The New York Times of course has it, and Drudgereport links to the Yahoo version. Slashdot links to the Reuters story. The BBC picks it up as well.
Drudge Retort links to the story in the Houston Chronicle. 2Blowhards links to the original research paper (PDF), with supporting links to the LA Times story, the PR, (via Steve Sailer), John Hawks’ blog, and Scientific American. Andrew Sullivan gets in the game. William Saletan blogs it in his Slate column.
Wednesday Dec 12th brings one link to the acceleration story, by mcmath61 at Plastic.com. However, on December 12th the New York Times reports on another evolutionary story, as to the adaptation of a women’s spine to bipedal pregnancy. This news release at Eureka Alert suggests the loss of fur (and hence the loss of the ape’s tendency to have babies clinging to the fur) encouraged the development of that bipedality. CNN picks up the pregnancy story,
The Eureka Alert press release on the adaptive spine goes out on the following day, December 13th, and the New York Times reprints a slightly altered version of their previous day’s take. The Boston Globe writes up the pregnancy story, and the Globe & Mail reproduces it.
Jason Kottke gets on the Accelerated Evolution bandwagon on this day, linking to the New York Times article, as does Slashdot. The Economist does its write-up.
Finally, on December 14th, William Saletan picks up the theme and writes about it in a piece called The Evolution of Evolution.
Jameson’s recent lecture launching the conference ‘The Humanities after Utopia’ at the recently inaugurated Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.
Goodreads |2007 week 49 number 4 (22nd Century Architecture)
Figure 1. A 22nd Century Bridged City
The above is from an episode of the Star Trek series Enterprise. It came to my attention the other day through a montage depicting history in another episode of the series. As fans of the show know, one of the running plots involved time travel, and the depiction of human history ‘resetting itself’ (after plot related meddling) was done through the use of images from various sources grouped together into thematically recognizable decades. So the 1980s were depicted by images of Ronald Regan, Margaret Thatcher, and Ruhollah Khomeini, the 1990s by images of the Clintons, George H Bush shaking the hand of Mikhail Gorbachev, etc. After the depictions of the first half the present decade (scenes of 9/11, Bush & Blair) it moves on into speculation. (The images from the stream are available here). The future was represented by a car and a robot and from then onto scenes of the show’s 22nd Century, marked by the opening shot of the series, the launch of the Enterprise spaceship, in the year 2151 (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Cpt Archer in the Timestream
The 22nd Century is therefore marked by two cityscapes, one being that of Figure 1 the other being the following. These are meant to be Earth cities given the context of the time stream, but both shots are re-used production art from previous episodes. As I’ve mentioned, the cityscape below is from a Season 1 show (‘Dear Doctor’), while the bridge above is from an episode of Star Trek Voyager‘s last season (‘Workforce Part 1’).
Figure 3. Toronto, 2110 AD
With regard to Figure 3, because it is otherwise unlabeled and supposed to depict an Earth city in the 22nd Century, I thought it might as well be Toronto. We can imagine this stretch of waterfront as being a bit to the East, or a bit to the West, of the CN Tower thus accounting for its absence (or, I could just invite anyone to Photoshop it in). We can imagine the bridges are subway extensions to the island, and we see that a similar subway/covered LRT path runs right along the water.
This being an image originally from s-f, it reflects the current architectural trends of the beginning of the 21st Century, the postmodernist appreciation of angles, glass and concrete.
But I present this image to you thus as a reflection of what kind of city we’ll get if this century is to be one of starchitects. This is what another hundred years of Frank Gehry and Daniel Leibskinds will result in.
Does this city look like a place you’d want to live? We can spy green-space but it seems very sparse. And don’t give me the old, ‘who cares I’ll be dead’ routine, so common from the likes of the Baby Boomers. It’s precisely that type of attitude which has gotten us our present shit world, and I don’t want to encourage more of that. Given the extension of our lifespans over the past century, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that this could be the city of your elder years, so take the question seriously: is this where you want to hobble and feed pigeons? Further, are you so selfish as to be that uncaring about the type of environment our proverbial great-and-beyond-grandchildren will live in?
