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The Alzheimer House
“Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist's home,” writes the Associated Press. They were installed there to track any deviations in “the seemingly healthy 86-year-old's daily activity,” any small changes in her routine which could be attributed to the onset of Alzheimer's. “It's like spying in the name of science - with her permission,” we read.
And if the sensors detect any wayward behavior, Elaine Bloomquist gets zapped.
Which, of course, isn't exactly true.
This sensor network is a sort of early detection system for the disease. “The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.”
Currently 112 homes in the Portland, Oregon area have been retrofitted with the devices. A $7 million grant from the National Institute of Health will expand the project to 300.
Firstly, if the experiment proves successful, should we expect to hear about similar tele-monitoring networks operated at the urban scale? CCTV-Alzheimer's®. An entire retirement community comes under the constant, penetrating gaze of their hometown doctors and medical technicians thousands of miles away, diagnosing every move our grandmothers make or incorrectly make, and administering behavior modification electroshock treatment when so diagnosed.
Secondly, might we also expect to hear of a house or a town patterned after the erratic movements of Alzheimer's patients? Rooms, hallways, corners, ceilings, streets, gardens, parks arranged according to fuzzy and hesitating markings of dementia? What would these spaces look like? Perhaps we've heard about this already?
And thirdly, how about houses for, say, the most obsessive of obsessive compulsives, hacked not to monitor their disorder but rather to cure them? Wherein the faucets, for instance, run skin-peeling, scalding water whenever they sense three or more consecutive washes in the span of 15 minutes, wherein the furniture unaligns itself at arbitrary times of the day, and wherein light switches and door knobs and that tempting patch on the wall electroconduct when they come into contact repeatedly with human skin.
“Tiny motion sensors are attached to the walls, doorways and even the refrigerator of Elaine Bloomquist's home,” writes the Associated Press. They were installed there to track any deviations in “the seemingly healthy 86-year-old's daily activity,” any small changes in her routine which could be attributed to the onset of Alzheimer's. “It's like spying in the name of science - with her permission,” we read.
And if the sensors detect any wayward behavior, Elaine Bloomquist gets zapped.
Which, of course, isn't exactly true.
This sensor network is a sort of early detection system for the disease. “The theory is that as Alzheimer's begins destroying brain cells, signals to nerves may become inconsistent - like static on a radio - well before memories become irretrievable. One day, signals to walk fire fine. The next, those signals are fuzzy and people hesitate, creating wildly varying activity patterns.”
Currently 112 homes in the Portland, Oregon area have been retrofitted with the devices. A $7 million grant from the National Institute of Health will expand the project to 300.
Firstly, if the experiment proves successful, should we expect to hear about similar tele-monitoring networks operated at the urban scale? CCTV-Alzheimer's®. An entire retirement community comes under the constant, penetrating gaze of their hometown doctors and medical technicians thousands of miles away, diagnosing every move our grandmothers make or incorrectly make, and administering behavior modification electroshock treatment when so diagnosed.
Secondly, might we also expect to hear of a house or a town patterned after the erratic movements of Alzheimer's patients? Rooms, hallways, corners, ceilings, streets, gardens, parks arranged according to fuzzy and hesitating markings of dementia? What would these spaces look like? Perhaps we've heard about this already?
And thirdly, how about houses for, say, the most obsessive of obsessive compulsives, hacked not to monitor their disorder but rather to cure them? Wherein the faucets, for instance, run skin-peeling, scalding water whenever they sense three or more consecutive washes in the span of 15 minutes, wherein the furniture unaligns itself at arbitrary times of the day, and wherein light switches and door knobs and that tempting patch on the wall electroconduct when they come into contact repeatedly with human skin.
Un-vanishing a lake
From January 10, 2005 to October 22, 2006, or thereabouts, Ledia Carroll retraced the ghostly outline of a vanished freshwater lake in San Francisco as part of her Mission Lake Project.
From a press release, to be read in the past tense, unfortunately: “On October 22, 2006, Ledia Carroll will use a field line chalker to recreate the full perimeter of Lago Dolores, a former freshwater lake that stretched from what is now South Van Ness to Guerrero and 15th to 20th Streets. Drawing the line in reference to maps from the 1800s, Carroll’s chalkline allows the still visible ancient depression of the lake to become apparent to the eye. In conjunction with the re-created lake shoreline, Ledia Carroll presents a 'lakeside' barbeque and perimeter 'alleycat' bike race.”
