Jan 22
lindsayrgwattUncategorized vancouver
A few years ago, Alan Weisman wrote a little book called The World Without Us . In it, he detailed what would happen to the the earth if humans suddenly disappeared. There’s a captivating chapter where he describes the decay of Manhattan as it’s buildings begin to collapse:
In the first few years with no heat, pipes will burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things stat to seriously deteriorate. Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract; joints between walls and rooflines separate. Where they do, ryan leaks in, bolts rust, and facing pops off, exposing insulation. If the city hasn’t burned yet, it will now. Collectively, New YOrk architecture isn’t as combustible as, say, San Francisco’s incendiary rows of clapboard Victorians. But with no firemen to answer the call, a dry-lightning strike that ignites a decade of dead branches in Central Park will spread flames through the streets. Within two decades, lighting rods have begun to rust and snap, and roof fires leap among buildings, entering panelled offices filled with paper fuel. Gas lines ignite with a rush of flames that blows out windows. Rain and snow blow in, and soon even poured concrete floors are freezing, thawing, starting to buckle. Burnt insulation and charred wood add nutrients to Manhattan’s growing soil cap. Native Virginia creeper and poison ivy claw at walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air pollution. Red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons nest in increasingly skeletal high-rise structures.
By definition, none of us will ever get to see this (after all, it’s the world without us…), but every winter in Vancouver a miniature version of this plays out:
Stanley Park has a massive pool in it but it’s shuttered for the winter; literally no one enters it between September and May. The ever-resourceful crows recognize this and use the concrete surface as an oyster-opener. They drop the shells from on high then swoop down after they crack on impact. Since no one’s going in the there to clean it up, the shells collect over the winter.
It’s interesting to imagine that in the immediate aftermath of a Vancouver without us the streets near the water might end up filled with a thin coating of broken shells…
Jan 20
lindsayrgwattUncategorized architecture, Art
There’s a great exhibit on right now at the Charles H. Scott gallery at Emily Carr.
Babak Golkar’s Grounds for Standing and Understanding rethinks our everyday relationship to architecture.
At the end of the gallery sits an afghan rug; the patterns have been perfectly extruded to create a speculative cityscape.
To get to the rug you walk through a room full of sharply angled lines. If you’ve been to the gallery before, it feels all wrong: this wall wasn’t here before? Why has the window been blacked out?
And then when you see the rug and its surface, it sort of makes sense. We’re part of the exhibit and we’re looking at ourselves, hidden in the everyday.
Trapped?
It’s not clear, but the recursion gives you pause.
Well worth a visit.
Feb 12
lindsayrgwattUncategorized pcv, pcv11
I gave a talk today at ProductCamp Vancouver (well done organizers!) called Articulating Your Idea. It’s a 12 step process for taking your thoughts/visions and turning them into one or two concrete sentences that people can understand.
Here’s a link to the slides:
On a different note, the event was in the SFU Business School, whose building is the old BMO building at Granville & Pender. It’s a beautiful place and I highly recommend going in it if you’re in the area (and check out the old vault doors in the basement).
Sep 19
lindsayrgwattUncategorized street art, subway
One of the little joys of living in my neighbourhood is watching the subway ads get defaced. If it was just a matter of people tagging the ads, I’d consider it vandalism, but the locals have turned it into an art form (I think there are some very creative but underemployed folks in my hood who are quite bored waiting for their morning commute to Manhattan. Perhaps a hint of social deviance as well).
Below is a scene from earlier today. Our local artist carved out the baby’s smile and found that it was perfectly overlaid above a row of teeth below. There is an artistry of sorts lurking here.
Sep 02
lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized charter schools, education, reform, union
It’s widely acknowledged that the U.S. education system is a mess. It was, arguably, designed to train people for an industrial society – a society that no longer exists. Most people admit that some type of reform is needed, although there’s little consensus on what is right. However, lots of people are doing great things in education – and I’m confident that the system can be fixed (but it ain’t going to be easy).
Here are a couple of recent themes/articles outlining some of the great things that are being done in education today:
- Teacher accountability. It’s widely acknowledged that, on average, the quality of teachers is the single biggest determinant of a student’s success. The trick is rewarding good teachers and punishing bad ones. Michelle Rhee in D.C. proposes higher salaries for great teachers. In NYC, Joel Klein uses the Rubber Room to get bad teachers away from students.
- Community involvement. Greet Dot is “transforming” underperforming LA schools, in part by requiring that all parents provide 35 hours a year of volunteer work at the school. You don’t send your kids to a Green Dot school, you’re part of it too.
