All the Clever Names Were Taken

Masters Thesis Project

2012-02-17T00:04:00.000-06:00

I've been neglecting this blog because I'm in the middle of my masters thesis project (architecture at IIT). I've partnered up with seven other students to do a design build project -- first you design it, then you build it, and somewhere in between you raise money, go through zoning and permitting, encounter unimagineable problems, redesign the building a million times, did I mention fundraising?, and have 5.97 x 10^24 meetings.

Our project is located on the South Side of Chicago at 43rd and a few blocks west of State St. at a place called Eden Place Nature Center. We're building them a school that looks out over their prairie. Here's our website and a video I just completed:

DIY Christmas

2011-12-25T14:05:00.001-06:00

My wife came home with a Christmas tree, somewhat unannounced, about two weeks ago. After she set it down she said she was off to go get a stand... hmm. The ubiquitous Christmas tree stand in the US is stamped sheet metal painted red and green; I'm not a huge fan, so I offered to make one. She expressed her skepticism, but a few days after finals I built it.

It's made from leftover 1 1/4" angle iron (about 5' of it) from my previous coffee table project. I chose a triangular base because it would never wobble and would most easily hold the tree. The three pieces are identical which made fabrication quick and simple. More so in this project, because of its utilitarian nature, I let the material and fabrication process guide the design. For example, aesthetically, the angle iron should be rotated to show the flat side on the outside, but this would require some fairly difficult cutting and welding to make the connection between the three pieces. Instead I chose to keep the top flange hanging to the outside so that the angle iron could be simply butt-welded to one another.

The three pieces just prior to butt-welding them together then bending the legs up and welding them in place.

I tapped the angle iron to receive 5/16"-18 screws.

The finish is the same boiled linseed oil that I usually use. I use steel wool beforehand to remove most of the mill slag.

Next I had a problem with the Christmas tree ornaments... so I designed some a laser cut them. Bonus: I found all the plywood in the garbage bins around the M&M building.This was a quick job from start to finish. For next year I'm going to come up with some more interesting designs and use the 1/8" Baltic birch ply (it cut much faster and was burned less).

This photo was taken before I sanded them to remove the burn marks.

The cut-outs left on the laser bed.

Here's a video of the laser cutter cutting the ornaments out. It's kind of like watching a waterfall or fire; even though it's not that exciting it's oddly mesmerizing and hard to avert your eyes.

I made some frames from Peruvian (tropical really) walnut for a few in-laws and myself. I also grabbed some panga lumber for the first time; beautiful wood but it explodes when you machine work it. I kind of liked it.

The finished stand. Still need to get some black bolts... Home Depot lacks aesthetic options.

The finished product.

The staves (soon to be molding) of Peruvian walnut being routed to form a rabbet.

This was my Christmas gift to my sister-in law. The frame is 11" x 14" (inside) and made of Peruvian walnut with maple splines.

The photos is a silver gelatin print I enlarged from a B&W negative I took of her in Napa. It's mounted on museum board .

My Mom Really Needs a Bottle of Ripple

2011-12-23T11:02:00.003-06:00

Muppets outtakes.

Feist - Graveyard (live)

Cults - Go Outside

Picturequote

2011-12-23T10:59:00.001-06:00

Dear Mother,

I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't think there's anything left for me but to be an author.

Nathaniel [Hawthorne]

A square in Berlin near the Altes Museum. The sign you can only kind of see on the right is Weihenstephaner - my favorite brewery.

Picturequote

2011-12-21T12:52:00.002-06:00

"The gods are of no sect; they side with no man. When I imagine that Nature inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls, and specially existed for them, I go to see an obscure individual who lives under the hill, letting both gods and men alone, and find that strawberries and tomatoes grow for him too in his garden there, and the sun lodges kindly under his hillside, and am compelled to acknowledge the unbribable charity of the gods." - Thoreau Journal entry April, 15 age 23

My sister in law, Gaja, picking blueberries. This photo was made with a Diana+ using 120 B&W film.

Fall 2011 Studio Work

2011-12-20T16:25:00.002-06:00

My studio project this semester took place at The Plant in Chicago. I described it a little bit in this post. It was nice to have an actual client this time around, and to top things off it's entirely conceivable that they may implement some of the ideas that our studio came up with - being as that they're in a seemingly perpetual state of demolition and construction.

This is my 3' x 4' board that's on display at the plant right now.

Plan view (Google Earth view).

This is a Sanborn (historical) map overlaid over my plan. The old non-existent buildings inform the new layout along the old rail corridor.

Birdseye view looking west. The beer garden is in the center with hops to the left and greenhouses to the right.

Birdseye view from the south looking north.

This is the terraced seating area between the great lawn and vending area of the beer garden.

The beer garden with terracing.

Diagram of the greenhouses,

Section of the greenhouse.

The back of the greenhouses. That's a double height rolling door on the left. The concrete is left exposed so it can be used for work (i.e. compost can be laid against the wall, sand or debris can be piled, etc.)

The hop garden/parking lot made from simple telephone poles and stainless wire rope. Everyone really liked this which is funny because of the sheer practicality. If they actually built this I wouldn't be too surprised.

This is the initial scheme for the drainage of the street and site. I reconfigured the idea to be less complex and more effective.

In the final scheme water from the street flows into a recessed planting area with well drained soil while the run-off from the site flows through the gabions and into the same area. The recessed area can store some amount of water as it waits to percolate into the soil. In the event of a large storm excess water would flow into the sewage system as it already does.

Picturequote

2011-12-17T13:11:00.001-06:00

This is for the rats from yesterday.

"Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down - toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth." - Carl Sagan

This is the power and steam plant next to the Materials and Minerals Building (M&M, the wood shop) on IIT's campus. M&M was the first building (1939) Mies built in the US. It's also where I make all my furniture.

Small is Beautiful

2011-12-16T12:26:00.000-06:00

Tata Nano, the world's least expensive car.

This article about the Tata has me a bit worried. For those of you who don't keep up with Indian automotive companies, the Tata is the world's least expensive car. It's spartan as hell and costs $2,400. The problem lies in the fact that Indians aren't into the idea of owning the worlds cheapest car. It's just not selling (contrary to this Wired article from 2008 which predicted that it would be a huge eco-problem because it would put so many people on the road, I agreed then, oops). And that's a problem for me. Let me explain.

Green technology is incremental. The gains it provides are percentage points, and as percentage points go they tend to be low. Not that I'm against them, I think it's a great effort, and I'll try to employ them probably even more than most architects. But I have a different approach too. If I only learn a few lessons in architecture school, one of them will be that every square inch costs money.

Oh? Don't want to pull that flat wall in to fit the contour of the rooms? Only 10 square feet you say. Well let's see, that's $140 a square foot in hard costs, plus your borrowing costs and other fees - times 10. Yup, that just cost you $2,000. Want to put a kink in that wall?

If your home is half the size it costs half a much. Half as much to heat. Half as much to cool. Half as much to repair. Half as time much to clean. No new technology - just smaller. It doesn't just work for buildings, it works for cars and other things too. This Formula 1 designer made an electric car that gets 350 MPG just by making it super light weight (more info).

I've brought up this idea to my professors and I usually get lukewarm feedback. Most buildings are formulaic. So many square feet per occupant, so much height, so many watts per square foot for lighting, etc. I'm told reinventing the wheel shouldn't be done, but in NYC or London people live in much smaller spaces because of the cost. I'm convinced that a good percentage of my generation would be willing to live in somewhat smaller places (say 10-25% smaller) in order to save money/work less/have more disposable income. Isn't that what our generation is all about? Less shit, more experiences.

But the Tata is proving otherwise. People do want more stuff. Bigger stuff. Nicer stuff. But this is also a country of poor people on the come up. Like most of our grandparents and great grandparents they didn't have anything growing up and now they want the Cadillac, their double quarter-pounder, and the swimming pool behind the mcmansion. Maybe we're different? Maybe not, if my brief stint on this planet has taught me anything it's that people are more similar than they are dissimilar.

As I always tell my friends who want me to build something. If we make it half the size we can make it twice as nice. Most have never thought of this. A big table from plywood can be cool but how about a coffee table made of black walnut instead? Consuming more doesn't mean consuming more. It means consuming quality, and that's what I want to build.

Picturequote

2011-12-15T12:25:00.000-06:00

“My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.” - Bohumil Hrabal

Travel is much the same. This photo was taken on my first trip to continental Europe. My travels; especially Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany; will undoubtedly influence my designs far more than any studio I've ever had or book I've ever read.

Cemetery in Chur, Switzerland

Expert

2011-12-14T11:19:00.001-06:00

What are you truly good at? I mean, expert. Ten thousand hours plus. As in, if you handed someone a resume with these things listed on them you would be expected to perform them at an expert level right then and there. What are yours? What would you like to be expert at? Post in the comments section. I'm legitimately curious.

I did this little exercise in my head and it kind of surprised me. Most of the things I want to be expert at I'm really not, and the things I am expert at are... strange?

Here are mine:

1 - Photography: If the camera has some manual controls then I'm comfortable with it. Large format film? Yes please.

2 - Paintball: It's interesting that becoming really good at something means that you understand your weaknesses better. Even up until the day I stopped playing (after 12 years and a few years pro) I had tons of skills that needed work.

3 - Riding a bike in a city: Chicago isn't Europe and biking here has more to do with comfort level than rules. After almost a decade of riding in Chicago almost every day I've developed an odd awareness for how to go as fast as possible without getting hit.

Genetically engineered (Scottish) legs don't hurt either. Photo: Jacki

Things I want to be expert at:

1 - Architecture: the programs associated with it, comprehensible sketches at a moments notice, the ability to communicate my ideas clearly, and a good understanding of its history/theory. They say most architects don't become good until they're in their 40's. By that logic I'm 3/15 of the way there or about 20% - sounds about right.

2 - Woodworking, welding, making things: The architectural job market may force me to get better at this anyways. I'm further along on this one.

Slowing Down Time

2011-12-14T10:29:00.000-06:00

A group of scientists made a camera which shoots 0.6 trillion frames per second. As per explaining my million, billion trillion obsession - 0.6 trillion is 600 billions or 600,000 millions - frames per second. High speed camera = the ability to see things happen very slowly by playing the footage back at a normal rate. We can now see light as it travels (!).

Why isn't this on the NYT front page? Why are all the magazines in the grocery checkout isle feckless and base? The availability of media and physical goods reflects the desires of those able to purchase them. Thus, the world is built for people who love 12 oz. light beers, football, and Maxim magazine.

On Creative Production

2011-12-13T12:05:00.001-06:00

This more or less perfectly and succinctly explains how I feel every day about architecture school and my work surrounding it.

- Ira Glass (stolen from here, really like the site too)

And the hilarious and perhaps funniest/most true article I've ever read on architecture: Your House, Your Sandwich: An Architectural Drama in Five Parts.

