I spent my blogging time today concocting a posting about the opinions and discoveries of Anton Howes, and in particular this piece. My posting will be ready and up at Samizdata Real Soon Now. In the course of doing this I encountered this podcast which an American guy did with Howes. I’m now half way through this. So far: recommended.
That’s it for today.
This evening I happened upon episode 1 of Trains That Changed The World on Yesterday TV, the show which has Steve Davies in it. This was the episode I missed the first time around, so I am very happy about this.
For the first half of the show, we were in Britain, covering the Stephensons and the transformation that trains wrought, as you’d expect, upon Britain. But then we crossed the Atlantic, and learned how trains put the U in USA. Which all the talking heads, including Davies, agreed that they did.
In particular I learned about this loco:
On the left, an Old Photo of what I take to be, more or less, the original. And on the right, painted in totally implausible paints of many colours, and also photoed in full colour, a Reproduction produced in the 1970s. And looking like it’s just got the part of its lifetime in Back to the Future 3.
This is the 4-4-0, the Model T of the railroad track. The big thing I learned about the 4-4-0 (which gets its name from its wheels) is that it burns wood rather than coal, on account of America being made of trees rather than coal; and that the big bulge on its chimney is to stop solid bits of burning wood pouring out and setting fire to America. I did not know this.
Indeed, in Marylebone Road:
The same night I photoed the car and the leaves and Sherlock Holmes smoking.
I photoed many photos of these geese, in their clutches of four on each street lamp, while waiting for the Curry Night Boys to assemble, my favourite photo being this one …:
… because it turns the four geese into something that looks more like one giant insect. If I had showed only that one, it might have taken you a few moments to work out what was going on.
Okay, so, apart from four geese on each street light, what is going on? Why these geese? And why those strange blue smudges?
It took me a while, but eventually I came across this guide to Christmas street lights, which comes complete with a street map of the Baker Street “quarter”. These Marylebone Road geese are lights clutch number one:
Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, the ornate lamppost columns marking the gateway to the Quarter feature illuminated geese sporting blue jewels (carbuncles).
So, Sherlock Holmes again. If you are in that particular bit of London, you can’t escape the guy.
Wikipedia summarises the plot of this story, which involves a goose getting the above-mentioned blue carbuncle stuffed in its crop, concerning which Wikipedia interpolates angrily …:
… (the fact that geese do not have a crop has been regarded as Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest blunder) …
… and being chased across London. By Sherlock Holmes.
Time for another photoer photo, which I envy because I didn’t photo it myself:
Apparently this photoer is using a Galaxy Note 10. Here’s hoping he doesn’t burn his fingers.
I liked this tweet in response.
I think this must be the first The Wires!!! posting at BMNB, but there were several at BMOB. What these postings celebrate is photography that itself celebrates new architecture, typically Japanese, which is full of The Wires!!!, but which never mentions The Wires!!!
Here are some classic photos in this genre, which I first encountered in this report, celebrating a modernistical new house in Kyoto:
I tried copying the top one of these three photos from where I had first seen it, but that didn’t work. Instead I tried copying it from here. That worked, sort of, because I found I’d copied all three of the above photos, in one big old .jpg file.
But since these all three photos feature The Wires!!!, and since, once again, these The Wires!!! were never discussed in the text, I am content to just shove up all three, in one big old .jpg file.
One day, some Japanese architect is going to design a building which includes The Wires!!! itself, as a decorative feature.
I predict that as soon as The Wires!!! start getting buried, The Wires!!! will start to be missed, and will become a relentless topic of architectural analysis. In other words the opposite of what they are now.
And there’s a great picture at the top of the report:
What they did was scale up a 3D printing technique that had been developed at a micro level a quarter of a century ago, for making a really strong micro-structure, and they scaled it up, with results such as you observe above. They they fired bullets at it. And it was neither shattered, nor even much penetrated. Which was the same story as happened with the original miniature version.
But the report is in The Architect’s Newspaper, so they give the story an architectural twist:
But what does this mean for architecture? The team at Rice envisions a future where ceramic, concrete, steel, and other common building materials could be printed in porous tubular approximations. Limited only by the size of the printer, these structures could someday form the basis of ultra-strong building materials that are more durable and react more safely to stress, all while being lighter and, if left uncovered, having a unique, knit-like aesthetic.
Sounds a bit like a sword (in this case armour plating) trying to pass itself off as (or being passed off as) a ploughshare. “Could” (see also the title of this posting (and of the report itself)) suggests to me that the stuff like that in the above quoted paragraph was actually spoken by someone ringing up these scientists, and one of them merely saying: “Yeah, I suppose that could be true.” But, you know, maybe it could.
… even though it does look a lot like it:
No, it’s Plastic bubbles incorporated into high-rise to reduce concrete usage by 35 per cent.
Because the world faces a shortage of the right sort of sand.
A few from here:
The originals are only 600×400, but still worth a click through.
The top few medal-winning photos will get lots of views, but it’s the quality of the pack at the front of the pack, so to speak, that impresses me. As I keep saying here, the real story of photoing now is not that the most brilliant photoers are indeed brilliant, but that everyone else who is willing to spare only amateur amounts of time and money can be pretty brilliant also.
Following an earlier posting here, which linked to a cement enthusiast, here’s something which I did not know about the sort of sand that is used to make concrete:
The problem lies in the type of sand we are using. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete.
The sand we need is the more angular stuff found in the beds, banks, and floodplains of rivers, as well as in lakes and on the seashore. The demand for that material is so intense that around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare, and farmlands and forests torn up to get at the precious grains. And in a growing number of countries, criminal gangs have moved in to the trade, spawning an often lethal black market in sand.
What is needed is to pour desert sand into a Gizmo, and for the Gizmo then to grind up the desert sand into even smaller particles, and then to reassemble them, with 3D-printing, into the better sort of sand. Easy.
The paragraphs quoted above were encountered by me in an Instapundit posting. They got them from a BBC piece entitled Why the world is running out of sand.
Until now, for me, sand shortages were the stuff of jokes about what would happen if communism came to the Sahara Desert. (For fifty years, nothing. Then …) Blog and learn. As I often like to say when I blog.
If this right-sort-of-sand shortage gets worse, it will presumably have architectural consequences.
