It seems that scientists at the University of Oregon have discovered a way to make liquid droplets walk on their own.
Even uphill!
In the phenomenon called the Leidenfrost effect, or film boiling, liquid droplets on a surface heated above their boiling point form an underlayer of vapor, which suspends them above the surface like a hovercraft. Normally, the droplets would move about erratically. However, Professor Heiner Linke and his colleagues have discovered that if “placed on asymmetrically structured surfaces, such as a piece of brass with periodic, saw-tooth shaped ridges” they would self-propel themselves in one direction. And quite literally using their own steam power.
Professor Heiner Linke is not yet certain where the propulsive forces come from, but he has already speculated on how it can be applied: “This method uses heat to pump liquid, and could therefore be used in pumps for coolants, for instance to cool microprocessors. Such a pump would need no additional power (it's run by the heat that needs to be removed anyway), it would have no moving parts, and it wouldn't require a thermostat.”
Of course, I'd like to know if you can construct a landscape feature exploiting this phenomenon. Parks criscrossed by racheted channels heated simply by the Earth or the parking garage underneath, and on these channels, giant film-boiling droplets race past by, indifferent to gravity.
If you turn on the heat, will the Chicago River re-reverses to its original course? Probably not, but I'd like that to see that happen as an annual event.
Shadow by Adam Frank and Zack Booth Simpson is “an interactive installation that projects a disembodied, autonomous, human shadow on the ground. This apparently living shadow attempts to merge itself with the viewer's real shadow. When this occurs, the invisible figure, implied by the virtual shadow, inhabits the viewer's own personal space. Real-time 3D graphics and video sensing are used to produce this work of interactive light.”
Coming soon to back alleyways, undergound parking garages, deserted downtown streets, elevators, and hospital corridors.
Found a short AVI file while cleaning our archives. It's from Crowd IT, a utility tool for 3d Studio Max that can simulate very large crowds, thereby allowing you to make your computer generated landscapes, cities, and buildings seem more realistic, if so desired.
Probably there are better crowd-rendering tools out there, but for now, we are more interested in this particular movie and its complete lack of context. There is simply the crowd, following some sort of external parameters imposed by the designer, creating patterns and timelines.
And so we wonder: can you create a park without its accoutrements — no shrubs, no benches, no paths, no water features — but simply the pageantry of mass psychology? No tectonic elements to program activities or direct traffic, only a flat terrain and its mass ornament, self-organizing (or even self-destructing) under its own internal logic.
Or do they already exist? Are streets in a way already a parkless park? How about prison courtyards — where the built environment always plays secondary to group dynamics? People-watching as if your life depends on it, and it does.
Lastly, what will the crowd actually do in a real parkless park? What Busby Berkeley musical formations will thousands of people enact? And what would happen if I throw in a screaming man infected with Avian flu? Or confect a scene in which an al-Qaeda cell finds itself in the company of a pack of Texans? How about a pedophile or two? Would the crowd keep its distance or swarm around and stone them to death? Or how about a zombie?
A cylindrical projection of Jupiter stitched together from photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft during its December 2000 flyby of the planet.
Can someone confirm for me whether or not the Army Corps of Engineers are salivating over this photo? Is it tempting them, taunting them to pack up all their trinkets — their weirs, flumes, levees, spillways, etc. &mdash and head on over to the gas giant to arrest its whorls and vortices in time and place?
The Giant Red Spot National Park. And no, it's not a dog park.
But as there really is no financial or ecological reason to be creating another national park, landscape astroengineers might just simply construct dentritic hyper-mississipian superstructures — a Jovian Theatrum Machinarum — to funnel its turbulent bands over and under, disrupting their neat parallel formation. Vortices against vortices. Cataracts against cataracts. All colliding and churning to the point when, despite falling short of critical mass and what the laws of physics might have to say otherwise, Jupiter collides in on itself and finally detonates, reborn into a star.
The Star of Fisk. The Star of Pruned? Perhaps there will be a naming competition.
This is a very old story, but it involves a perennial subject here on Pruned. Architect John Ronan apparently wants to turn Chicago's old main post office behemoth—located a mere block away from Sears Tower—into the largest municipal cemetery in the world. In Downtown Chicago!
I'm all atwitter.
Once the major processing and storage center for interstate commerce and communication, John Ronan wants to return the building to its former function, though this time to process and store something of a different sort: dead bodies — by the millions. And he sees them “floating up the Chicago River, driving down the Eisenhower, riding in on the rails.”
It's worth mentioning that Union Station and the Greyhound Station are a block away, and the Blue rail line, which connects directly to O'Hare International Airport, is even closer. In fact, it sits on top of rails, an expressway, and a subway. It could not have been better sited. The singularity of a spectral vortex. An axis mundi.
There are a lot things we like about the project. Actually, we like everything about it. Obviously at the top of the list are its location and its fidelity to the existing façade and superstructure.
Also at the top is Ronan's theatrical staging of a funeral: “A funeral barge floats silently down the Chicago River to the site where the Old Post Office once stood. A figure clad in white steps onto the river landing, and leads those gathered at the river's edge up an incline to the foot of the large, rusting steel doors. The figure knocks. A hollow echo precedes the slow opening of the doors to reveal a long hall lined on one side with chapels. The white figure leads the group to the open chapel where the ritual of life and death takes place. The rear wall of the chapel opens wide, leading the funeral party to the crypts above. Upstairs, the funeral procession winds through the glass crypts, past the reliquaries that hold souvenirs of lives now past. The reflection of candle flames flicker in the polished floor, animating the wind that passes through the open facade.”
In a lot of ways, Ronan's proposal finds close affinity with the current vogue in green burial. For instance, there are no water-guzzling grass lawns, and no lawns also means no toxic fertilizers to maintain a healthy, luxurious shade of green and to intimate a vision of Paradise to soothe grieving visitors.
Additionally, for a planned internment of millions of dead bodies, it's a highly efficient use of so little land, reusing, as it were, what's already there: “Seventy percent of what's in landfills right now is old buildings. The silliest thing would be to put a green building in its place [and] you carted away this three-million-square foot thing.”
Owing to its central location, the funeral cortege could make use of public transportation. If a CTA train car can be gutted and transformed into Santa's sleigh — with a Santa, his reindeers, elves and carollers merrily riding back and forth across Chicago, roofless(!!!) in the dead of winter — so can it be converted into a hearse.
Lastly, you can probably set the heater and air conditioner at very low levels.
“Landscapes are produced and maintained in ways that are largely unseen by those who happen to drive past, admiring the beauty of the landscape. Deeply embedded in the landscape are human costs invisible to the eye. In this paper we investigate some of the many social and material relations that underlie the pastoral views that characterize one particularly beautiful village. Bedford, a suburb of New York City, is a site of aesthetic consumption practices in which the residents derive pleasure and achieve social status by preserving and enhancing the beauty of their town. We explore the way in which the beautiful landscape of Bedford is internally related to the poor living conditions of Latino day laborers in a neighboring town, Mount Kisco. Global political and economic structures as well as the structure of local zoning, supported by a socio-spatial ideology of local autonomy and home rule, lie beneath Bedford's successful exclusion of its laborers and Mount Kisco's failure to keep out what they see as Bedford's and Latin America's 'negative externalities.' Our argument is that aesthetic concerns dominate social and economic relations between Latino immigrants and receiving communities.”
![Adam Frank and Zack Booth Simpson](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_yiiPzeRfNBQ/TJ8Bl0QaZRI/AAAAAAAADEk/QzmgzsRrAes/s800/060403_2_spectral_3.jpg"")