The Plant - Architecture Installation

2011-12-13T11:50:00.003-06:00

About two weeks ago I helped my studio professor, Mary Pat Mattson, setup an installation at The Plant. The Plant is a former pork processing plant on the edge of the Chicago Stockyards and served as the site for our project. The whole place is overbuilt - 2 1/2' thick columns, stainless steel, solid brick floors, and cork insulation throughout. Pretty cool.

We hung 3/32" stainless cable on 1/2" embedded anchors; to go with the overbuilt theme. The lower end is held in tension by a brick, there are more than a few laying around this place. Lighting is accomplished with simple clamp lights. I anchored some conduit to the ceiling with pipe clamps and tapcons for the lights to secure to.

I should have brought a bigger tripod and a note saying "yes it's a camera, please move along." I need to re-edit this too...

Pre-public arrival.

Jason talking to the documentary film maker. He's been following John Edel around for a few years and says he's going to make something in 20. Should be interesting. John is a really cool guy. He manages his pie in the sky thoughts with a down to earth attitude that's impossible not to admire.

Max.

Nice and blurry, just the way I like me. Photo Credit: Vija.

Invalid Object?

2011-11-25T18:30:00.001-06:00

I'm in the middle of finishing my semester so that means lots of experimentation in architecture/imaging programs. This often leads me to obscure forums looking for answers to problems, so I thought this was appropriate.

I've been a big fan of XKCD lately (link).

Where Did All the Real Republicans Go?

2011-11-25T12:59:00.001-06:00

For the past several years I've been increasingly concerned about the change in course of the GOP. They have a different ideology than myself, and that's fine. In fact I think it's necessary for a healthy political process, but it seems like they're making up their own reality. All the while I've been worried that the change was not in fact with the GOP but perhaps my own biases... maybe? So what to do/think.

Historically when I think of Republicans this is what I think of:

I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. -David Frum

And although I don't entirely agree, I find it to be a reasonable position. It does one no good to only read things that they agree with - it's intellectual incestuousness. So for a while I've been searching for a voice on the right that I could actually listen to. Someone who held a different viewpoint than myself, but who actually lived in reality. It seems that person is David Frum - a former Bush speech writer, prominent blogger and writer, and Harvard Law Grad. Here are two of his pieces that I've found very helpful.

The first piece of his I read was this one: Were Our Enemies Right? which if you have to read only one thing this month please read this - it's short and dead on. First he brings up an example from Susan Sontag:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

The point is of course that liberals were entirely wrong about the realities of communism. It was corrupt, people starved, and once great nations were reduced to ineffectual countries that hurt generations of its citizens. Argue all you want about the idea of communism but it just didn't work. As Frum says, "You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts." So he puts a new spin on this for our modern day economic situation:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Frum has more or less been shunned by his conservative peers for saying such things just as Sontag was booed loudly by her liberal crowd. Krugman is reviled by the right and he can often be a little shrill to my own ears, but the guy just keeps being right... it's actually kind of shocking.

Anyways, Frum has a new article about the direction of the GOP entitled When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality? It's a bit long but it's entirely worth it. I'm interested to hear what people think. He says a lot of things I've been thinking for years but had no credibility in saying as I'm not associated with that ideology.

What I've Been Reading Lately

2011-11-22T23:19:00.001-06:00

I love trees, fractals, and polymaths. Hence, I found this article on the branching of trees interesting. Basically, the thickness of all the branches of a tree combined are the same at any height. So if the diameter of the trunk is say 3' near the ground then all the branches at any given height will have a cross-sectional area of 3'.

An app that gets around the NYT's firewall. It works flawlessly and it's free.

If I wasn't doing architecture this is something I'd pursue... intaglio-type photo printing. This guy, Justin Myer, is an acquaintance of a close friend of mine, Justin Santora, and they've traded some work in the past - it's really nice stuff. The process is really fascinating too.

Some truly fantastic older photos.

Architecture I've been looking at: small house, wood, video... how the? With boilers!

The economy is bad. It's going to remain that way for the foreseeable future. No recovery, any time. Get it? Not happening. If you hear otherwise it's just spin, lies, ignorance, or some combination thereof. The fastest way out is of course spending (aka stimulus). Doesn't matter how it happens. First, a history lesson then a more recent one. Read them both or do not talk to me about the economy. Wonk note: 2.5% of GDP is huge. The US needs 2.5% (or so) real (as in, above inflation) GDP growth just to keep up with population growth (same GDP with more people equals less income to split up). That's correct, anything less than that and our standard of living per capita is actually going down. With growth right now hovering right around the 2.5% area anything that adds to that helps dig us out of our collective hole.

How to make a zip line. Hell yes.

I'm a firm believer in simple solutions. So is this former Forumla One designer who made a car that gets 350 MPG. Nothing crazy, it's just really light. Think about it. The typical car today is about 3,000 pounds - to move what, a 150 or 200 pound person? My bike weighs 20 pounds and moves my 180 pounds.

Car:Person = 20:1 or 10:1 with two people
Bike:Person = 1:9

My bike requires 180 times (I know the numbers are rough, but it proves a point doesn't it?) less mass to move me.

I'm tired of writing so I'll leave you with this. A beautifully made graphic of causes of mortality from 2008. It's official, the world is now so safe that most of us die from cancer.

Picturequote

2011-11-13T20:25:00.001-06:00

"Become who you are." - Nietzsche

I took some photos of my friend Derek a while ago for a project he's been working on for a little over half a decade now. He basically grows out his facial hair and then trims it into some style and documents it with photos. For his final photo he just grew out a gnarly beard.

Anyways, the first photo is a digital photo edited in Photoshop while the second is 4"x5" color slide film. I may have said this before on here, but I have a theory on film/digital photography. Digital photography tries to duplicate reality and does it very well - film does not. Film is a chemical process that was refined for roughly the last 100 years. The object was not to look real; it was to please the photographer, and to that end each manufacturer makes several types of color film that produce slightly different hues. My personal favorite is Fuji RDPIII (Provia). What's interesting to me is that digital photographers spend a lot of time in Photoshop making their digital photos look like film (think of all the iPhone apps that do this) not because they want it to necessarily to look like film, that may be what they're going for, but in reality they're just trying to make Reality (with a capital "r") look more pleasing; which is what film does. Film is a tangible interpretation of what humans find aesthetically pleasing.

The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Internet

2011-11-13T10:49:00.001-06:00

If you're at all interested in the evolution of internet technology and human computer interaction then you should watch this TED talk. The beauty of this particular talk is that the speaker, Roger McNamee, gives names and assigns trends to a lot of the phenomena that I think a lot of us have felt in our interaction with the web - but haven't, up until now, had a name for.

Income Inequality Addendum

2011-11-03T11:47:00.001-05:00

The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) just released a report showing growth in incomes and growth in income as a share of overall income.

This first one shows growth in income over the last 30 years among the various quintiles (each 20% of the income spectrum). The gains were as follows:

275% for the top 1 percent of households,
65 % for the rest of the top quintile
< 40% for the second, third, & fourth quintile
18 percent for the lowest quntile

So everyone's income grew, that's good, but here are the gains as a whole (taken from Krugman).

Not so pretty. Also, that top 1% could be broken down further. I like to think of this as market share. Basically there's a pool of something - customers, income to be had, etc. - and there are entities vying for control of that pool. Well, the 99% is losing out.

Occupy is Right, Stop the Skepticism and Apathy

2011-11-02T13:17:00.000-05:00

I've been unexpectedly alone among my friends in my support for the OWS movement and it's bothering me quite a bit. I'm convinced that most people are completely unaware of just how one sided our society is. Further, all the critiques I've heard of OWS is the same utter crap that the news media (see: owned by rich white conservative men) spouts. Here are the three main gripes I hear about the Occupy Movement:

1- "They don't have a clear message."

Yes they do. OWS is fighting against economic and political inequality. They want everyone to pay their fair share. And they're right. The system is broken and unfair.

2- "There's a bunch of weirdos at their protests."

There always is. In the 1960's there were a lot of LSD dropping and free-sex having protestors, but out of it came the civil rights movement, women's rights, and anti-war protests. Does that invalidate them?

3- "They're just bitching. They/we don't have it that bad. Plus, nothing is going to change."

That's utter apathy and it misses the point. Sure, a lot of us live quite well in the bottom 99%, but even as our country has grown richer in the last 30 plus years our share has not increased. Study after study shows that wealth inequality is bad for just about everything in a society from crime rates to levels of happiness. Even the richest are better off in a more fair society.

Evidence:

First, here's the past 100 years or so of income distribution in the US as given by the New York Times:

Currently the top tax rate is 35% for any income made over $379,150 and that doesn't include capital gains (money made on stocks, interest, etc.) which is currently taxed at 15% (really low). It is common to hear people saying that high taxes are bad for an economy. Yet, during America's greatest economic growth, post WWII to somewhere in the 1980's, the top marginal income tax rate was between 70-94% and included capital gains. So no, high taxes are not bad for an economy (see: Northern Europe).

It has come to my attention that the chart that was once here contained some incorrect information. I will repost this when they release the new data (hat tip: Joe). The chart showed varying effective tax rates among similar income earning groups compared with various levels of income earners. The point was that a percentage of the very wealthy pay a very small effective tax rate.

Income Inequality is bad for EVERYONE.

The more a country taxes the rich the happier its people. It's really just a small part of that video from above.

Also, the top 1% is misleading. It's more like top 0.1% (both of these graphs are taken from Krugman's analysis of CBO data):

The top 20% of income earners haven't gained any income share since the late 1970's while the top 1%'s share has grown from about 8% to about 17% - or more than doubled.

The top 1% minus the top 0.1% share of income has grown from about 5% to 8% - a 60% increase - not bad, but the top 0.1% of earners went from 2.6% to about 8% - about a 300% increase. It truly is the super wealthy who are making all the income gains.

Solutions:

There was a study done a little over a year ago that I wrote about before where people of all ages and political affiliations were asked who had the wealth in America.

Of course, everyone was totally wrong. Reality was far more unfair than they had realized. In fact, when asked what the division of wealth should be, people overwhelmingly responded that it should be more fair than what they thought it was - which was to generous to begin with.

So how do we fix our system?

Simple, see that bottom line in the graph? That's what people want. That's the society Americans say they want to live in. To accomplish this first we have to elect people who will represent our interests - fairness. Now the fun part, Congress will set goals as to what percentage of the total national income any group is allowed to keep as income. Say the top 0.1% gets 5% of earnings, top 1% gets 5%, etc. Whatever we choose. Next, the IRS and CBO changes the marginal rates (which now include capital gains taxes) of those income tax brackets every year to bring the targeted goals to within range. It'll take a few years to settle out, but eventually the tax brackets will stabilize. If you think that's too socialist or whatever then simple... just lower your targets and let the rich get richer. This is already what we do, we just don't set goals. We just set arbitrary numbers that mean nothing.