There were also guided tours later in the year to some of San Francisco’s hidden underground waterways. And if someone could let us know where we might find more info on these hidden waterways online, that'd be fantastic.
Prunings XXXI.1
Call 811
From January 10, 2005 to October 22, 2006, or thereabouts, Ledia Carroll retraced the ghostly outline of a vanished freshwater lake in San Francisco as part of her Mission Lake Project.
From a press release, to be read in the past tense, unfortunately: “On October 22, 2006, Ledia Carroll will use a field line chalker to recreate the full perimeter of Lago Dolores, a former freshwater lake that stretched from what is now South Van Ness to Guerrero and 15th to 20th Streets. Drawing the line in reference to maps from the 1800s, Carroll’s chalkline allows the still visible ancient depression of the lake to become apparent to the eye. In conjunction with the re-created lake shoreline, Ledia Carroll presents a 'lakeside' barbeque and perimeter 'alleycat' bike race.”
There were also guided tours later in the year to some of San Francisco’s hidden underground waterways. And if someone could let us know where we might find more info on these hidden waterways online, that'd be fantastic.
Prunings XXXI.1
Call 811
15 Storeys High
15 Storeys High is a British television show set in a South London tower block, created by Sean Lock, Martin Trenaman, Mark Lamarr (as Mark Jones), and Mark Nunneley, and whose run of 12 episodes over 2 series ended in 2003.
It has been described to us at various times thusly: “better than The Office”; “what would have been if Krzysztof Kieslowski had conceived Dekalog as a British sitcom”; “the beginnings of a brilliant but ultimately failed Ballardian musical dark comedy”; “architorture by boredom, exquisitely executed”; “a desultory dissertation on post-occupancy, the psychology of space, and Polish energy drinks”; “a damning statement on the impotency of architects in designing anything well except chairs”; “a landscape architect's erotic nightmare”; and as “shit”.
Of course, one of those microreviews is pure gibberish. Another one is made up. Three have actually been cobbled up together from minimally-remembered, drunken conversations, and two more were said by colleagues after seeing only one episode. Exactly one is an accurate description.
It's worth checking out, legally or extralegally, in other words.
And in case you're wondering, some clips of the show have been uploaded to YouTube.
15 Storeys High is a British television show set in a South London tower block, created by Sean Lock, Martin Trenaman, Mark Lamarr (as Mark Jones), and Mark Nunneley, and whose run of 12 episodes over 2 series ended in 2003.
It has been described to us at various times thusly: “better than The Office”; “what would have been if Krzysztof Kieslowski had conceived Dekalog as a British sitcom”; “the beginnings of a brilliant but ultimately failed Ballardian musical dark comedy”; “architorture by boredom, exquisitely executed”; “a desultory dissertation on post-occupancy, the psychology of space, and Polish energy drinks”; “a damning statement on the impotency of architects in designing anything well except chairs”; “a landscape architect's erotic nightmare”; and as “shit”.
Of course, one of those microreviews is pure gibberish. Another one is made up. Three have actually been cobbled up together from minimally-remembered, drunken conversations, and two more were said by colleagues after seeing only one episode. Exactly one is an accurate description.
It's worth checking out, legally or extralegally, in other words.
And in case you're wondering, some clips of the show have been uploaded to YouTube.
Prunings XXXI
On hydrology, del.icio.us.ly linked:
1) Artist Eve S. Mosher is leaving behind a trail of blue-tinted chalk as she winds her way through the coastal neighborhoods of southernmost Brooklyn. This chalk line, The New York Times reports, “demarcates a point 10 feet above sea level, a boundary now used by federal and state agencies and insurance companies to show where waters could rise after a major storm. Relying partly on research conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, Ms. Mosher is trying to draw attention to projections that the chance of flooding up to or beyond her line could increase significantly as a result of global warming.”
To learn more about this amazing public artwork/guerrilla theater/Christoesque interactive installation, check out HighWaterLine. There's also this blog.
2) In the worst-case scenario of another hydrological matter, National Geographic News reported that 4 people were killed and another 19 injured in northern Sudan during a protest over a proposed dam on the Nile River. And “later, in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, police used tear gas to scatter hundreds of demonstrators outraged by the deaths and stirred by the bitter legacy of the Aswan High Dam. Dozens of Nubian villages were flooded by the dam's construction and tens of thousands of people were forcibly relocated.”