- Online education. Hot off the presses: online education outperforms traditional, face-to-face education. What makes this so exciting is that this space is likely only going to get better. As tools like IM, wikis, etc. get folded into all online learning experiences we’re going to see even better results (a lot of the successful studies reference in the article are from late ’90s/early ’00s and don’t reflect newer technologies)
- Emphasizing learning: High Tech High and Roxbury Prep are schools that work hard to ensure that no one is made fun of for learning. Combine this with rewards for learning (e.g., public recognition of good grades) and fun team projects and you’ve got a supportive environment that generates great people.
Two interesting themes arise here: a) the most interesting stuff is happening at charter schools (the “startups” of the education world?) and b) if you want better schools you’re on a collision course with the union. I’m hoping some of these memes go national soon.
Update (Oct 20, 2009):
Another interesting program reported on by FastCompany: in North Carolina, kids were given smart phones to make and share movies about how they solved math problems. This also provided after hours access to their math teacher. Net result: pilot group had higher algebra scores than the non-pilot group plus every student had a 100% proficiency rating (vs. 70% for those not in pilot).
Aug 03
lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized ballard, fiction, quotes, writing
I just finished reading J.G. Ballard‘s Super Cannes. It was an amazing book: I don’t know if I’ll ever again find a book that mixes corporate intrigue, mass murder, psychopathy and architecture in a great read. For those who don’t know, Ballard narratives tend to involve similar worlds to ours, except that the architecture frequently has an overpowering effect on the characters.
Throw in a dash of great lines and you’ve got rewarding literature.
For your pleasure, here are a few lines that caught my fancy. For more, read the book:
I began to count the pools, each a flare of turquoise light lost behind the high walls of the villas with their screens of cycads and bougainvillaea. Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Cote d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.
…
Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house.
…
Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747.
…
The strong sunlight had stirred up an atlas of currents that cast their shadows across the tiled floor…
…
The mental climate that presided over Eden-Olympia never varied, its moral thermostat set somewhere between duty and caution.
…
Memories jump the rails and speed off down the wrong track.
…
They were pleasantly high, but in an almost self-conscious way, as if they were members of a tontine blessed by the unexpected death of two or three of its members.
…
The twentieth century was an heroic enterprise, but it left us in the dark, feeling our way towards a locked door.
…
Dust lay over the swimming pool, an overnight veil disturbed by the feeble movements of a waterlogged fruit fly, struggling against the meniscus that gripped its wings in a mirror harder than glass.
…
Ten feet from my kerbside table the limousines moved on towards the Palais des Festivals between the lines of police and security men. Helicopters circled the Palm Beach headland, waiting to land at the heliport, like paramilitary gunships about to strafe the beachside crowds. Their white-suited passengers, faces masked by huge shades, stared down with the gaze of gangster generals in a Central American republic surveying a popular uprising. An armada of yachts and motor cruisers strained at their anchors two hundred yards from the beach, so heavily freighted with bodyguards and television equipment that they seemed to raise the sea.
May 20
lindsayrgwattUncategorized discovery, iphone, itunes, Music, recommendations
Over the past few months, I’ve been trying a little experiment and it’s worked quite well. In my own truly nerdy way, I’ve been ranking almost every some I listen to on my iPhone/iPod and listening to each song until the very end.
Why? Well, now I’ve got a list of my favourite, most listened-to songs. This gives me the ability to do a couple of cool things:
1) I’ve set up my iPhone so that it only contains the most recent 150 songs I’ve bought plus any song that is at least four stars. Now, when I’m on the go, I only listen to new and/or good music
2) I also use Apple’s Genius feature a lot on my iPhone. It’s fascinating to see what pops up as a recommendation. Some of my songs consistently cluster together whereas others bridge distinct genres. It’s almost become a game to figure out which songs can create the best playlists.
This experience is totally different from using Genius on my laptop. I have 10x more music on my laptop, so the Genius playlists are much more homogenous; it’s only on my iPhone where I see a bit of serendipity.
3) I’ve also created a playlist of songs that are rated at least four stars but haven’t been listened to for 90 days. It’s like coming home to an old friend (just kidding)
4) I’ve another playlist of songs sorted by play count. It’s a quick and dirty way to guarantee that I can find a song that I know I’ll like
There is one downfall to this experiment: if a tune doesn’t get four stars quickly, it is doomed to be unlistened forever. Assuming my tastes don’t shift (an unlikely assumption) this should be fine, but I’d like to think I can re-discover my older music or allow albums to grow on me over time.