My guess is that the vast majority of people would pay less in taxes, more income brackets would be created near the top end, and those really high end brackets rates would be close to 70 plus percent.

Parting Thoughts:

The top 400 wealthiest people in America have more than the bottom 50% (about 155 million people). That means one person has as much as 390,000 people. That's like getting rid of Chicago and replacing it with 7 people.

"No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order." -FDR

A Real Water World

2011-10-26T08:16:00.002-05:00

About a month ago I wrote about the possible cancelling of the James Webb Space Telescope program. I see such an action as a symbolic gesture of our countries larger unwillingness to invest in science and infrastructure. On a more literal level this is why you need the JWST.

Craftsmanship

2011-10-09T11:16:00.000-05:00

Just two quick examples of extremely high quality work done by hand that caught my attention.

This guy makes all mahogany bicycles by hand. If you search around his site you can see the plys before they're worked and finished (hat tip: Steve U.)

Solid marble, carved by hand, 2.5 tons... original article here (hat tip Dan M.).

Making Mead - Batch #1

2011-10-06T12:16:00.001-05:00

I'm jumping the gun a bit here since I haven't posted photos of how Vija and I harvested honey from our beehive, but none the less.

About two weeks ago I picked up a book called The Complete Meadmaker along with some additional brew equipment since my friend Chris had given me some as a gift. Just to clarify, mead is basically honey wine. It was the preferred drink of the vikings and is thought to be one of if not the oldest fermented beverage on earth. People have been making it for at least 9,000 years.

I decided on two 1-gallon batches of traditional sweet mead. I opted for a method that involves no heating. It can be risky in that wild yeast could take over the fermentation, but 80% of brewing beer/mead is sterilizing everything, so it shouldn't be a problem.

The ingredients are:

3 or 2.2 pounds of honey - in this case south side of Chicago unpasteurized wildflower

1/2 pouch of Wyeast Sweet Mead yeast

1/2 gram of Wyeast yeast nutrient

Filtered water to fill up the rest of the 1 gallon carboy

The only equipment needed was a few 1 gallon glass carboys; a hydrometer; a hydrometer beaker; some airlocks and rubber stoppers, and eventually I'll need a siphon hose; capper/corker; caps/corks; etc.

Obviously I'm running it as a bit of an experiment. The IV is the amount of honey added. One batch got 3 pounds of honey while the other got 2.2 pounds. The idea is that, according to the book, every 0.2 lbs. honey/gal of must (that's the honey water mixture that ferments into mean) you get roughly 1% ABV (alcohol by volume).

The water honey mix.

Mixing and aeration is supposedly key to the initial steps of fermentation.

A hydrometer tells you how dense your must is. 1.000 is water. If something has a specific gravity (SG) of 1.11 as in this case then it is 11% heavier than water. Water being 8.33 lbs/gallon that makes this about 9.25 lbs/gallon. When it's done fermenting it should have a SG reading of around 1.0 again. They should finish in the 10-15% ABV range; I'm not very experienced so we'll see. Sweet meads tend to be less alcoholic

This is the fermenting must two weeks in. The one on the left is the 3 lbs and the right is the 2.2 lbs. The fermentation took about 48 hours to really pick up and the airlocks on top have been busy ever since giving off CO2.

This Weeks Videos

2011-09-27T00:20:00.000-05:00

This Carl Sagan video is a must see. I've blogged about him before as he is easily one of the most insightful humans to have every existed.

An interview with Al Jean, the executive producer of the Simpsons, explains to the NYT the now infamous Banksy opening.

One of the better TED talks I've seen in a while. It's about mycelium - mushrooms.

Who Are We?

2011-09-21T23:09:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note.

The US is the best country in the world because we do things that other people think won't work or can't be done. Not because we are the most fair or have the best healthcare or because our foreign policy is even tolerable. No, people look up to us because we get shit done.

Well, congress is thinking of shutting down the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project that NASA has been working on since 1996. The JWST is a technological marvel that will enable astronomers and physicists to peer far deeper into space than Hubble currently does. It is a mammoth undertaking.

The technology created for projects like this eventually find their way into consumer products, and in the mean time they help advance science and push the limits of engineering and the like.

What American doesn't look back on all of our great achievements without some tinge of pride? Why do we so deeply want to be just another country that aspires to nothing other than our own comfort and entertainment?

Walnut and Steel Coffee Table

2011-09-19T17:29:00.001-05:00

I just finished making this walnut and steel coffee table for a friend. It cost $250 in material and measures 45" square and 18" high.

These are some quick conceptual sections which were the driving factor in the design - aside from cost - this was my first attempt at building something with high-end materials that was more affordable and lighter. The lower section is the dimensions of the boards and me figuring out how to use them the most efficiently. Most wood workers order 20% more because of waste. I spend a lot of time choosing the individual pieces and planning, so my waste is almost nothing.

This is how the details were actually made using 4/4 walnut and 1 1/4" x 1/8" thick angle iron.

Dominoed with beech tenons, glued, and clamped. Those strips on top are the end grain glue-ups/solid strips that make up the underside edge.

This is after one of the first coats of teak oil.
(Of course the shop has the best natural lighting... when I'm using a camera phone)

More walnut furniture in Crown Hall. Teak oil finish - about 6 coats taken to 320 grit and buffed out with #0000 steel wool. The top is 4/4 (3/4" walnut) with strips of 1 3/8" wide walnut on the underside with grain set perpendicular to the top boards to give the appearance that the table is actually made of boards going opposite directions.

The frame uses 36' of 1 1/4" angle iron (it comes in lengths slightly longer than 20'). The legs and frame are four of the exact same pieces butt welded to one another near the corner. The cross member is needed as the walnut would be too thin to support a substantial load.

The tabletop is dominoed and glued together at the joints, as are the strips to one another, and to the table top.

The typical rule for coffee tables is to make them 2/3's the length of the largest couch and the same height as the top of the seating cushion. In this case that makes the table 45" square and 18" high.

I took some steel wool to the metal frame before rubbing some boiled linseed oil onto it. After about 15 minutes you wipe off the excess. This both protects the steel and makes it darker and leaves a sort of waxy feel to it. This is what farmers used to use to protect their tools from rust.

Here's a short video I made about how I made the one-piece leg-table top supports. It's sped up a bit in the middle of the clips to make it less boring. The 90 degree triangle is removed from the angle iron, then it is bent to 90 degrees, and welded on the backside. I've used the same process to make hundreds of pipe brackets in factories.

Paul Krugman

2011-09-19T09:32:00.000-05:00

Liberal or conservative, anyone I espouse Krugman's ideas to gets uncomfortable/mad. Which is interesting because his track record on macro is the best of anyone out there. That and he offers actual solutions. Here's one of his latest.

Walnut Entry Table

2011-09-19T00:26:00.001-05:00

For my final project in my summer furniture class I built an entry table with storage space for shoes. It has a solid walnut frame and maple plywood for the interior. The finish is a semi-gloss polyurethane, but I'm going to strip the front, top, and sides and apply tongue oil instead. Walnut more than most woods looks much nicer with an oil finish.

It measures 36" high, 48" long, and 16" deep. The shoe cubbies are 10 1/2" wide; 15" deep; and they range in height: 4" for flats and sandals, 6", 8", and 10" for winter boots. The concept was to build something that had a sense of permanence. That is, literal heft and construction techniques that would last. If you put a gouge in solid wood it just reveals more wood.

Axonometric drawings.

Exploded axonometric view.

Rendered exploded axon.

Parts list.

I modeled our entryway and made this rendering using Rhino and Maxwell Render.

These are the process photos. It took me two and a half to three weeks (6-7 days a week at roughly 12 hour days) from start to finish. The actual construction was done in the first two weeks. Finishing is mostly just being patient. I've since decided to strip the walnut of the polyurethane finish and instead use tongue oil.

The two 10' long, 9" wide, 1 3/4" thick walnut boards cut into 1/3's to make joining easier.

Jointing - making two perpendicular planes square so that the remaining planes can be squared.

Using the table saw to get the rest square. Walnut is one of the best woods to work with.

This is called a domino machine by Festool. It makes a floating mortise and tenon joint. What's that? Basically a squared dowel. It allows the wood to shrink, swell, and move without damaging itself. It also allows the maker to waste less wood because everything lines up perfectly. The resultant piece is also much stronger.

Creating the mortises for the oak tenons and wood glue.

Gluing.

Once gluing is done it's off to the planar to make everything uniformly thick.

I kept the boards in order so that the grain pattern will follow around the piece. It sounds simple but it was surprisingly difficult to keep it all in order.

This is the interior shelving for the shoes. It's 3/4" maple plywood.

Humidity was a huge problem...

The plywood grew by a 1/16".

This is the jig to make the finger joints. You adjust the width of them by moving the back piece of wood. The difference between perfection and utter failure is within the width of a single line of lead (look at the left side bottom of the photo). All those pieces are tests.

Routing out for the shelves and strips for the walnut within walnut inlays.

This is the walnut routed on three sides for the shelves, the walnut strip to hide the plys, and the walnut inlay on the exterior.

More RH problems... I had to hand file each side of all the fingers, but it's better than fighting it during assembly.

This is the second jig I built to put the frame together. The first one was too weak and this one was too. If I built it again it'd be made of 2x8's and lag bolts.

This is all done to ensure that everything is square. Lots of planning beforehand. If you screw up here you just bought yourself some expensive firewood.

To flatten the finger joints I made a jig (see a pattern here?) that would elevate the router. It was incredibly sensitive. The removal of 1/64" of an inch is very visible and it's easy to just push the jig down a little harder and do just that.

Putting polyurethane on the maple ply. It ended up with 4 or 5 coats.

The inlays.

Japanese sawing off the excess for a flush finish.

Dominoed backing - I used 1/2" maple ply. I hate when you buy something from IKEA or whatever and the backing is 1/8" MDF/cardboard veneer junk.

First coat of the polyurethane. I should have used gloss for the first several coats THEN semi-gloss. Regardless, I'm stripping it soon and replacing it with tongue oil.

Using a micrometer and planar to get the right thickness. I made it five thousands (0.005") over so that it would compress in the joints.

I didn't want to use nails and I also wanted the pieces to be solid so I routed out the furring strips to create an egg-crate joint wherever they intersect.

The butt (back).

Here you can see the egg-crate joint and the dominos. The lack of steel means it will last forever as long as it's not abused too much. Wood on wood joints instead of steel means everything expands and contracts at roughly the same rates as the temperature and humidity changes.

The live-edge corner.

Using a block plane to get everything nice and flat. I also had to tape off the inside so I could apply the finish without disturbing the already applied finish on the maple.

Crown Hall was empty so I used it as a big photo studio.

The view in my large format.

This was the digital test photo...

