There have been a lot of long nights of faffing about with learning about the technology that runs the internet, But now the building performance quiz is live, working reasonably well in most browsers, and has started producing results!

So “what is it?” I hear you ask!

There are a couple of reasons that I can’t tell you everything about it just yet. But for now it is a quiz that shows up what you know and don’t know about designing for building performance within the emerging low carbon economy.

The key thing is that a lot of people have a go at the quiz, so if you have a screen, and some time, then please do it, and if you have all of the above, and friends, then send it to all of them and beg them to do it too. Please!!!

have a go!

BPquiz.co.uk

This photo has been popping up all over the internet today. It has galvanised me into writing down an idea that I’ve been kicking about for a few weeks. I’ll try and be as structured as I can and rant as little as possible.

Starting with a pair of premises that I believe to be factual.

1. Global fish stocks are severely depleated. I don’t know much about Pacific stocks, but I’d imagine that there is a similar situation to the Atlantic stocks.
2. There are floating islands of plastic in the ocean gyres.

some that are slightly more open to debate, but I still consider to be facts.

• There is likely to be a collapse of the fishing industry if fish stocks reach a terminal point in their populations.
• They are also extremely heavily subsidised, up to 50% of the industries income is from subsidies.
• Fish and other marine animals, particularly filter feeders, are being found with significant ammounts of plastic inside them.
• Plastic in oceans degrades to smaller pieces of plastic as the polymer chains unwind from each other, but very rarely to monomers, or anything that can be digested.

So what can be done about this? Obviously, the simplest answer to the problem of the pastic is to stop putting it into the sea, but this is a global problem, and most of the plastic is not deliberatly put there.

Also we need to stop the part of fishing that involves taking fish out of the water and put some effort into trying to rebuild fish stocks. Probably somethign like 10 or 20 years of not fishing.

"Oh no!" I hear the cries from the fishing industry in disgust and terror for their livelyhoods. "You’ll bancrupt us, and even if you just pay us to stay at home* we’ll loose our craft – the next generation will become 7-11 staff". (*probably not that much more expensive than paying them to go and fish as the current subsidies do.)

My suggestion is that we should redirect the activities of the currently unprofitable fishing industry into fishing for plastic. The deep sea trawlers have the technology and infrastructure to go for long term trips to collect plastic waste. The low hanging fruit in this situation is the large pieces, i.e. plastic bags, detergent bottles, etc. so that’d be a good start. The onboard processing capacity could be put to use in catagorising the plastics, but also once the easy catch of large plastic is taken, the factory ships can set to work on filtering out the much smaller particles of plastic that are in suspention. This would maintain the fleet, and the fleet’s skills. The plastic that was landed could either be recycled or burnt to produce energy.

This would provide a rest for the fish, and also improve their habitat, so that when the stocks have sufficiently recovered, the polymer:meat ratio iside fish is a bit closer to what we’d hope it’d be.

I’ll probably revisit this as I get a bit better at scenario planning and future thinking. weigh in in the comments if you have anything at all to say, and if you are watching in black and white on facebook, go here to watch in green and white.

The 21st century is hailed by many as a ‘make or break’ time for humanity, the tipping point between a technological utopia and a crushing blow to our species’ capacity to flourish. While every effort must be made to steer a path towards a bright future, contingencies for both extremes, as well as the vast, but discontinuous, range of circumstances and possibilities between must be considered.
Only in a very perverse utopia, or particularly devastating catastrophe, does architecture cease to be pertinent (the importance of architects is less certain!).

The risk of global catastrophe, ranging from super volcanoes and runaway global warming to doomsday machines or bio-terrorism, is non trivial. The contingencies in place to contain or manage these events may (if successful) affect societies as much or more than the event itself. Conversely the potential for technology to enhance our lives beyond recognition is considerable. Indeed, it has already been realised. Genetic modification, cognitive enhancement and life extension are just a few of the possibilities.

With these great threats and opportunities come ethical questions about how, and whether, to manage the risks that the implementation of these opportunities (or whether to implement them at all!). While forecasting has its perils, as recent events in the financial sector have shown, it is foolhardy not to prepare to manage the outcomes of potential cataclysms. The continually diverging tree of all possible events makes the odds of a particular event, even in the relatively near future, vanishingly small. We need better tools. I intend learn how to develop a better understanding of the future, and the methods that can be used to improve predictions. Architecture is one of our most persistent projections into the future, there ought to be some consideration of what that future is going be like.

If getting past the next 90 years is really as fraught as is claimed (disasters, divergent societies, etc.) then we have a lot of work to do to get there, but it would make me feel better if I had a bit of an idea of what we’ll find when we do.

If you have any thoughts on things I ought to be looking at then let me know.

The Naïve Set Theory is from the library and is a beautiful pre 1977 version with gold blocked text on the cover, and is for the course I’m about to do (starting tomorrow night – so I’ll probably post up my homework).

The General Systems Theory seems to be out of print, but I’ve got what I think it a first edition from a web bookshop.

They are going to make a bit of a dent in my time compared to the other pop-science that is on that list!

This is a recording of last night’s Intelligence Squared talk entitled ‘The world in 2050′. The quality is a little echoey, and it is extremely long, but I’m still getting comfortable with the nuances of this Livescribe pen.

The talks are pretty fast paced, and there is a lot of visual work that you’ll miss just from the recording, but it will tide you over until you get to the video – hopefully soon on the 21^st Century School website. There is a blog post there already.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in here that seems reasonably plausable, seeing how far we’ve come in the last 10 years.

The majority of things in this video are based on new hardware, none of the software seems all that far fetched. I wonder if it’s because we aren’t ready for suggestions about significant UI advances, or if they don’t predict that things will change much?

However it’s important to remember that this is made by the office team, and as such there are a whole load of things that they aren’t especially bothered about. It’d be interesting to see how a matching video made by a variety of governments would look.

which side of the debate do you fall on?

In a crushing moment of feeling old, I realised that it was only fluke that they knew what a floppy disk looked like. It’d be like someone telling me that I needed to look for the 8Track, I know what it is, but i have no idea what it looks like!It just set me wondering if this whole thing has taken on a life of it’s own like letter forms going from pictograms into Assyrian (there’s great diagram on p112 of David Crystal’s excellent book – How Language Works) .

Are we going to have a generation, lets say today’s 10 year olds, coming through in a few years that know exactly what a save icon looks like, but no idea what it depicts, it’s just the symbol for save?

I had a quick look around, and I found an alternative icon for save, but as floppies disappear from our collective conscience, perhaps too will manilla folders.

Is it necessary for the images depicted in icons to remain contemporary, or is it sufficient that the icon’s intention remains intact, and the meaning can become obsolete?

Update

John sent me this scanned article from about the same time as I wrote this. It says more or less the same as I did. John, if you can remember where it came from then let me know.