other

Just what it says it is.

[via rantings of an arab chick]

We’re in the process of closing on some beautiful property outside of Walla Walla in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. As a result, we’ve been very interested in pre-fab and/or very inexpensive structures that will allow us to enjoy the property on long weekends. “The Shack at Hinkle Farm” by Broadhurst Architects is exactly what I have in mind, a small structure for basic living which benefits from an outstanding location and a rustic DIY ethic. Hand-powered plumbing, rain water shower, and oil lamps on this one although I’d be interested in looking into solar systems for some power needs.

The great thing about small structures like this is that they often fall under the size required for permitting.

Photos by Anice Hoachlander/HD Photo

On Architectural Record and the Spec Sheet.

On Materialicious

On Treehugger

Changing your assumptions about what a car should be. The BMW GINA (Geometry and function In “N” Adaptations) is not only beautiful, it’s more functional - lighter, less energy required in the manufature of materials, etc.

I think it would be pretty cool to own multiple skins for your car and swap them out when you tire of one. Oh wait, now we’re getting back into wasteful aren’t we?

This one just focuses on design questions.

While not the typical Puget News fare, this was just too good to pass up and was making the rounds of some of my climbing friends.

I’ve done quite a bit of climbing throughout the years but I’ve never risked my life just getting to the climbing area. This video shows a completely hairball path to a famous climbing area in Spain. Billy goats and rock climbers only!

Sara Lloyd has published a wonderful and informative manifesto about the place of publishers in a rapidly changing reading landscape. It’s an absolute “must-read” for anyone involved in the production of written content (bloggers, authors, publishers, and marketers alike). There’s enough information here to feed a lot of different blog posts so don’t be surprised if you see me turning back to this one with some frequency.

Publishers – and, importantly, authors - will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks.

If you have a few minutes today, give it a read and then post a comment telling me what interested you or what you’d like for me to follow up on in more detail. I’ll be happy to dig down into anything here.

Easy Links to all 6 parts of the manifesto:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5
6. Part 6

An award winning article regarding the physics of violin acoustics and the mysteries of the “Stradivarius sound.” A very compelling read that makes me want to learn to play violin - showing it as a complex and sensual instrument while breaking some of the mystical taboos associated with the greatest instruments.

Every violin, whether a Stradivarius or the cheapest factory-made copy, has a distinctive “voice” of its own. Just as any musician can immediately recognize the difference between Domingo and Pavarotti singing the same operatic aria, so a skilled violinist can distinguish between different qualities in the sound produced by individual Stradivari or Guarneri violins. The challenge for scientists is to characterize such differences by physical measurements. Indeed, over the last century and a half, many famous physicists have been intrigued by the workings of the violin, with Helmholtz, Savart and Raman all making vital contributions.

Article originally discovered via this post over at Signal vs. Noise.

Living in the countryside of Northern California when I was about 12, going through some of the things my parents had stuffed into my large bedroom closet because their own large bedroom closet was stuffed to overflowing, I discovered a boxed set of 5 Vonnegut books from the 70s - my dad’s books. The covers were gaudy comic-book like things with lurid female imagery and so I asked my dad about them. His response was that they were “books for adults,” they had “complex themes,” and I “probably wouldn’t like them.” Of course that set my mind’s course upon immediately ripping through them all. I quickly tossed whatever Dragonlance novel I was reading at the time and read straight through “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Breakfast of Champions.”

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At 8,000 euros I’m going to have to call this one “unnecessary.”

Try going to the Seattle Library on a rainy or a cold day and counting the number of homeless people taking refuge there. This points to a huge problem. These people need help beyond finding temporary shelter in our public structures. In Seattle, our new library cost more than $165 million and yet we have not found a better way to take care of our mentally ill and chronically homeless populations than to let them inside in the morning, monitor them for behavioral issues, and then clear them every night.

Former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library system, Chip Ward, has written an outstanding piece called “How The Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel” (found via a short pointer piece at LibraryJournal.com) for the Atlantic Free Press, in a column called Hard Truths for Hard Times. This is a fascinating read and it touches on some real loopholes and ineffectiveness in our policies to deal with the mentally ill. I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to read it.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America’s public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

The library wrestles with where to draw the line on odor. The law is unclear. An aggressive patron in New Jersey successfully sued a public library for banning him because of his body odor. That decision has had a chilling effect on public libraries ever since. When library users complain about the odor of transients, librarians usually respond that there isn’t much they can do about it. Lately, libraries are learning to write policies on odor that are more specific and so can be defended in court, but such rules are still hard to enforce because smell is such a subjective thing — and humiliating someone by telling him he stinks is an awkward experience that librarians prefer to avoid. None of this was covered in library school.

The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it’s downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.

What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy — then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: “What are they doing in here?” “Can’t you control them?” Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.

Watching “Novel Reflections on the American Dream” (link to trailer | website), a new documentary on PBS, is an illuminating two hour experience which steps through 7 great American novels and how they’ve each confronted the subject of American idealism and pushed our perceptions of what it means to be “self-made.” Delving into issues of class, racism, feminism, politics, and soul-searching, this documentary is not to be missed.

I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve only read 2 of these books, “Seize the Day” and “The Great Gatsby.” I definitely intend to get to “The Grapes of Wrath” one of these days. Any others I shouldn’t miss?

1. 

“Sister Carrie,” Theodore Dreiser

2. 

“The House of Mirth,” Edith Wharton

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