... and the 4x5 film negative. Shooting in Mies's masterpiece - empty none the less - is quite the perk of going to IIT.

Modern furniture + neo-georgian architecture = kind of awkward. Guess I'll have to design a house to put my furniture in.

Furniture Class

2011-09-17T11:59:00.002-05:00

Over the summer I took a woodworking class (at IIT) with Frank Flury. He's been at my school/in the US for about ten years and he runs a design build studio. Here was his last project which he and his class won an AIA award for. It's beautiful. Needless to say he's pretty okay at woodworking and building in general.

This walnut box with maple splines was built in 2 days.

The dimensions are: 7" (17.5 cm) wide, 9.5" (24 cm) long, 6" (15 cm) tall, and the walnut is 1/2" (1.3 cm) thick.

These are just some scraps from wood world. It cost less than $10.

It's hard to overstate how easy it is to screw up in woodworking. One wrong cut and you have to start over and lose money. Marking everything out, taking your time, not cutting corners (no pun intended), and staying organized are the only way to screw up less.

I had to buy one of these. It's a digital angle finder. If only I knew these existed when I was pipe fitting/building concrete plants.

A good glue joint is actually stronger than the natural bond between wood fibers.

This is the spline jig.

In this application the spline doesn't add too much strength - you really need thicker boards to have a big effect. The idea is to add more gluing surface and in another direction.

The maple splines are cut off with a japanese saw and the box was sanded and finished with teak oil. After a few coats of oil I alternated between #0000 steel wool and teak oil. The result is a buttery smooth finish. The lid is a little warped but oddly it acts as a kind of spring to keep the action of the lid semi-tight.

This is actually the first thing we built. It's a somewhat simple chair. It's called an Ulmer-Hocker Stool and was designed by Max Bill. It's red oak with finger jointed tops and sides, dominoed feet, and a polyurethane finish. The original dimensions are 40 cm x 28.5 cm x 45 cm and was made of beech and spruce.

The dimensions are: 15.5" (39 cm) wide, 11.5 (29 cm) deep, 19" (48 cm) tall, and the oak is 5/8" (1.7 cm) thick.

Changes in Hours at Chicago Public Schools

2011-09-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

My wife works for CPS and just had her first day back yesterday. Long story short, at some point in the day the head of the CPS teachers union gathered all the psychologists, speech language therapists, etc. into a room, shut the doors, and told everyone that they should be outraged that their workday and number of days worked will be going up while wages will only go up 2%. Never mind the failing schools - people needs to get paid. So let's break that down:

Currently:
Average salary is $68,200 (2009)(starting salaries are nice too)
Days worked per year 170 (176 is required in IL but CPS gets special permission)
The work day is from 8:30-2:45 so 6.25 hours
1062.5 hours/year (53% of a 40 hour a week job with 2 weeks vacation)
$68,200/1062.5 hours = $64.19/hour

Rahm Emanuel's Changes:
The union turned down a 2% increase after they were told they would get a 4% increase, so average salary would be (by 2009 numbers) about $69,600
Days worked is going to 180
Work day will now be 7.75 hours
1395 hours/year (70% of a 40 hour a week job with 2 weeks vacation)
$69,600/1395 hours = $52.77/hour

I understand that working more and not really getting paid much more is frustrating, but my wife always has to clock out, lest she be reprimanded by union workers, at the end of the day then stay and do her work. I don't know... $53 an hour plus benefits and summers off with job security sounds fairly okay to me. It reminds me of a quote by Michelle Rhee at the end of Waiting for Superman where she says something similar to 'the amount of harm we visit on our children so that adults can be civil to one another is astonishing.'

Affordable Healthcare Act Explained

2011-09-01T12:40:00.001-05:00

I hesitated to watch this since it ran about 9 minutes long but it was actually very good and informative.

Children at Play

2011-08-25T09:20:00.002-05:00

My friend Joe sent this to me. It's easily one of the best articles I've read regarding our current economic, political, and societal morass. It was penned by GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham.

If you give a damn it's worth reading.

If You Bemoan Federal Debt I Bemoan You

2011-08-01T08:45:00.027-05:00

I am not an expert in economics. I have an undergraduate degree in it, but I'm not an expert. None the less the basic tenants of economics are being violated wholesale by our elected officials. This is part one of a basic overview of what is happening in the US right now. This is the simple stuff that if you don't understand you really shouldn't open your mouth about anything economics related. Sounds harsh? So are the consequences for saying stupid things. No one walks into a hospital and requests blood letting just as no one walks into congress and votes for reduced spending during a recession... oh wait.

What is disturbing is that our federal government is literally doing everything wrong that it can. I expect my friends and family who have never looked at an IS/LM curve or Keynesian multipliers to say ignorant things like "oh just let them default or whatever, we need to stop all this deficit spending," but for our government to act in a populist manner in this scenario is nothing short of insanity. It is wrong. It will hurt people. This is not an ethical debate. There are thousands of research papers, billions of data points, and hundreds of relevant historical examples to garner experience and guidance from. If you have a different opinion post the data because your slogan (big government is bad!) does not hold water.

Where to begin? Let's keep it basic. How much money does the US produce every year - or thought of as personal income - what is the US's salary? This is called GDP or GNP. Please read about it. It is important. Well the number is $14.1 trillion per year currently. That's 14,100 billions or 14.1 million millions.

How much is the federal government's revenue? That is, how much money does it collect in taxes? According to the CBO data (congressional budget office) it was about $2.2 trillion in 2010. That's $2,162 billion or 15% of all the money generated during a year in the US. Let's look at some data.

So how much is the deficit? It's there on the far right of 2010 above: $9 trillion. That's a lot of money and it's been growing, but why? Look at revenue on the far left in 1971 and then look at the next year and the next. See that? It goes up every year as the economy grows. Then look at 2001; it dips. Why? In 2001 and 2003 we had the Bush tax cuts. Revenue fell, nothing shocking here. After 2003 revenue continues to go up as usual until 2008 when Bush was still in office and our current mess started. Straight forward right? It usually is...

Aside: if our debt is $9 trillion and we produce over $14 trillion a year that's like the typical American who makes $32,000 (as of 2006) a year having a debt of $20,500 - sounds like a car loan (in 2006 the average cost of a car was $28,400 according the the government). Does having a car loan make you reckless, irresponsible, and broke?

Now let's look at how much the government is spending (outlays), that's the next column over. I made an Excel spreadsheet using the CBO data starting in 1990 because I'm lazy. You can see the formula I use and all the numbers. Look at the percentage change.

In the 90's federal government spending increases at about the rate of inflation. Then in 2000 spending ticks up and in 2002 it surges. Why? Well, wars are expensive. See how it's high in 1991 and 1992 when we blew up Iraq for the first time? Anyways, it jumps in 2008 and 2009 greatly because Obama is a socialist. Oh wait, no. The recession begins in Q2 2008 and lots of people are unemployed and now collect unemployment and depend on other social welfare programs. Which is what they are designed to do. That and there's the stimulus and bank bailouts in there. Then the stimulus mostly goes away in 2010 and outlays actually drops slightly.

So why is debt bad? Well, there is only so much money out there so whenever the government borrows it "crowds out" private investors and raises the cost of borrowing to some degree. Well, that does not matter right now because we are in a liquidity trap. What the hell is that? Basically, everyone is trying to pay down debt, save, and invest money. If everyone is saving then who is borrowing that saved money? When you put money in a bank or pay down a mortgage that money is lent back out again. If more people are saving than spending it makes it cheaper to borrow money because there's less demand for it. A liquidity trap is when common monetary policy (changing the federal funds rate) no longer has an effect. That is, lowering the interest rate does not spur more borrowing/growth. Well, the federal funds rate has been zero for a while.

So why else is debt bad? Because you have to pay interest on debt. What does the government pay in interest? They pay whatever investors are willing to lend them money at. That is, Treasury Bills. So what are the current rates?

Inflation adjusted rates - that is, the money investors receive after inflation, is currently negative on both 5 and 7 year treasury bills. At 10 years the government pays a "real" rate of 0.38% interest. This is not magic. There is almost nothing to invest in right now because there is so little demand and everything is so uncertain, and up until recently it was unthinkable that the US Federal Government would default on its debt. Hence, we are the safest debtors in the world and get the lowest interest rates. Let's see some data...

Look at the second to last column. Every year we pay more and more in interest until 2009. Then it drops and stays pretty low. Why? Because the federal government can pay almost nothing to acquire long term debt as explained above. Hell, people will pay them to acquire short and medium term debt (up to 7 years!).

Do we need to do something about the debt? Absolutely, but not in a depressed and now stagnant economy. So why do we need to reduce the deficit in a depressed economy? We don't. Borrowing is cheap. If I told you that you could take out a 10-year loan for 0.38% above inflation, try to make money with it, and then pay it back do you think you could? If your answer is no then keep your 9 to 5, otherwise welcome to America. Let's borrow more money so investors have something to do with all their cash that's sitting on the sidelines or in gold bars doing nothing. Let's build some bridges, fix some national parks, upgrade our research facilities, double NASA's funding, fix our schools, invest in cleaner energy, help the poor, and provide basic healthcare to all. It's an investment in our basic infrastructure and I bet the returns will be more than 0.38% over inflation.

Chicago Poetry Center Opens

2011-07-31T12:38:00.009-05:00

I took these photos a little over a month ago, but I've been in producing mode so not a lot has gotten off of my computer or into the developing tank.

This is the Chicago Poetry Foundation's new headquarters just a few blocks from my house at 61 W Superior. It was designed by an architect at my school named John Ronan. He's been getting some excellent stuff built in the area and this is no exception.

Here are some other articles about the building: 1 , 2 , 3

Those green patches are moss. If they last they'll be spectacular.

The screening is made of zinc so it should both last forever (it's what they make galvanizing out of) and form an interesting patina over the years.

Lots of levels and nooks - a.k.a. refuge. A cat would love this place.

Entrance courtyard.

Finnish birch plywood detail.

The scoring in the concrete continues inside as does the change in the texture between pads.

Hidden vantage point - there's a lot of savanna principle/biophilic moves going on here.

Finch's Brewery - Process Photos - Film

2011-06-28T16:15:00.008-05:00

First off here's some 4x5's. My scanner doesn't do a great job with them since it's for film that's you know... not 4" by 5".

This was taken on my phone. In person they're like prints in and of themselves. You can drum scan them to hundreds of gigabytes if you pleased. Basically the amount of information in them is staggering.

This is the canner.

The cooking platform.

An accidental double exposure of the fermenters.

More of the cook platform.

The single exposure of the fermenters.

Now the B&W 120 film. The negatives measure 2 1/4" x 1 3/4" (56mm x 42mm) and the film is Kodak 400 TMY-2 if you were interested.

This is what you would see if you were delivering say a pallet of grain.

The grain silo.

All stainless fermenters.

The keg washer and filler.

