimented with hat-removal, and got to like it.

And ruined his father’s business in the process.

When flying 720 miles takes 12 hours ∞

Jad Mouawad, reporting for the New York Times:

It took Josh Hunter three separate planes, two connections and a two-hour drive to get from Mobile, Ala., to Cincinnati at Easter. When he added it all up, his 720-mile trip had lasted 12 hours — about the same it would have taken him to drive.

“The whole point of flying should be to save a lot of time, and I didn’t,” Mr. Hunter said.

Remind me again, why don’t we need high-speed rail?

If football withers, what happens to small towns?

Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin

Anyone who is a football fan (and many who are not) know of Junior Seau’s death on May 2. The tragic event has been ruled a suicide, and the manner in which it happened—Seau shot himself in the chest—has people asking questions beyond the usual, “Why?” It’s not a common way to commit suicide, and it mirrors the suicide of Dave Duerson in February 2011, another retired NFL player. Before Duerson died he sent a text message to his family, telling them he wanted his brain studied for evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Seau’s family recently agreed to the same.

CTE is a disease that results from too many concussions and other head injuries. It’s symptoms are frightening, and include psychotic symptoms, memory loss, and Parkinson’s disease-like symptoms in later years. It can only be diagnosed post-mortem.

Recent exposés by the New York Times and other publications have highlighted the link between hard hits in sports like football and CTE. As a result, the National Football League has amended its rules to limit the risk of concussions. But they can’t take the inherent violence out of the current sport. Brain-jarring collisions are likely to remain common. For some, big hits are part of the appeal of the sport. Yet as word spreads of the link between CTE and football, I suspect fewer people will feel that way. As Rob Mitchum said, “It’s getting harder and harder to innocently watch football.”

That has some questioning the future of football. John Gruber linked to a piece over at Grantland written by economists Tyler Cowen and David Grier back in February, after Duerson died. In it, they detail the hypothetical decline of football in the coming decades. That may surprise many of you: An America without football seems like an impossibility. But keep in mind that football wasn’t always the juggernaut it is today.

Football’s uncertain future doesn’t exactly make me feel rosy inside—I’ve done some pretty silly things just to watch Packer games—but neither does the thought of NFL players living on average nearly 20 years less than everyone else.

Football’s decline could have far reaching consequences, Cowen and Grier point out, from possible decreases in binge drinking on college campuses to reduced profitability for cable TV companies. But there’s another part of their thought-exercise that stood out to me, and one that’s relevant to Per Square Mile. Cowen and Grier:

Overall, the loss of football could actually increase migration from rural to urban areas over time. Football-dependent areas are especially prominent in rural America, and some of them will lose a lot of money and jobs.

They use Green Bay as a case study. The Packers’ Lambeau Field adds $282 million to the local economy, supports 2,560 jobs, and contributes $15.2 million in taxes. While Green Bay may be an outlier as the smallest city in the NFL, many small university towns are similarly dependent on collegiate football. If football becomes too much of a liability and universities drop the sport, then many small towns will lose significant portions of their economy.

Let’s say these things come to pass, that football’s liability causes it to disappear at the high school and college levels, that schools no longer feed the NFL the talent it needs to stay on top, and that football in general withers like boxing did in the first half of the 20th century. What will replace it? If Cowen and Grier are right, that football is a small town and rural sport—and I believe they are—then what is an urban sport? Basketball or even soccer or track and field, as they suggest? Or another relatively unknown sport? Only time will tell, but given the recent spate of tragic deaths among football players, we may not have to wait long to find out.

Photo by compujeramy.

Interview: Eli Kintisch on art and climate change

A Sam Jury film

Last week I attended an art exhibition with a unique theme—exploring climate extremes—and curator—Eli Kintisch, an MIT Knight science journalism fellow on leave from the journal Science. Kintisch has spent the last year preparing for the exhibition, called “To Extremes: Public Art in a Changing World”. Part of that preparation involved hosting what he called “Climate/Art Pizza”. The small gatherings can best be described as salons: Artists, scientists, and journalists met in his apartment here in Cambridge overlooking the Charles River to discuss how art and science intersect under the rubric of climate change. Entries to “To Extremes” followed similar guidelines.

The exhibition ended last week, but for Kintisch real challenge lies ahead. He is now working to make the winning entry—an ambitious public art installation—a reality. I caught up with him this week over email.

Tim De Chant: What inspired you to explore climate change through art?