3) This may or may not add to the bitterness simmering along the banks of the Nile, but scientists in Brazil and Peru think they have found a new starting point of the Amazon. This new discovery, BBC News reports, makes it the longest river in the world. “Researchers travelled for 14 days, sometimes in freezing temperatures, to establish the location at an altitude of 5,000m” and to force cash-strapped school districts everywhere to spend millions of dollars updating their now inaccurate geography textbooks and everyone else to reconfigure their whole mental concept of the physical world.
4) But moving on to another part of the world, we read in another BBC News article that “Japan has launched an innovative project to try to protect an exclusive economic zone off its coast” by “planting coral to increase the land mass of rocky outcrops in Japan's waters.” Quoting further:
China, meanwhile, thinks they're just rocks, not islands, and so whatever natural resources lie in those waters, it can also claim.
5) Which reminds us of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, the setting for some hilarious geopolitical games of brinkmanship. And an opera, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
6) Finally, back to the states, specifically to Nevada, a line of a different kind has been drawn up from the parched city of Las Vegas to the water “rich” valleys in the east-central parts of the state. That line, according to NPR, is a proposed pipeline that officials in Las Vegas hope will bring in 65 billion gallons of rural water a year to feed its phenomenally growing population.
It's but one possible theater of conflict in the future Hydrological World War. At one end of the line are “gluttony, glitter, girls and gambling” and on the other end are “children, cattle, country and church”.
On hydrology, del.icio.us.ly linked:
1) Artist Eve S. Mosher is leaving behind a trail of blue-tinted chalk as she winds her way through the coastal neighborhoods of southernmost Brooklyn. This chalk line, The New York Times reports, “demarcates a point 10 feet above sea level, a boundary now used by federal and state agencies and insurance companies to show where waters could rise after a major storm. Relying partly on research conducted by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, Ms. Mosher is trying to draw attention to projections that the chance of flooding up to or beyond her line could increase significantly as a result of global warming.”
In a worst-case scenario, according to the research, the line could mark the zone for flooding that would occur every eight years, on average, by the year 2050, meaning that dozens of neighborhoods would soon come to resemble Venice, or maybe ancient Alexandria.
To learn more about this amazing public artwork/guerrilla theater/Christoesque interactive installation, check out HighWaterLine. There's also this blog.
2) In the worst-case scenario of another hydrological matter, National Geographic News reported that 4 people were killed and another 19 injured in northern Sudan during a protest over a proposed dam on the Nile River. And “later, in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, police used tear gas to scatter hundreds of demonstrators outraged by the deaths and stirred by the bitter legacy of the Aswan High Dam. Dozens of Nubian villages were flooded by the dam's construction and tens of thousands of people were forcibly relocated.”
3) This may or may not add to the bitterness simmering along the banks of the Nile, but scientists in Brazil and Peru think they have found a new starting point of the Amazon. This new discovery, BBC News reports, makes it the longest river in the world. “Researchers travelled for 14 days, sometimes in freezing temperatures, to establish the location at an altitude of 5,000m” and to force cash-strapped school districts everywhere to spend millions of dollars updating their now inaccurate geography textbooks and everyone else to reconfigure their whole mental concept of the physical world.
4) But moving on to another part of the world, we read in another BBC News article that “Japan has launched an innovative project to try to protect an exclusive economic zone off its coast” by “planting coral to increase the land mass of rocky outcrops in Japan's waters.” Quoting further:
According to the Law of the Sea, Japan can lay exclusive claim to the natural resources 370km (230 miles) from its shores.
So, if these outcrops are Japanese islands, the exclusive economic zone stretches far further from the coast of the main islands of Japan then it would do otherwise.
To bolster Tokyo's claim, officials have posted a large metal address plaque on one of them making clear they are Japanese. They have also built a lighthouse nearby.
China, meanwhile, thinks they're just rocks, not islands, and so whatever natural resources lie in those waters, it can also claim.
5) Which reminds us of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, the setting for some hilarious geopolitical games of brinkmanship. And an opera, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
6) Finally, back to the states, specifically to Nevada, a line of a different kind has been drawn up from the parched city of Las Vegas to the water “rich” valleys in the east-central parts of the state. That line, according to NPR, is a proposed pipeline that officials in Las Vegas hope will bring in 65 billion gallons of rural water a year to feed its phenomenally growing population.
It's but one possible theater of conflict in the future Hydrological World War. At one end of the line are “gluttony, glitter, girls and gambling” and on the other end are “children, cattle, country and church”.