The grain mill.

Cleaning the grain out of a batch that just got cooked. They had multiple dumpsters of spent grain. Seems like an opportunity for a productive reuse if someone would come haul it away (big if). The guy who makes our moonshine in NC has a flock of "wild" turkeys that eat all the mash. Supposedly they're delicious.

This machine places the tops on the cans.

Cooking station.

Glass House

2011-06-28T13:06:00.002-05:00

This is a house that was designed and built by one of my professors, Thomas Roszak (wiki article).

A more complete set of photos will accompany these shortly.

Readings

2011-06-28T09:29:00.003-05:00

Denmark, Germany, and Europe in general is betting on a more pedestrian centric city by making it harder more expensive to own cars. It's a little hard to imagine if you haven't been there but the US is going the opposite direction which I think over time will prove to be the wrong decision.

I'm not a big fan of articles about how college is or is not worth the cost and time. It clearly is with some caveats. This article from the NYT does a great job of breaking it down. To put things into perspective:

[C]ollege tuition in recent decades has delivered an inflation-adjusted annual return of more than 15 percent. For stocks, the historical return is 7 percent. For real estate, it’s less than 1 percent.

Someone finally puts solar panels into window assemblies. (Hat tip: Hass)

Food label 1 & 2 design seems to be getting a lot of press lately. Problem - if I walked around the street right now and asked people very basic but entirely relevant questions about food labels/general nutritional knowledge most people, as in 80-90%, would utterly fail. Until people can somehow understand that there are three major sources of nutrition (carbohydrates/sugars/saccharides, fat/lipids, protein/amino acids) what does it matter if you show how many grams of fiber are in something? Conversely, when I visited Google in Palo Alto they have a simple and effective system. Everything gets a color: red is unhealthy, yellow is in between, and green in healthy. In a society where people think that lower taxes decreases debt levels I think that's more the level we need to be shooting for.

Finch Brewery - Process Photos

2011-06-27T15:14:00.013-05:00

I went to a BBQ at Finch's Brewery a few weeks ago at 4565 N. Elston. Afterwards I asked one of the owners if I could photograph his brewery and oddly enough he said yes. And that's why small companies rule. This is the digital portion of the results.

The warehouse was really nicely done. I've been in a lot of factories so I have a fairly good idea of what a good fit and finish looks like industrially. These guys spent some money up front and ended up with a really nice place. They're busy too. The day I was there they had about six or seven employees working - it didn't hurt that they were all really nice and entertained my usual battery of questions.

This is their main room where all cooking and fermenting happens.

Keg washer. The kegs get rinsed with pressurized acid to eat away any build up, then iodine to sterilize them, and (if I remember all this right) are finally rinsed with water. This same station handles keg filling.

After being washed the kegs are stored in the fridge to get the ready to be filled.

Beer making is at least 50% sterilizing everything. Hence, there's sterilizer everywhere.

This is the grain grinder.

It has it's own dedicated room (Update: this is supposedly because grinding grain causes a fine dust to accumulate in the air that becomes an explosion hazard).

Their milled grain connects directly to a silo via a system very similar to those vacuum tubes used at banks. I'm not actually sure what mechanisms move the grain around. I'm assuming an auger attached to a motor.

The silo sits right next to what I'm going to call the cooking station.

Cooking station. Update: The vessel on the left is a boil kettle where the wort is boiled to the desired gravity. The one on the right is a combination mash/lauter tun where the grains steep in water to extract their starches (sugar).

This is a PLC (programmable logic controller) LCD screen. Everything is automated - it's incredible how similar this is to the concrete plants I work at - the output here is just more interesting.

No open flames at Finch's hence the steam boiler. Never seen one of those before...

This is a heat exchanger that removes heat from the freshly brewed wort (pre-beer) so that yeast can be pitched. This is a much bigger version of the tiny copper coil that Evan and I use to chill our massive 5 gallon batches. Finch's does a 1000 gallons at a time. If you don't cool it down the yeast will die and fermentation will never start - at least not with the bacteria that you want. I think they run city water through this then chilled glycol (more on that in a bit). I think I'd increase my surface area and lower my delta T (city water is pretty cheap) but they seem to have their system pretty well worked out.

The grain needs to get cleaned out of the mash/lauter tun. A tad bigger than our 3 gallon stock pot.

These are their 1000 gallon fermenters where their beer will sit for several weeks.

The yeast gives off CO2 as it converts sugar into alcohol, but air cannot be allowed back into the fermenter. Hence, an air lock. In this case a 5 gallon bucket filled with sanitizer. This one was really bubbling off.

These are 5 gallon kegs that I would normally help Evan fill with beer. In this case this is what they use to hold their yeast. 5 gallons of yeast to 1000 gallons of beer! They propagate all their own yeast.

That's a food grade hose. Everything is stainless, seamless, and sterilized.

This is part of their glycol system. The fermenters are jacketed. That is, double walled. Chilled glycol is circulated around them to keep them at whatever temperature is wanted.

Glycol supply and return lines

A solenoid and control precisely control the temperature.

This is the reservoir/make-up tank for the glycol. As you might be able to tell from the number of photos I was really impressed by this system.

Once fermenting is done the beer can be either bottled or put into kegs. This is the canning line.

If the beer is to be kegged it makes its way to the manifold (bottom). All the fermenting tanks connect to this. Very nice. Much easier to open a valve and let gravity and pumps do the work.

Picturequote

2011-06-27T11:35:00.004-05:00

"When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature." - Sigmund Freud

Not a huge fan of Freud but that one reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Hagakure:

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: 'Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.' Among one's affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern. If these are deliberated upon during ordinary times, they can be understood. thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the times comes is what this is all about. To face an event and solve it lightly is difficult if you are not resolved beforehand, and there will always be uncertainty in hitting your mark. However, if the foundation is laid previously, you can think of the saying, 'Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,' as your own basis for action." - Hagakure (27)

This is my friend Garret Santora playing at the Streetside Bar in Chicago.

This is a random unedited video of them playing that night:

Charter Cities

2011-06-27T11:23:00.003-05:00

This is a concept I've been curious about for a while, but Paul Romer seems to have worked out a lot of the details and is actually making it happen. The concept is this: cities are worth more than it costs to build them. But yet historically they have to develop naturally and are their growth is burdened by their complexity, laws, and bureaucracy. What if instead the general framework for the city is predetermined? A vast tract of land is set aside and laws and a tax structure that encourage growth are put in place. The city is essentially a sovereign city-state within a country. There will definitely be some interesting problems that arise but it none the less is very fascinating and I think promising. South Korea and China have already done similar things and are actually helping with the project (second video).

The first video is by far the more interesting of the two.

And the follow up of this actually becoming reality in Central America...

Picturequote

2011-06-23T10:58:00.003-05:00

"I've heard people say that the trouble with the world is, we haven't enough good leaders. I think we haven't enough great followers. I have stood side by side with great thinkers--surgeons, engineers, economists; men who deserve a great following--and have heard the crowd cheer me instead. I'm proud of my profession. I like to play baseball. I like fans, too, but I think they yelled too loudly for the wrong man." - Babe Ruth

Propane tank converted to grill pulled by a dune buggy made by the driver, Carlos. That's my dad sitting shotgun. This is the first photo he ever sent me via email - it's a new medium for him.

Dr. King Legacy Apartments

2011-05-20T10:59:00.005-05:00

So I went to take some photos the other day as spec work for an architecture firm and I noticed that my widest angle lens was going off at about 1/60th for a 1 second shot... The great thing about old school manual cameras is that they can be repaired (unlike newer far more complex digital models). The bad news is... that they're complex.

I haven't gotten my color 4x5 film developed yet, but hopefully will soon. The rest of these are from my digital SLR.

This is the west elevation of the Dr. King Legacy Apartments by Johnson and Lee Architects.

Southeast corner looking west.

Northwest corner looking south.

This building is built in a not so great neighborhood - it's at roughly 16th and Kedzie. What makes it interesting is that the architects were able to stretch their dollars so well. The facade is basically just brick with a little bit of limestone and what I assume is some sort of aluminum or steel cladding around some of the windows. The spacing is even throughout, so no added cost there. The facade is fairly flat and the change is color is just different brick. This is public housing so you can imagine they weren't splurging. So again, I commend them for being able to produce something this pleasing on a budget that permitted little more than a brick and concrete box.

Picturequote

2011-05-10T08:08:00.000-05:00

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ... The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

-Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

With the killing of Osama Bin Laden there were a lot of misattributed MLK quotes floating around. I thought this one was pretty much amazing.

I recently submitted a few photos about steam engines for publication for a new journal at IIT. They only printed my black and white stuff so I thought I'd post the color photos that were left out. This is one continuous strip of film I shot in a concrete plant in Mokena, IL during my winter break the first year of grad school. This is my brother working on a scotch marine boiler.

The Cost of Energy

2011-05-04T09:51:00.003-05:00

I was working on a project for school that looked at the benefits of solar hot water heating equipment and I ran into something odd. Solar hot water heating panels look like regular solar panels but they're usually solid black and water is pumped through them. They're fairly common to see because unlike solar panels that produce electricity (in many cases, lets not get into it) they actually pay for themselves. But there is an interesting oddity to them. They are generally meant to replace the quantity of natural gas needed for heating water, but natural gas is cheap. So even though they save a large amount of energy they do not in fact save that much money. Here is why:

Here I'm showing the three most commonly bought forms of energy: natural gas, electricity, and gasoline.

Natural gas is sold in therms.

1 therm = 100,000 BTU's (British thermal units)

Cost per 100,000 BTU's = $0.86 (in Chicago currently, it's usually about a dollar)

Electricity is sold in kilowatt hours (kWH - 1000 watts for one hour).

1 watt = 3.412 BTU's so a kWH is 3,412 BTU's.

Cost = 12 cents per 3,412 BTU's

Cost per 100,000 BTU's = $3.52

Gasoline is sold by the gallon.

1 gallon of gasoline = 125,000 BTU's

Cost = $4.50 (in Chicago currently)

Cost per 100,000 BTU's = $3.60

So natural gas is more than four times cheaper than other forms of energy per unit. This is why heating my apartment with electricity is stupid. It was cheap for the contractor to put in electric radiant heat washes near the windows but it's incredibly expensive for me to run. The price of electricity is almost double on the west coast ($.025/kWH) and the east coast ($0.20/kWH). Say what you will but nuclear energy makes energy relatively cheap for the Midwest.

When you change the cost of an input, in this case energy, it changes behavior - not really shocking. Doubling the price of electricity causes people to buy more solar panels because it becomes cost effective.

In Chicago it can get up to 100F in the summer - about 30 degrees warmer than we'd like. In the winter it can get to -10F - roughly 80 colder than we'd like. Thus, it takes more energy to heat our homes than it does to cool them. From an environmental/ecological point of view we should live in a warmer climate, but monetarily an 80F difference divided by 4 times cheaper energy because we're using natural gas and not electricity means it's actually cheaper to heat our homes in winter than it is to cool them in the summer with electricity. This is how the cost of something can create perverse incentives.