Eli Kintisch: Data suggest that large swaths of the American public know little about climate change and have little interest in the topic. By contrast, the readers of most of my stories I strongly suspect have well-formed views on the topic, so I seek now to reach new audiences who don’t know what Science magazine is, who James Hansen is, or even that the planet has warmed 0.8 ˚C since preindustrial times. 

In an age where everyone pre-filters their news with handheld computers or google news, I figure building public art will:

a) reach broad groups who don’t read science or environmental stories (and can’t run into them by chance reading a paper newspaper) and 

b) use a new visual language that appeals to those who might be turned off or bored by such articles.

De Chant: Has the intersection of art and science been a longstanding interest of yours?

Kintisch: Somewhat—I first got into it in an active way when I designed this Earth Emergency Procedures Safety Card as schwag for my 2010 book Hack the Planet—on real glossy card stock. Artist Benjamin Marra, a friend of mine, helped me layout and did all the drawings, and the give and take with him, plus the challenge of making visual what I had previously described with words.

De Chant: How were the entrants judged? What was the balance between art and science?

Kintisch: To Extremes is what’s known in the art world as a juried exhibition—a fancy name for an art contest whose winners appear in an exhibition. I contacted various curators for suggestions of artists to invite, and invited 50 of them, nearly all American. More than half submitted work in the form of proposed public art works.

Those proposals were to make up the exhibition, and the jury, which included science and art experts, had to choose which pieces to go in the final exhibition. They tried to balance artistic merit with potential for impact with integrity to the science of extremes and climate. They selected nine proposals and the runner up and winner. I was truly inspired by the discussions about each piece—they really embraced the spirit of the exhibition I had created, applying their taste and expertise to choose edgy, creative but solid pieces for inclusion.

(I wasn’t on the jury, though I was present during their deliberations.)

De Chant: Why an exhibition climate extremes and not another aspect of climate change like CO2 concentration or sea level rise?

Kintisch: Mostly I pegged this exhibition with the release of the IPCC special report on extreme events, released in November ’11. I’d consider creating art competitions/juried exhibitions in the future around other aspects of climate.

De Chant: Tell me, what drew you and the other jurists to the winning entry?

Kintisch: Sam Jury’s piece is a one-hour long video loop that explores climate adaptation in her inimitable, eerie/beautiful style. But an algorithm we are designing that responds to real-time climate data will trigger the playing of a bank of videos that explore specific extremes—i.e. extreme rain in the location of the video installation will trigger a video that visually explores the psychological and physical aspects of excess water.

The judges didn’t release a statement, but they seemed to believe Sam Jury’s piece’s a) visual beauty b) direct relevance to climate extremes and c) clever embodiment of the To Extremes theme made it the winner.

De Chant: What are the plans for the winning entry?

Kintisch: Sam Jury (who lives in Cambridge) and I spent three days last week meeting with Boston area foundations, curators, art experts and city officials to figure out how to bring her piece, which right now is just a proposal, to life. It’s audacious, no doubt: to make it work it would have to run continuously over a year or so, Sam thinks. We believe we can make it happen by tapping all the creative interest that Boston has, and our piece might even appear in other cities too.

It won’t be cheap to pull off, but a video installation would cost a lot less than other public art projects, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Stay tuned!

Rural life without the hard edges ∞

Craig Leisher, writing for NYT Green:

Would you like to live a year of your life in someplace stunningly beautiful? A place where the views stretch to the horizon? A place surrounded by forest and lakes where birds are all that break the morning stillness?

Yes.

Forestry as insurance ∞

On parts of the Fukushima coast, thick pine forests drained the tsunami’s power before it reached one village, which was largely spared. As a result, the prefecture is replanting in the hopes that future generations will benefit similarly.

Via Yale e360.

More than just flora and fauna

Landscape near Paris, Paul Cézanne

Peter Sigrist, writing at Polis about what he sees as ecology’s shortcomings:

Ecology “proper” is currently limited in addressing human habitation. It doesn’t usually incorporate the theory or methods of fields like economics, anthropology, political science, sociology and history. Many subfields have emerged in answer to the need for more detailed study of human-environment interaction, including human ecology, cultural ecology, political ecology, environmental sociology, historical ecology, ecological anthropology, ecological economics and ecological urbanism. But most are not closely integrated with mainstream ecology and its methods, which are primarily focused on nonhuman nature. Many ecologists portray human environmental impact as a kind of alien intervention into the natural world, and don’t attempt to understand the political, social, economic and cultural processes through which it takes place.