I’ll have to set up the next experiment to work on that…
Apr 21
lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized customs, driving, maps
Yesterday I had to drive up to the border to renew my visa. (For technical reasons, you need to apply from outside the country and I’m too cheap to fly). It was one helluva drive: 658.6 miles (or 1,060 km for my metric friends).
This got me wondering: if I had only gone one way, where could I have made it to? Fortunately, the interpipes are here to answer this.
According to Google Maps, I wouldn’t have made Chicago, but would be in Fort Wayne right now. I would have blown past Detroit and gone all the way to Flint. If I was feeling Appalachian, I could have almost made it Knoxville, Tennessee. If I’d wanted a some Southern comfort, I could have gone down to Myrtle Beach.
Alternatively, I could have headed north to North Bay or Jonquiere (where, I’ve been told by my bro, the cheapest house in Canada is available for $4,000 – caveat emptor). Alternatively, I could be on the Bay of Fundy today, feasting on fish & chips.
Here’s the rough map:
Here are a few random things I learned on the trip:
- If you turn on the maps on your iPhone and drive fast you can actually see your location move. I do not condone this and only found out by accident. Definitely do not try this and claim you heard it from me.
- The Customs Service only got the new photos of Barack Obama about three weeks ago; they’re still waiting for a Biden (next time you’re at the border, glance behind the agents – there are always photos of the President & VP plus possibly a cameo by the Secretary of Homeland Security). However, they don’t show a Cheney in his place; it’s a vacant frame waiting to be filled.
- Hitting blinding rain just outside the city after thirteen hours in a car is not fun.
Apr 14
lindsayrgwattUncategorized debt, deflation, depressions, Economics, fisher
Way back in 1933, Irving Fisher outlined what it took to make a depression or recession really nasty. In a nutshell: too much debt, followed by deflation that is brought on by everyone selling to reduce their debt. This creates a vicious cycle where you can sell everything you have but you still can’t cover your debt – and therefore you either go bankrupt or need a bailout. Sound familiar?
You can read it all in his paper “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions” [pdf]. (Note that economics paper from that era are quite approachable, unlike now)
There’s a fascinating tidbit in this paper where he reflects on the preponderance of scandals to come to light during these scandals:
The public psychology of going into debt for gain passes through several more or less distinct phases:
(a) The lure of big prospective dividends or gains in income in the remote future;
(b) The hope of selling at a profit, and realizing a capital gain in the immediate future;
(c) The vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations;
(d) The development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible.
When it is too late the dupes discover scandals like the Hatry, Krueger, and Insull scandals. At least one book has been written to prove that crises are due to frauds of clever promoters. But probably these frauds could never have become so great without the original starters of real opportunities to invest lucratively. There is probably always a very real basis for the “new era” psychology before it runs away with its victim. This was certainly the case before 1929.
You could swap out “Madoff, Leland, and Dreier” for “Hatry, Krueger, and Insull” and this could pretty much be 2009, not 1929.
There is a bit of sunshine here: we can rest assured that we’re not the first to go through something like this (and I’m sure my great-grandkids will go through this too) and therefore we’ll get through it. The bigger question is: can this sort of thing even be avoided in the first place, or is it just human nature?
Apr 04
lindsayrgwattUncategorized
This weekend my bro put me onto a new site – Arts & Letters Daily. It’s basically intellectual brain candy: every day they cull what they perceive as ‘the best’ from a variety of newspapers and serve it up to you.
I was struck today by an article about which words have been around since the Ice Age. Researchers in the U.K. have been working on determining which words were likely used by our ancient predecessors. Their conclusion: “I”, “who”, “thou”, “two”, “three” and “five”.
What struck me about the article, though, was that the author’s tried to use their model to predict which words are most likely to disappear from English in the future. Top of the list: “throw”, “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze”. They do so by calculating the linguisitic history of words and essentially determining how rapidly the words have changed from common ancestors.
However, I couldn’t help but wonder how their model would account for the pace of change of technology. Think about it: until the 1500s, few people could read. In the mid-1800s, newspapers became mass media and now everyone is literate and surrounded by the written word: the web, newspapers, books, magazines, ads, etc. Does this proliferation of media actually make it less likely that words will change? Will it freeze our language as is and make it more likely that humans 10,000 years in the future will be able to converse with us?
Or will something else keep our language dynamic? Maybe globalization will lead to us all speaking a balkanized English where each country’s native tongue
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