What is shocking is that no one has figured out how to arbitrage this situation. Why don't any cars run on natural gas or why don't people produce their own electricity from natural gas? The answer is of course in the up front costs of doing such things. Generating your own power is expensive an inefficient. Most generators are roughly 20%-40% efficient...

Everynone Videos

2011-04-21T10:58:00.003-05:00

A new video from everynone/Radi0Lab.

This is the first of theirs I saw... definately have to watch it at least twice.

Picturequote

2011-04-07T16:18:00.005-05:00

"There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything." - Yamamoto Tsunetomo in Hagakure, 38

I found this photo while I was looking for photos of the actual lathe that the legs came from in the post below. It's my older brother and father standing in our now demolished warehouse.

Lathe Table

2011-04-07T14:42:00.009-05:00

I just completed another table that's been in the works for almost two years now. We had to clean out my familie's warehouse the summer before I started grad school so that it could be demolished - really sad. We scrapped and threw out dozens of semi-trailer loads of steel, stainless, aluminum, brass, lead, copper, etc. (in ascending monetary value of course) in the process. That place was a true treasure trove or potential projects.

The legs are cast iron, although because of their age there's probably a good amount of nickel in them making it more like steel or so I'm told, they came off of a working lathe. This is it sitting on the flat bed - it's probably the frame of a Toyota or rebar buried in Mumbai now; or something else equally undignified.

The dimensions are 48" L x 32" W x 26" H, the tabletop is 1 3/4" thick, and it weights around 250 pounds (I'm guessing tabletop 100 lbs + 75 lbs for each leg - I'm going to weigh it soon). UPDATE: the table top is 88.0 lbs, the legs are 78.0 lbs and 78.6 lbs, and the bolts are 1.6 lbs giving it a total weight of 246.2 lbs.

The wood is jatoba and is also known as Brazilian Cherry even though it's not part of the cherry family. The wood is insanely heavy and literally twice as hard as oak (2300-2800 on the Janka harness scale, oak is around 1300-1400). It will darken with time too. Some other random specifics: it's finished with several coats of semi-gloss polyurethane (I kind of fought doing this but it does protect it so well); the bolts are 5/8" stainless; the tabletop is what is known as a "glue-up" which means that the pieces were joined, glued, and planed into a single slab; and I sealed the cast iron legs with boiled linseed oil, it's the same stuff that artists use to seal oil paintings, which gave it a great kind of lacquered feel that will keep it from rusting.

Picturequote

2011-04-04T08:29:00.005-05:00

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Teachers unions and getting rid of terrible teachers; cops and the drug war - judges too; populist politicians who spew idiocy, racism, and anti-science rhetoric so that they can garner the support from voters who hold similar opinions; the mega-rich in America and issues of fairness/taxes (see: Koch brothers); home contractors and using truly new materials, technology, and ideas to build responsible homes; etc. The further I go in school the more I realize how difficult true change is to accomplish - especially as the area of interest gains prominence. We had a lawyer that specializes in litigating claims related to architecture speak to us. His message over and over was that lawyers and judges, given opposing opportunities, will make legal decisions based on which allows them to stay busy and make more money. It was a way of predicting the outcome of any given trial that proved quite accurate.

So now the constructive part - how do you incentivize people to change their deleterious but self-preserving actions for the benefit of all?

Just a dreary shot of Chicago from the roof of Vetro.

San Francisco Time Lapse

2011-03-27T23:51:00.004-05:00

While I was in SF I made a few time lapses. This is an amalgamation of said videos, in my first ever edited video using Adobe Premier, with Grizzly Bear and Feist in the background.

The video looks better at higher quality so click before or follow this link and up the quality and full screen it.

San Francisco Film

2011-03-23T21:34:00.006-05:00

All of this is shot on Kodak B&W 120 film. Borders are left because it's basically photojournalism and no edits are made other than brightness and contrast - as per the usual.

Cathedral of St. Marys of the Assumption by Nervi and others.

Frank Lloyd Wright's V.C. Morris Gift Shop.

Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park.

Renzo Piano's California Institute of Sciences.

Artesa Winery in Napa by Domingo Triay.

The Painted Ladies next to Alamo Square.

Unemployment at a Glance

2011-03-23T16:48:00.010-05:00

Trending of the monetary and employment makeup of the US lately has been both disturbing and interesting, but first some articles and figures:

The unemployment rate is currently 9.5% as of February 2011.

A more accurate unemployment rate, the U6 (total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons), is about 16%.

There are now 5 unemployed workers for every 1 job opening.

The unemployment rate of the young, often cited as a reason for unrest, in Egypt is 25% - in the US it's 21% (defined as 16-24 in the US and under 25 in Egypt). If you're a college grad it's more like 11% and if you're over 25 it's 4.5%.

Cutting unemployment benefits is correlated with people looking for work less.

Graduating from college now and not getting a job is detrimental to your long term prospects - that is, we're damaging a whole generation of workers.

And last but not least, the top 400 richest Americans now own more than the bottom 50% of Americans.

I'm not even sure I need to comment further. It should be abundantly clear why firing teachers - which will most likely be young and will further exacerbate the problem, cutting government spending - which will increase that 5 unemployed per job opening number, and/or cutting taxes (on the rich none the less) at this point in time makes no sense. The employed have historically high employment rates while some job postings are even requiring that you're currently employed just to apply for the job. It's as if the unemployed have become a minority group with little power and diminishing resources. Why is this acceptable?

San Francisco

2011-03-23T10:41:00.015-05:00

California Academy of Sciences designed by Renzo Piano.

Back entrance.

The de Young by Herzog and Demuron.

Copper facade.

Entrance courtyard.

A cathedral made of...

... bullets, gun parts, casings, and buck shot.

Interior courtyards in the de Young.

View from the observation tower.

This is the inside of the California Academy of Sciences.

Walk under aquarium...

The green roof made of native CA plants.

I'm not a fan of ceiling tiles, but in this case - sans the metal rack they usually sit on and replaced by an undulating pattern formed by hanging them from metal wire they both perform and please.

The Golden Gate Botanical Garden.

Rafael Viñoly's Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building for UCSF.

It abuts a beautiful nature preserve with quite the elevation.

A view to the green roof which is open to staff (and by the looks of it actually gets used).

These are a collection along of homes along Laidley Street that I found interesting for one reason or another.

Morphosis designed San Francisco Federal Building... it's like contemporary brutalism. Looks oddly similar to his Cooper Union building.

The back was the best part. It reminded me of the buildings in Germany.

San Francisco MOMA by Mario Botta.

The brickwork was nice but I'm not thrilled by the building.

Frank Lloyd Wright's V.C. Morris Gift Shop (now Xanadu Gallery).

Easily the best building I saw. Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption designed by Nervi plus some other people.

Notice the size of the people where the concrete touches the floor.

The scale is hard to capture in photos. The roof is 190' tall.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Hanna House - tours booked months in advance.

Ritual Coffeehouse.

Artesa Winery in Napa by Domingo Triay.

French Oak barrels. They were playing Gregorian chants...

Looking out from the entrance.

The Painted Ladies.

This is Buena Vista Park. It made me realize that Chicago doesn't have any parks that are, in some sense of the word, native/natural or even really picturesque landscapes. Maybe North Pond/the Alfred Caldwell Lilly Pool or maybe even Washington Park if Chicago weren't a segregated city.

The 3rd and the 7th - or - The Best Renderings I've Ever Seen

2011-03-04T09:15:00.005-06:00

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Almost everything in here is CG. He used 3DS Max with VRay, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere.

Interview here.

Sketches

2011-02-28T13:30:00.005-06:00

These are some sketches I did while in Europe this summer that I have yet to actually scan and post. I used a straight object to mark out the vanishing points but everything else is freehand.

8 House by BIG Architects in Copenhagen. Pencil and India ink on newsprint - 9" x 11".

VM Houses by BIG Architects in Copenhagen. Pencil and India ink on bristol board - 9" x 11".

Street along the river in Cologne, Germany. I was sitting in the grass drinking for this one. Pencil on newsprint - 9" x 14"

Bayer Headquarters by Hurphy/Jahn near Munich, Germany. Pencil, India ink, and watercolor on cotton rag paper - 10" x 7".

Visit a Tomato Farm in Florida

2011-02-28T09:07:00.005-06:00

During the winter holidays I visited the tomato farm where my uncle works. It's in southern Florida near Naples/Ave Maria. If I remember right it's roughly 10 square miles of land.

The plants are grown in very sandy and level fields surrounded by drainage canals. Some fields are drip irrigated and others are flooded.The soil is ploughed into raised beds and fertilized at the same time. Then they're covered in a plastic wrap to keep the fertilizer in and so they don't erode. Stakes are driven in and string is strung between them for the vines to grow on. Finally seedlings are placed and take about 2-3 months before they bear fruit. Each plant can be picked three times but each successive picking yields lower quality tomatoes.

When the alligators in the surrounding canals get to about 6'-7', such as this one is, they're "harvested." They were surprisingly skittish.

This reflective film is supposed to keep away bugs. The view literally went on for miles.

All the farm heads keep a private garden on the outskirts that are planted with cabbage, peppers, bell peppers, cilantro, etc. Everything grows at a greatly accelerated rate here because it's essentially a semi-hydroponic system powered by Florida sun.

This station filters and adds nutrients to the water. A computer does all the work and keeps tabs on everything. They know down to the penny how much of each fertilizer they're putting in every acre. Every aspect of the site is like a long term experiment.

There's also an uneasily fanatic drive towards cleanliness. Every day all the buckets are rinsed in a mild chlorine solution. Any plant that a bird defecates on is marked and anything within a 5' radius cannot be picked... it's some sort of regulation. I wonder if the scared public/lawmakers realizes that bird poo is fertilizer?

This is my uncle's solar powered shipping container tool shed/man cave.

Workers use a pneumatic air gun to press wooden stakes into the raised beds - all day long.

I felt kind of weird pointing my camera at people that I didn't even talk to. This machine is ploughing the raised beds and adding (I believe) the P value of the fertilizer (which always consists of a N-P-K mix).

The beds have to be covered quickly with plastic because the fertilizer is gaseous.

Drip irrigation costs more but yields are higher per acre as compared to flooding which requires big drainage canals every so often. Again, they can quote the cost of all this stuff per acre down to pennies and give you a back of the napkin cost benefit of plant variety, season, area of the farm, and what course of action should be taken - it's fascinating in the way that watching anyone who's good at what they do is always interesting.

Sand hill cranes. They're huge! Those are people size.

They allow a bee keeper to keep hives on their land even though tomatoes don't need pollination. There were over 20 hives.

