space hacking
As my 200th post I was going to write some stuff about ethics and dolphins, but Wikipedia has already done the lions share of the work so it’s left me feeling rather unnecessary. I was considering this as I came up the escalator at Town Hall station today (my legs are tired from a long walk yesterday so I didn’t feel like walking in). I was on the right and walking up the steps behind all the other karoshi who were doing the same, trudging hurriedly towards our desks. When I got to the top the girl in front of me stopped, did a sharp right turn and headed off to the ticket barriers; this made me stop and presumably made the person behind me stop. This sort of blockage never really stops anything, but acts more as a constriction. This sort of constriction seems to slow down the flow of people through the station, which reduces the station’s efficiency. (If you assume that the job of a train station is it’s obvious one, i.e. to move people about quickly, get them from where they are to where they want to be by making the journey from their entry point to exit point as time-short/distance-short as possible.)
Going off paper?
Once upon a time the only ones glued to their phone screens in public were spotty teenagers playing snake. I suppose I got a glimpse of the future on the Tokyo subway a while ago with everyone glued to their screens reading the news (I presume, it was all in Japanese).
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts on my phone through the gReader app. Even in short journeys I can knock off a couple of posts, and it feels like I’m actually participating in things as they happen. (I’m aware that this is an illusion, but it is one that I’m happy to maintain.)
So the phone screen is a good place for short form essays and journalism, and at fist blush it seems that it works for long form too. I’ve been reading Gulliver’s travels through the Kindle app, which has actually been surprisingly easy. The screen makes the columns a good width for reading fast, and the page turns are easier than turning an actual page. This means that I can put the phone on a table, hold my head in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, and read.
The ability to condense a library of books into one small space is pretty cool, as is the ability to look stuff up in a dictionary or on Wikipedia. I’m not wild about having to buy books that I already own so that I can read them this way, it seems that the payment for the IP has already been made, and that the actual cost of providing the content must tend towards zero. However there are so many free classics available that it will probably be a while before I’m hooked enough to fork over any actual money.
I’ll update in a while about what I thought of the experience, but I don’t think that it’ll be too much of a competitor to ‘real’ books in the near future, but in the longer term, probably!
Runaway success
When I got back to Australia after my long (relatively), and somewhat fraught, trip back to England about nine months ago, one of my jobs was to try to do things that made BVN a leader and not a laggard1 in the global computation/ architecture realm. It was pretty luxurious being given such a juicy brief, but it wasn’t going to happen over night.
One of the things that it turns out was possible to make happen over night (relatively) was to get the Australian compDesGrp running. I talked briefly about it here, but in summary it is just a place for people in the architecture realm, who dabble in computation can get together and talk about their work. It started in Sydney, and since that there have been sessions in Melbourne, Auckland and Brisbane. All the faff aside, it has been amazingly easy to set up. It’s as though it was a group that was just waiting for a tiny nudge to get going, and BVN gave me the time to get over that initial faff barrier, and also somewhere to host it (thanks guys!).
The thing that has prompted this outpouring of what appears to be self-congratulatory blurb is that the next Brisbane session, which I have had no hand in organising whatsoever (as far as I know it is all Bianca Toth’s doing) is so much bigger than I could ever have imagined, especially for Brisbane – the city that I thought that it would take the longest time to catch on in!
There’s going to be a book launch, two workshops, and the customary presentations. If you happen to be in Brisbane I can thoroughly recommend that you go along!
- this was a phrase that Ian Goldin used to introduce a podcast at the Martin School recently. I can’t find the link just now, but I’ll come back to it and fill it in when I do! ↩
Hydraulic economics
I walked to and from work today and listened to Arnold Kling talking to Econtalk about patterns of sustainable specialisation and trade. Quite apart from how enjoyable it is to be able to walk to work in the sun, it makes my brain tick over nicely.
They were discussing why certain economic models didn’t work, and while they were pontificating about some details it occurred to me that you might be able to think of mathematical models that aproximate the phenomena that economics is concerned with by using fluids.
Straight up mathematical models give one, absolute, answer. It is as if they worked over infinite time, and took an infinitely large sample. Most things take time to settle down; I first came across this idea when I was thinking a lot about search methods and writing genetic algorithms. I was frustrated that the computer wouldn’t spit out the answer to my question, but instead spiraled towards a best guess eventualy.
This morning’s idea was that an economic or physical system could be modeled as a hydraulic system filled with a load of different fluids of different viscosities. So as you try to move from one value to another it takes time to get there, and this lag causes stresses in the system, preventing some things from happening, causing asymmetries in others, and maybe even forcing things to happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen.
Not being especially mathematical I haven’t been able to formulate this properly I’ll leave it to your imagination, but it make it easier for me to think about things.
Studio update
My studio has just had what I suppose you could call their mid semester crits.
They’ve been developing and researching their existential threats over the last few weeks, and this crit was a chance for them to present that work. I was a little surprised by the presentations, this was the first time that i’d seen architecture students presenting a non-architectural topic. It shows how accustomed we get to relying on familiar presentation styles – ‘this is the plan’ and ‘here are some elevations’. Everyone struggled to convey information about things related to magnitudes, and there was a general lack of clarity on the slides, too much information crammed onto each slide.
The thing that really struck me was that when stripped of the framework imposed on every presentation since first year there was very little to fall back on, the story just didn’t flow. It is tempting to think of this as a failing of my students (and by extension, myself), but i’d be interested to see a good startup entrepreneur pitching a building design. I’d imagine that a really ace presenter of either ilk could cross over without too much trouble, but mere mortals – less easy!