Figure 4. Caprica City, from the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries (2003)
A much more dramatic depiction of the type of city we could end up with it that from Battlestar Galactica. Filmed in Vancouver, perhaps one could label this ‘Vancouver 2210 AD’ since it seems a bit more harsh than the aesthetic presented above, as if one needed another century to get both the flying cars and the brutal deadness of the civic space:
Figure 5. Caprica City Detail
The real nightmare of urban development is this uniform cityscape of similar buildings, all equally unadorned, apparently utilitarian, with a neglected use of green space.
As spaces designed on computers to provide semiotic scenes meant to convey an advanced technological civilization, these reflect in turn the imagined futures of our own civilization. This is what we could end up with. But, in all likelihood, my guess is that the 22nd Century will not look like any of these images.
When Martin Rees published his book Our Final Hour in 2003, he famously gave our ‘civilization as we know it only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century.’ (source) Now there’s some ambiguity there: others predict the potential extinction of humanity, which would certainly ruin our civilization, but it could also anticipate a sort of apocalyptic collapse into another form of Mad Max Dark Ages. But I have to point out the civilization known to the British in 1903 – and globally, that of every other nation and ethnic group on the planet (with the exception of those still living isolated tribal lifestyles) did not survive the 20th Century. The British Empire fell, the reliance on coal was replaced with that of processed crude oil, and the colonial projects of the era came to ignominious ends – the consequences of which we are still processing. Given how squanderous of natural resources our present civilization-as-we-know-it is, there’s no reason to want it to survive the 21st Century.
Which brings me to Prince Charles, who by the times spoken of here will be thought of as King Charles III. In the early 1980s, Charles was mocked by the media for his interest in organic farming, and he’s currently thought of as daft for his architectural interests, including his sponsorship of the community of Poundbury. Poundbury is the result of Charles’ interest in the work of Leon Krier and Christopher Alexander. As the Poundbury website records:
Poundbury is a mixed urban development of Town Houses, Cottages, Shops & Light Industry, designed for the Prince of Wales by Architect Leon Krier on the outskirts of the Dorset County Town of Dorchester. Prince Charles, The Duke of Cornwall, decided it was time to show how Traditional Architecture and Modern Town Planning could be used in making a thriving new community that people could live & work in close proximity. Poundbury has now become World Famous as a model of urban planning, with regular visits from Councillors and MPs. Welcome to the Poundbury Community Website!
Given how Charles has already displayed some prescience when it came to organic agriculture, anticipating both its sense and its popularity, my expectation is that he’s once again onto something with his interest in such small-scale, community oriented architecture. The end result will be cityscapes of the 22nd Century which will not reflect the imagined exaggerations of the present shown to us through easy digital mock-ups.
I return now to the city of the bridge. When I saw this in the Timestream montage, the lines of it brought to mind the position just stated: that by the 22nd Century, technological advance combined with a rejection of explicit postmodernist, angular, and Leibskind-like egotism will brings us a meld of the traditional and the technological. The bridged city seemed a place inspired by Lord of the Rings, a technological version of Rivendell.
Figure 6. Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) Figure 7. Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) Figure 8. A bridge in Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) Figure 9. Rivendell,
from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Given a choice between Caprica, or the Toronto of 2110 suggested here, I’d take a Rivendell of any season, of any weather condition. Of course, I expect to be able to continue to use a high speed internet connection, use a cell-phone, browse in an Apple Store, and be able to have sushi. The point here is we can take much more control over our built environment, and expect more from our architects than glass and concrete. Letting current architectural fashion guide the next several generations will only result in a Caprica like monstrosity.- Timothy
Restructuring 21st Century Architecture Through Human Intelligence | Nikos Salingaros and Kenneth Masden LINK (PDF)
“Abstract: This paper introduces a compelling new way of thinking about, teaching, and practicing architecture. Founded on the basis of how the human mind
perceives and interacts with the built environment, we call this new design process “intelligent architecture”. Perhaps surprisingly, scientifically-conceived rules for architectural design and building can lead to a more human architecture, one with a renewed respect for traditional methods of architectural design. This new process can also be extended by implementing new technologies. By applying the most recent scientific advances to architectural thinking, we can better appreciate the architectural heritage of the past, giving scientific insight into its origins and manner of conception. This development also reverses an unfortunate misunderstanding that required the future to erase the past rather than to learn from it. […] How can anyone believe that a “Dutch Design Demigod” could know more about a place than the very people who were born and raised there? How can these starchitects espouse to know what is best for the rest of the world? More importantly, how do we combat the aesthetic authority that such individuals now exert over our place in the world?”