They grow rounds, ugly (their own variety), and plum tomatoes. Here workers are picking plums and being paid by the basket; I forget how much they get paid, somewhere around 25 to 50 cents per basket and each one takes about 2 or 3 minutes to pick and haul. The foreman (the guy who's pouring the basket into the truck) gives them a token for each basket picked and the workers usually jog back to their picking spot. Every few minutes the trucks move down the isles to keep pace with the workers. They pick them green so they don't bruise prior to being sold.

Again with the hygiene - here's a mobile hand washing station.

The laborers are actually contracted out and run by someone else. The foreman owns the buses and sets the wages. The farm pays by weight picked so there's an interesting exchange there where if the yield is bad the workers may not get on the bus and essentially work harder for less, or of course the opposite can be true.

Writer's Theatre

2011-02-27T15:23:00.006-06:00

My studio embarked on a one week charett to design a 250 person theater in Glencoe, IL. My professor, Thomas Roszak, is among those submitting proposals.

These are my drawings:

And a few of the renderings:

The walls are curving cast in place concrete that radiate from a central point - the theater. To the left is an outdoor auditorium that adjoins a park. The entrance is the opening to the right.

This is a view of the entrance. There are small openings where the ceiling touches the wall to provide a light wash on the rough concrete walls.

This was all modeled in Rhino and rendered with the Maxwell Rendering plug-in for Rhino.

Why Do Architects Geek Out Over Furniture?

2011-02-27T13:03:00.008-06:00

Seriously, my school has a chair collection in the library. It's a relationship I don't fully understand. This is the first in a (hopefully) long series of projects that I've documented and not posted in the last few months.

So a while back I offered to make any of my friends tables and the like if they'd pay for supplies. One person, Joe, actually followed through. My first design for his coffee table is here, and the principle was to make a form that would map the flow of forces that the table would experience when loaded. I'm still somewhat interested in making that table when I'm bored but in the mean time I decided to come up with a new concept for Joe's table.

Part of being a 20-something year old these days is moving a lot, so I thought the table should be able to break down, but it should be solid too. I really dislike tables that wobble and look feeble; the finished product weighs about 50 or 60 pounds. Quality plywood, in this case Baltic birch plywood, comes in sheets that are 5' x 5' so I designed the pieces to minimize waste. The scrap was used as blocking so that clamps wouldn't scar the table.

The final dimensions were about 42" long x 26' wide x 18" tall. The proportions are close to the golden ratio while still maintaining the same height and 2/3 the length of the couches it resides next to.

The different colors represent the different pieces of the table. They're laid out to make single cuts on the table saw easier/possible.

The legs are held in by friction. They're tight enough not to wobble but can be pulled out for moving.

This is after the first coat of polyurethane.

This is a time lapse of some of the construction (about 2 min).

Revolution!

2011-02-24T11:23:00.003-06:00

This is my favorite Egyptian protester sign.

(Via The New York Times)

This one is interesting in the way that the numbers add up. If you're into chess 32 on the pawn side vs 31 on the other. Although I'm thinking it'd be nearly impossible to beat the pawns given their layout.

(Hat Tip: Kevin H.)

Holy Shit They're People Too?

2011-02-24T11:14:00.003-06:00

Debate Problem:

Without using religious/god references (because we're a "religiously free country") how is it possible to defend being opposed to gay marriage without admitting prejudice?

It's cool I'll wait.

Yet supposedly all Americans care about right now is getting jobs. “People that don’t focus on pocketbook issues are frittering away their 15 minutes of attention.” - Fred Sainz

Barack Obama speaking on gay marriage:

“I struggle with this. I have friends, I have people who work for me, who are in powerful, strong, long-lasting gay or lesbian unions. And they are extraordinary people, and this is something that means a lot to them and they care deeply about.”

Kurzweil Reading

2011-02-21T01:53:00.004-06:00

Time has a decently long piece on Raymond Kurzweil - he's the inventor and futurist who's interested in life extension and large time scale predictions. I've been interested in him for a while now.

Also came across this organization from the article... seasteading, interesting. Piratebay.org almost bought a place a few years ago called Sealand that would have made them a sovereign nation or something. Interesting idea anyways.

Architectural TED Talks

2011-02-21T01:47:00.003-06:00

Here's an interesting portfolio site that's trying to dematerialize portfolios called first-stop.org. There's some really great graphic work on there too.

I visited this guys firm over the summer in Copenhagen. It was pretty magical. He and some friends kind of founded the firm by accident. Him and some friends entered several design competitions in their "free time" while working at another office. They won all of them and had to basically quit their jobs and hire-up.

Global Warming Comprehension

2011-02-10T11:47:00.001-06:00

Amazon Prime

2011-02-06T14:55:00.004-06:00

I've been meaning to write about this for a while now. Amazon is an interesting beast to me; they didn't turn a profit for the first few years like so many dot coms, their website is very confusing and Yahoo like (see: the antithesis of Google), but at the same time they're undercover innovators.

Case in point - Amazon did some research and found that for every extra 0.1 seconds longer it took for a webpage to load their revenue went down by 1%. It makes a difference when, if I'm reading this right, you gross about $36 billion a year. They also have the Kindle which, in its current incarnation, is the first serious challenger to print. I really do mean that.

Now, what I really want to talk about - Amazon Prime. For $79 per year (about $6.50 a month) you can get free 2 day shipping on any purchase or pay $4 for overnight delivery. At first I balked at the notion, but they offer a free 1 year trial, so I figured why not? In a short period of time it changed the way I went about purchasing everyday items. So what? I now buy things from Amazon that I never would have before. Why go down the street and pay tax (over 10% in Chicago) to get one or two things when I can order it with a much greater ease, far larger selection, better price, has reviews, and get it the day after the next for essentially free? Amazon is taking market share from physical stores. They're essentially eroding barriers to online purchases. Less wait = more purchases.

Every dollar Amazon gets from a customer is another dollar Walmart and Walgreens isn't getting. Dollars are votes.

So why this photo?

I was a little confused when this over-sized box that held a single small item showed up in the mail room. It seems like such a waste, but the real waste is a brick and mortar store with lots of lights, heating and cooling, maintenance, people who work there full time, cash registers, shopping bags, the parking lots that serve them, you owning a car so you can get there, the larger urban spaces that are needed to house all this stuff, etcetera. When I walk around Chicago and see all the empty storefronts I wonder if it's due to the current economic situation or if it's an actual shift in the way we purchase goods. My guess would be a fair dose of the latter.

An Architect That Can (Still) Draw

2011-02-01T10:39:00.007-06:00

My uncle is a landscape architect in southwestern Florida with Grady Minor Associates, so I thought I'd visit his office while I was there. His niche, as far as I can tell, is that he hand drafts and renders - that is, the man can draw. Almost no one does this in architecture so I assume it's somewhat rare in landscape too. He uses Autocad and Photoshop aside from drawing but generally only at the back end of the design. For the most part iterations are done free hand. What I find interesting is that clients specifically request him because of the way he works - which isn't all that surprising to me but is of course counter to so much of what I learn in school.

An entire wall plastered with plans and sections on trace paper.

This rendering (about 2' x 3') took him about 20 hours - about the same as a computer if not less.

We Need Growth and No That's Not a Bad Thing

2011-01-28T11:50:00.005-06:00

Note: every link in here is worth reading/looking at.

A common response, especially among young liberally minded people, to my all too frequent tirades about how economic stimulus is still needed is "why do we still need growth? Do we really need more stuff?"

Of course we do - and we need it at an increasing rate. Here's why - population growth in the US is about 1% per year. Inflation is currently about 1.5% although the natural rate is more like 3 to 4.5%. Therefore, right now we need to increase GDP by about 2.5% a year just to sustain our current standard of living. Nothing tricky here just some arithmetic.

This is a table I took from Krugman here where he explains basically the same thing. This is Okun's Law by the way:

The take away from this is that an economy needs 2.5% real growth just to keep unemployment from rising and an increase of 2% of real growth to knock 1% off of unemployment.

Typical GDP growth rates are about 2.5-3.5% a year... see where this is going? Real GDP growth in 2010 was 2.6% and in the last quarter it was slightly up to 3.2% (as a part of the whole, not an additional 3.2%) so... at this rate unemployment should start to look semi normal around late 2018 or so.

Back to the point - so this sets up a system where we can only sustain ourselves through continual growth - evidence of the brutality of a market based economy!

Why not? Well population growth and inflation are a fact that must be dealt with and I don't think it's wrong that people should want employment although perhaps I think our mindset towards employment should shift to projects as opposed to a 9-5 but that's not relevant here. What is relevant is that a growing economy and an increased GDP does not necessarily mean a bigger house and an SUV. Whenever predicting how we will live in the future it's usually a good idea to look at Europe now. They've focused on increasing quality of products over tons. As Krugman puts it here:

The way I see it, by the way, is that it’s about shifting the mix away from tons of stuff to quality. You have a small electric vehicle (powered by solar-thermal) instead of an S.U.V., but it drives itself most of the time, and has a great built-in entertainment system. You live in an apartment or townhouse instead of a McMansion, but the brain-wave controlled kitchen turns out gourmet meals on demand. And if we do the GDP accounting right, this will show up as economic growth.

This is something I blogged about a while ago. I was talking about buying fewer quantity but nicer things. There's a good TED talk there too.

The Koch Brothers

2011-01-10T11:15:00.001-06:00

This article by Malcolm Gladwell is well worth the long read. It gives a really good look into the long game played by certain libertarian/very right of center very wealthy individuals - in this case the Koch brothers.

Gun Ignorance

2011-01-10T10:05:00.009-06:00

In the wake or Arizona's shooting there is of course going to be a wave on anti-gun sentiment. I differ from most of my somewhat liberal friends in that I support gun ownership. This usually comes as a shock to whomever I'm talking to and we get into some sort of debate over "okay well shotguns are fine because you can hunt with them, but assault rifles are terrifying and should be illegal."

Here's an excerpt from the above article that I found a bit troubling:

“... you do not hear much about the fact that Jared Loughner came to Giffords’s sweet gathering with a semiautomatic weapon that he was able to buy legally because the law restricting their sale expired in 2004 and Congress did not have the guts to face up to the National Rifle Association and extend it. If Loughner had gone to the Safeway carrying a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms...”

The author makes out the 9mm Glock that the shooter used to be some sort of special handgun that citizens shouldn't be able to buy... I don't get it. It's a slide actuated, clip fed, semi-automatic pistol. It's no different than the Colt Model 1911 that my grandfather carried in WWII. It was even a 9mm which the military is going away from because it doesn't have the stopping power to kill a human.

My general frustration is a lack of gun knowledge. In Illinois, where I live, I can buy a shotgun when I'm 18 but I can't buy a pistol until I'm 21. Go to a shooting range some time and shoot a shotgun. Shotguns are about the scariest thing you could shoot at a person. Hands down. Ask any gun owner. It's nearly impossible to miss with a shotgun and there's nothing left of you when you do get hit.