Sigrist isn’t entirely wrong—our understanding of the natural world must consider human impacts. The thing is, many ecologist already do that. If Sigrist had written this decades ago, I would concede his point. But times have changed. No serious ecologist draws a firm boundary between natural and anthropogenic spheres. For years, ecologists have widely acknowledged that no part of the Earth is untouched by human influences. Some may still cling to the old distinction between human and wild, but they are increasingly few and far between. Climate change has thoroughly disabused most of that notion.

Sigrist further laid out his argument in a second post, stating:

Incorporating useful elements of cultural landscape, urban political ecology and ecological urbanism can make ecology more attuned to the ways humans experience and influence cities. This is more than a shared analytical framework or conceptual lexicon (Gandy 2008: 567); it means actual integration so that ecologists are equipped to address the full complexity of human environmental relations and help make cities more just, healthy and beneficial to the planet as a whole.

To say too few ecologists study human-environment interactions isn’t just unfair, it’s incorrect. Sigrist seems to misunderstand ecology and its relation to the myriad subfields he listed above. The ecologists he describes—the ones that focus on strictly “natural” ecosystems—aren’t members of an umbrella field but a subfield. They’re just one type of ecologist. The people who study other subfields of ecology? They’re ecologists, too.

What Sigrist is proposing for ecology already exists. Perhaps he wants ecologists to avoid over-specialization.¹ Perhaps what he means to say is that there needs to be more collaboration and cross-pollination between ecologists of different subfields. He’s not wrong—there could always be more. But he’s ignoring what’s already out there. I know ecologists of all stripes—field, physiological, sociological, and so on—who collaborate with environmental historians, economists, even electrical engineers. I know ecologists who write papers about the value of ecosystem services, how to use Wall Street’s data processing techniques to understand the water cycle, or how spirituality can affect the conservation of biodiversity. Hell, I’ve been to conferences where ecologists have wrung their hands about how ecology needs more collaboration. If anyone is conscious of the need for interdisciplinary collaboration, it’s ecologists. After all, ecology is the original interdisciplinary science.

Again, that’s not to say we shouldn’t work harder to identify how humans are affecting the natural world. I’m the last to argue against that. But we need to identify our shortcomings where they actually exist, not where we imagine them to be.

  1. Not a bad idea, but good luck getting it to happen. Despite calls for interdisciplinary research, the trend for individuals is toward increasing specialization. Nipples on the surface of human knowledge and all that. ↩

Landscape near Paris, Paul Cézanne, National Gallery of Art.

Silo trees ∞

A.G. Sulzberger, reporting for the New York Times:

The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas.

Will organic food fail to feed the world? ∞

David Biello, reporting for Scientific American:

“We found that, overall, organic yields are considerably lower than conventional yields,” explains McGill’s Verena Seufert, lead author of the study to be published in Nature on April 26. “But, this yield difference varies across different conditions. When farmers apply best management practices, organic systems, for example, perform relatively better.”

I’ve often wondered if organic farming would be up to the task. The good news is it appears to be, but with a big caveat: You have to know how to do it properly. Lack of knowledge about conventional farming practices is already a huge problem in many developing countries, resulting in high soil erosion and low yields. Organic practices are a level or two above that.

Unused US hydropower could supply 1.5 million megawatt-hours annually ∞

John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica:

In the US, the loss of landscape and wildlife to hydropower has made the installation of major new dams very unlikely; in fact, the government is seriously considering removing a number of existing ones, and has recently dismantled some smaller ones. But two reports by the Department of the Interior suggest that this doesn’t mean the end of new hydropower in the states. The DOI has gone through its catalog and identified existing dams and canals that could be fitted with generators, and found the potential for up to 1.5 million megawatt-hours annually.

Africa for sale ∞

Claire Provost, writing for the Guardian:

Researchers estimate that more than 200m hectares (495m acres) of land – roughly eight times the size of the UK – were sold or leased between 2000 and 2010. Details of 1,006 deals covering 70.2m hectares mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America were published by the Land Matrix project, an international partnership involving five major European research centres and 40 civil society and research groups from around the world.

That’s almost 5 percent of Africa’s agricultural land. Bad news for a continent that already has trouble growing enough food to feed its people.

Live from your backyard ∞

A photo gallery of creatures captured in people’s backyards, from the wild and wooly to the great and small. A delightful and not-so-subtle reminder that nature is everywhere.