Kitteh Urbanism
In what will certainly enrage feline lovers everywhere, Andy Beckerman and his colleagues from the University of Sheffield, UK, are blaming cats for “the ongoing fall in urban bird numbers.”
From New Scientist: “Many accusatory fingers point to the cat, and in areas of high cat density, predation may indeed be the sole reason for the decline. It might not be cats' only effect, however. Becker's team built a model that took both kills and the fear factor into account, and found that apprehension could explain the decrease even where predation is low. A reduction of just one chick per breeding pair per year per cat can lead to a fall in bird numbers of up to 95 per cent.”
Does this mean that urban ecology will simply be variegated, for the most part, by what members of the Westminster Kennel Club and the International Cat Association decide to include in their indoor menageries, and that any further decline in biodiversity will be offset by what is quarantined and confiscated at airports? Does this also mean that cats might be part of the solution to the looming Avian flu crisis?
The article, unfortunately, is too meager to provide an answer, and the source material published in the journal Animal Conservation isn't freely available online.
Nevertheless, there are two projects worth mentioning in this context. One is the Bat House Project.
A collaboration between Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller and partners, the project aims to highlight “the potential for architects, builders, home-owners and conservationists to work together to produce wildlife-friendly building design” and connect “the worlds of art and ecology to encourage public engagement with ecology issues.”
And one way of achieving their goal is to sponsor a competition. Entrants are tasked to design “a purpose-built structure that will provide the maximum diversity of specialised features to attract roosting, breeding and hibernating bats, and the possibility for visitors to engage with the bats and learn more about them.” The deadline is Monday, September 10, 2007, and the winning entry will actually be built.
Similarly exploring ways to increase urban biodiversity and augment the interface between the wild and the city is Natalie Jeremijenko's pigeon paradise, or the Model Urban Development for the Birds. We'll let her give you the tour, courtesy of Seed Magazine.
But we'll let Jonathan Glancey have the final words, though.
“Architecture and wildlife,” he wrote in The Guardian last year, “have [...] been intimately connected in most cultures around the world since the very first baked brick was placed on top of another some 10,000 years ago. Equally, animals were found within buildings, whether in stables, or, in much of the world, in the home itself.”
However:
Litter-Free Landscape and the Politics of Pollen
The Forest Freak Show
Into the Wild
From New Scientist: “Many accusatory fingers point to the cat, and in areas of high cat density, predation may indeed be the sole reason for the decline. It might not be cats' only effect, however. Becker's team built a model that took both kills and the fear factor into account, and found that apprehension could explain the decrease even where predation is low. A reduction of just one chick per breeding pair per year per cat can lead to a fall in bird numbers of up to 95 per cent.”
Does this mean that urban ecology will simply be variegated, for the most part, by what members of the Westminster Kennel Club and the International Cat Association decide to include in their indoor menageries, and that any further decline in biodiversity will be offset by what is quarantined and confiscated at airports? Does this also mean that cats might be part of the solution to the looming Avian flu crisis?
The article, unfortunately, is too meager to provide an answer, and the source material published in the journal Animal Conservation isn't freely available online.
Nevertheless, there are two projects worth mentioning in this context. One is the Bat House Project.
A collaboration between Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller and partners, the project aims to highlight “the potential for architects, builders, home-owners and conservationists to work together to produce wildlife-friendly building design” and connect “the worlds of art and ecology to encourage public engagement with ecology issues.”
And one way of achieving their goal is to sponsor a competition. Entrants are tasked to design “a purpose-built structure that will provide the maximum diversity of specialised features to attract roosting, breeding and hibernating bats, and the possibility for visitors to engage with the bats and learn more about them.” The deadline is Monday, September 10, 2007, and the winning entry will actually be built.
Similarly exploring ways to increase urban biodiversity and augment the interface between the wild and the city is Natalie Jeremijenko's pigeon paradise, or the Model Urban Development for the Birds. We'll let her give you the tour, courtesy of Seed Magazine.
But we'll let Jonathan Glancey have the final words, though.
“Architecture and wildlife,” he wrote in The Guardian last year, “have [...] been intimately connected in most cultures around the world since the very first baked brick was placed on top of another some 10,000 years ago. Equally, animals were found within buildings, whether in stables, or, in much of the world, in the home itself.”