Assault rifles always get liberals fired up - they look scary. They were invented by the Germans in WWII. Prior to their invention Germany used a bolt action rifle with a large caliber bullet like every other country. Today you'd recognize their Mausers as sniper rifles. The bullets can travel up to one mile or more and kill a person quite easily. At a few hundred yards you can take down big game with such a gun. With an assault rifle - no way. The range of such a gun is usually about 400-800 yards. The German engineers noticed that rarely were people in combat shot at more than a few hundred yards, such large bullets were unnecessary. They made the rounds smaller but made them go faster. Of course:

KE = 1/2MV^2

Velocity is more important than mass in determining force. This had the effect of allowing the soldier to carry more ammunition and be just as effective at ranges that battles were actually fought at. At the same time the guns were made smaller and lighter. The Russians invented the AK-47 and the US invented the M-16 shortly thereafter.

This is your grandfathers rifle (in this case the M1 used in WWII) using a 30-06 round:

180 grains @ 2700 feet per second with 2,900 Ft/lbs of force

This is the .223 or 5.56mm used in the American assault rifle the M-16 or now the M-4:

55 grains @ 3,250 feet per second with 1,300 Ft/lbs of force

A grain is 1/7000 of a pound.

There you have it. An assualt rifle impacts with less than half the force of a traditional rifle round that hunters still use for large animals. In fact a .223 is rarely used to hunt deer because it is not considered of sufficient size to take one down without undue suffering.

The idea that the Arizona shooter had access to some special weapon is straight wrong, and the next time you hear about an assault weapons ban just look at the numbers above.

Conditional Payments

2011-01-05T12:45:00.006-06:00

Mexico and Brazil have come up with forms of social welfare that pays the poor for meeting certain conditions, hence the name conditional payments (great article). These conditions can include keeping your kids in school, going to get medical checkups, going to classes on disease prevention, etc. The government figures its better to pay $1 to keep the kid in school than spend $5 to arrest them a few years down the road. The sums of money are tiny ($13 for every month a child is in school, $19 if you're 16 or over) but to a poor family it can double their income. The program is highly scrutinized and is showing very real and positive benefits. Poverty in Brazil has fallen from 22% to 7%. Mexico's version of the program has raised the numbers of kids entering junior high by 42% and high school by 85%. These are of course very real examples of direct stimulus - they're transfer payments.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone in America right now that thought our country was doing alright economically, and naturally one would assume that this means something should be done to correct the issue - which in this case is an unemployment rate of nearly 10% (about 4% is considered the natural rate currently).

Recently a bill passed approving 800 billion (that's 800,000 millions) in tax cuts that extended the Bush era tax cuts. This is, of course, more than the original stimulus received (which was roughly 40-60% tax cuts itself). And of course by taking away federal revenue - that's what a tax cut is - revenue declines and you go into debt if you don't slash spending. Of course that's not so easy. It turns out that if you take our defense spending, medicare/medicad, and social security you're only left with 20% of the budget. So have fun firing teachers, letting roads crumble further, and ceasing funding for scientific research. Why is any of that political? Doesn't everyone like education and roads?

Anyways, the whole point of this is that the legislative branch has two options for helping the economy. They can either cut taxes or spend more money. They both create debt so in essence they're the same thing. My complaint about tax cuts is that 70% (the bottom 50% pay 2.7%) of federal income taxes are paid by the top 10% of income earners, so if you make tax cuts guess who it goes to? When wealthy people get money they tend to save it which is not the intended outcome if you're trying to stimulate an economy.

This chart shows the percentage of Federal Income Taxes paid by each income group:

Year	Top .01%	Top 1%	Top 5%	Top 5-10%	Top 10%	Top 10-25%	Top 25%	Top 25-50 %	Top 50%	Bot 50%
2001	16.06%	33.89%	53.25%	11.64%	64.89%	18.01%	82.90%	13.13%	96.03%	3.97%
2002	15.43%	33.71%	53.80%	11.94%	65.73%	18.16%	83.90%	12.60%	96.50%	3.50%
2003	15.68%	34.27%	54.36%	11.48%	65.84%	18.04%	83.88%	12.65%	96.54%	3.46%
2004	17.44%	36.89%	57.13%	11.07%	68.19%	16.67%	84.86%	11.85%	96.70%	3.30%
2005	19.26%	39.38%	59.67%	10.63%	70.30%	15.69%	85.99%	10.94%	96.93%	3.07%
2006	19.56%	39.89%	60.14%	10.65%	70.79%	15.47%	86.27%	10.75%	97.01%	2.99%
2007	20.19%	40.41%	60.61%	10.59%	71.20%	15.37%	86.57%	10.54%	97.11%	2.89%
2008	18.47%	38.02%	58.72%	11.22%	69.94%	16.40%	86.34%	10.96%	97.30%	2.70%

If you give money to the less wealthy or even poor people they spend it because they have to. This of course begs the question why the not wealthy (see: the vast majority of Americans) would ever support tax cuts. I think the answer has, as it often does, to do with the perception of fairness.

To come full circle - why does America go for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy as opposed to inexpensive transfer payments that would help a greater percentage of our population and be more effective? Food stamps have long been THE most effective and efficient means of stimulus to the poor. Again, the answer seems to be the perception of fairness.

How Zombies are Really Made

2011-01-05T12:21:00.005-06:00

Video games have been surging in the past few years in terms of both money spent on them and time devoted to playing them. The phenomenon is interesting on several levels. It's beginning to both shape and replace more traditional forms of human interaction. Balk all you will but World of Warcraft is a group dynamics psych experiment with the biggest sample size ever. Plus it generated over a billion dollars in revenue in one year for its producer Blizzard (that's a 1000 millions). At the rate we're going we'll have a sizable chunk of our population who take the blue pill and lives largely in a built reality - It's already happening in multiple MMORPG's (massive multiplayer online role playing games). I've neglected to share a few articles in the past but this one is worth mentioning.

This is from Milo:

Call of Duty: Black Ops made $650 million in the first week it was out. It was by far the largest media release ever. By comparison The Dark Knight made $200 million its first week.

I find it more interesting than creepy. Game producers are becoming increasingly good at hooking gamers by teasing them with well timed upgrades and rewards. Your weapons and characters get better as you play - making playing more fun. What's interesting is that people seem to clearly prefer this as opposed to rewards they receive in the real world, if I can call it that. A game provides a certain framework and security that the world cannot. Perhaps social scientists, governments, and employers should take note and learn from game producers.

On Crowd Accelerated Innovation

2011-01-05T11:45:00.003-06:00

Chris Anderson, the guy who founded TED - not the WIRED writer, has an interesting article on what he deems "crowd accelerated innovation." I won't hash out all the details but the basic idea is that people in certain areas (dance and architecture are two I remember) are able to innovate faster vis a vie the internet and specifically videos. The idea came to him when he realized that by publishing TED talks online the quality of future talks was improved. People invited to speak at TED poured over the archive and practiced their speeches and it showed.

This idea appeals to me because one, I have first hand experience with this which I will get into in a moment and two, it dispels the myth of the lone genius which is rarely if ever the case. Einstein had his first wife Mileva who was perhaps smarter than himself, Edison ran innovation like a factory, Kalashnikov (of AK47 fame) was the head of a design team which was played down by the Soviets to trump up the hero card, etc. Tesla may be an exception but come on, it's Tesla. He was barely human.

As usual I digress to a paintball story. Back in the day - that is, roughly the late 90's paintball tournaments were played in the woods. This made for some pretty bad spectating. You could rarely get a good glimpse of what made good teams good. The sport evolved and by the time I started playing national tournaments (NPPL, when there was one league) in roughly 2000 woods fields were a thing of the past. What this allowed more than anything was for amateurs to see how the pros played. It used to be the case that all teams at a tournament would play teams of other classifications - of which there were three - Pro, Amateur A, and Amateur B. In 80-90% of the match-ups the team in the higher division would win handily. But as time progressed and classifications went from 3 divisions to 4 (Pro, D1, D2, D3) and 5 (+semi pro) this wasn't the case at all. The gap in skill decreased. Of course some of this could be attributed to various factors - lower cost of paint, widening of classifications, smaller teams (from 10 man to 7) which means more chance, but by far and away I believe it was because everyone could see what the pros were doing. You could literally stand next to the net at a national tournament without paying admission for the cost of gas to get there. A paintball education became cheap.

You could see where they ran off the break, where they shot, how they shot, how they moved, how they talked, and the young kids started to mimic them. It really cannot be overstated how much it changed paintball. In 2002 if a pro team lost to an amateur team it was the talk of the tournament, but by 2006 it was entirely common for a good amateur team to beat a top ranked pro team - we did it repeatedly.

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2011-01-05T11:39:00.003-06:00

"How can extreme forms of nationalism survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective - as a single, small globe against stars?" - Arthur C. Clarke

This is my uncle Kent in Naples, FL riding an appaloosa.

2010-12-19T17:24:00.000-06:00

All the Clever Names Were Taken

Masters Thesis Project

DIY Christmas

My Mom Really Needs a Bottle of Ripple

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Fall 2011 Studio Work

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Recommended Reading

Small is Beautiful

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Expert

Slowing Down Time

On Creative Production

The Plant - Architecture Installation

Invalid Object?

Where Did All the Real Republicans Go?

What I've Been Reading Lately

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The Internet is Dead, Long Live the Internet

Income Inequality Addendum

Occupy is Right, Stop the Skepticism and Apathy

A Real Water World

Craftsmanship

Making Mead - Batch #1

This Weeks Videos

Who Are We?

Walnut and Steel Coffee Table

Paul Krugman

Walnut Entry Table

Furniture Class

Changes in Hours at Chicago Public Schools

Affordable Healthcare Act Explained

Children at Play

If You Bemoan Federal Debt I Bemoan You

Chicago Poetry Center Opens

Finch's Brewery - Process Photos - Film

Glass House

Readings

Finch Brewery - Process Photos

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Charter Cities

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Dr. King Legacy Apartments

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The Cost of Energy

Everynone Videos

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Lathe Table

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San Francisco Time Lapse

San Francisco Film

Unemployment at a Glance

San Francisco

The 3rd and the 7th - or - The Best Renderings I've Ever Seen

Sketches

Visit a Tomato Farm in Florida

Writer's Theatre

Why Do Architects Geek Out Over Furniture?

Revolution!

Holy Shit They're People Too?

Kurzweil Reading

Architectural TED Talks

Global Warming Comprehension

Amazon Prime

An Architect That Can (Still) Draw

We Need Growth and No That's Not a Bad Thing

The Koch Brothers

Gun Ignorance

Conditional Payments

How Zombies are Really Made

On Crowd Accelerated Innovation

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