However:
Today's architecture is determinedly anti-animal. For all the insistent talk about “sustainability” and “green” buildings, and the huge popularity of wildlife programmes on television, animals have been increasingly pushed away from the built environment. So much so, that vast tracts of modern architectural development and urban landscaping are actually reducing the population of some of those animals we appear to be so very fond of at Christmas - if at no other time of the year. This distancing of animals, while imagining ourselves to be safe and clean inside our spick-and-span, chemically cleaned homes is, on one level, darkly comic. In many towns and cities, these same homes sit on heaving piles of maggots, rumpuses of rats, squealing mice and all sorts of other creeping things. Even the most superficially perfect minimalist Manhattan apartment, designed by the most fastidious architect, will be scuttling with cockroaches before the residents move in and take their first power-shower.
And despite our best attempts to exterminate it, the animal world creeps, bounds and flaps around us. And, unless genuinely dangerous, we should learn to welcome it into our built environment. Our homes are not just for us, or our cats and dogs, but part of a much wider, wilder world.
Litter-Free Landscape and the Politics of Pollen
The Forest Freak Show
Into the Wild
Rome Stillborn 1.0
Before news reports of the unveiling yesterday of a digital reconstruction of Rome circa A.D. 320 swept through the wires, we have always imagined the city to have contained people. And also trees, villa gardens, roving animals and kids, garbage, loose bricks and faded paint, pornographic graffiti, inclement weather, migraine-inducing smells and noises, sewage and stormwater underfoot, and prostitutes and their pimps — all swirling together in the urban vortex.
Enlightened as we are now by Rome Reborn 1.0, we realize how fundamentally wrong we were. Walking through the streets of the city back then wasn't really like walking now through the jumbled street maze of Varanasi, that frenetic, sometimes stultifying, temple-field Hindu holy city on the banks of the Ganges in India. In actuality, “the state of our knowledge about the urban topography of ancient Rome” tells us that it was verifiably spacious, its architecture pristine, the center of the world inhabited by no one.
And “about how the city looked,” “students or the general public” will be taught that navigating through “the alignment of built features in the city” was a breath of fresh air with cool winds tickling your hairy arms, the sun safely lighting your back to fend off murderers, thieves and whores, and the soothing operatic sounds of modern Europe drowning out the howls and the din of ancient city life.
Of course, we could be wrong and might not yet have heard that the reconstruction team, realizing that no new insights can be gained from their expensive simulation without the everyday physical marks of urban habitation, or urban violence, will be bringing in game designers from EA for v2.0.
SimRome 2007®. See how Romans bath; their shit flowing through the sewers; molest their slave boys while taking pointers from those Third Style porno-frescoes decorating the atrium; move from one temple to another temple to yet another temple offering gifts, etc.
Anyway, they will be hoping that the all-powerful Soprintendente will not send letters to all parties angrily demanding an apology for the use of archaeological sites as a backdrop for their violent simulations.
Before news reports of the unveiling yesterday of a digital reconstruction of Rome circa A.D. 320 swept through the wires, we have always imagined the city to have contained people. And also trees, villa gardens, roving animals and kids, garbage, loose bricks and faded paint, pornographic graffiti, inclement weather, migraine-inducing smells and noises, sewage and stormwater underfoot, and prostitutes and their pimps — all swirling together in the urban vortex.
Enlightened as we are now by Rome Reborn 1.0, we realize how fundamentally wrong we were. Walking through the streets of the city back then wasn't really like walking now through the jumbled street maze of Varanasi, that frenetic, sometimes stultifying, temple-field Hindu holy city on the banks of the Ganges in India. In actuality, “the state of our knowledge about the urban topography of ancient Rome” tells us that it was verifiably spacious, its architecture pristine, the center of the world inhabited by no one.
And “about how the city looked,” “students or the general public” will be taught that navigating through “the alignment of built features in the city” was a breath of fresh air with cool winds tickling your hairy arms, the sun safely lighting your back to fend off murderers, thieves and whores, and the soothing operatic sounds of modern Europe drowning out the howls and the din of ancient city life.
Of course, we could be wrong and might not yet have heard that the reconstruction team, realizing that no new insights can be gained from their expensive simulation without the everyday physical marks of urban habitation, or urban violence, will be bringing in game designers from EA for v2.0.
SimRome 2007®. See how Romans bath; their shit flowing through the sewers; molest their slave boys while taking pointers from those Third Style porno-frescoes decorating the atrium; move from one temple to another temple to yet another temple offering gifts, etc.
Anyway, they will be hoping that the all-powerful Soprintendente will not send letters to all parties angrily demanding an apology for the use of archaeological sites as a backdrop for their violent simulations.