The Nature of Order | Christopher Alexander http://www.natureoforder.com/
“‘. . . Five hundred years is a long time, and I don’t expect many of the people I interview will be known in the year 2500. Christopher Alexander may be an exception.’ David Creelman, author, Interviewer and Editor Knowledge Manager, HR magazine, Toronto”
// what gets me is that Christopher Alexander’s work does live up to that blurb by David Creelman, but his principles of design do not carry over to his shitty websites.
Prince Charles On Being Relevant | CBS’60 Minutes LINK (60 Minutes) //If you can handle the clutter of advert garbage on this page, your welcome to it. It was from this 60 Minutes story that I learned about Poundbury.
The Future of Cities: The Absurdity of Modernism | Nikos Salingaraos interviews Leon Krier http://www.planetizen.com/node/32
“NS: Has humanity, as you claim in your writings and talks, made a fundamentally false step in building its cities, and if so, what can be done about it now? LK: Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong — like communism — to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. They are ideologies which literally blind even the most intelligent and sensitive people to unacceptable wastes, risks, and dangers. Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e. unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions. Thank God there are, through the applications of New Urbanism in the last 20 years, enough positive experiences worldwide to see a massive return to common-sense solutions.”
Reforming the Suburbs | Conference Page, March 2007 http://www.avoe.org/reforming-suburbs.html // I wish the images here were better, but this link is pretty much just an FYI
Goodreads |2007 week 49 number 3 (Jeffrey Simpson on this morning’s Current)
Bali Conference – Canada’s Position | The Current http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/media/200712/20071203thecurrent_sec2.ram
“Like most other governments around the world, Ottawa buys into the science of climate change — even if some of its members didn’t in the not-too-distant past. But Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Environment Minister John Baird are adamant that for Canada to commit to tough targets in an international agreement, major emitters like the United States, China and India have to sign on to the same program.
John Baird’s office declined our request for an interview. But for his thoughts on Canada’s stance going into Bali, we were joined by Globe and Mail political columnist Jeffrey Simpson. He’s also the co-author of Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge and he was in Ottawa.”
// skip ahead to about 9:30 for the part referenced in the blurb above. I’m posting this because I appreciated what Jeffrey Simpson had to say.
Goodreads |2007 week 39 number 2 (Carl Wilson on Celine Dion)
Taste Test | Vish Khanna http://www.exclaim.ca/articles/frontfive.aspx?csid1=117
“Noted music critic Carl Wilson raised eyebrows when he announced his first book was about Celine Dion. In his renowned work as an editor and writer at The Globe and Mail, and his popular blog Zoilus.com, Wilson champions all manner of counter-culture practitioners and is a great proponent of Toronto’s underground arts community. The notion that he might contribute a volume to the 33 1/3 book series (on specific albums by everyone from the Minutemen to U2) is intriguing, but why focus on a multi-platinum seller like Dion?” // an intro to the …
Interview
“I came to realise that I definitely have been one of those people who’s staked a fair amount of my self-worth on my ability to have an insider’s knowledge of things culturally and felt like that was some kind of social capital for me. What I came to feel as I thought about it and the ways in which those kinds of cultural self-categorisations separate us from people who are unlike us and don’t share that language is that, that’s no longer so interesting for me. The culture and the art still is interesting to me but what that implies about me is not so interesting to me any more. As I get older, I feel like what I’m actually interested in is finding out about people’s experiences that are unlike mine. By having so much at stake in the question of taste, that forms a barrier between yourself and those people because the more unalike your experiences are, the more likely that your tastes are very different. If you feel like that prevents us from having anything in common to talk about, then that’s a way of segregating yourself in a certain way.”
1898 Obscene Language Baseball Document | Robert Edward Auctions http://s210975194.onlinehome.us/blog/?p=41
“In a contest between two leading clubs during the championship season of 1897, the stands being crowded with patrons of the game, a gentleman occupying a seat in the front row near the players’ bench, asked one of the visiting players who was going to pitch for them. The player made no reply. He then asked a second time. The gentleman, his wife who sat with him, and others of both sexes, within hearing distance, were outraged upon hearing the player reply in a loud, brutal tone, ‘Oh, go fuck yourself.'”
Goodreads |2007 week 47 number 1 (The Edwardians in Colour )
I found this series on the weekend was astounded by it. Albert Khan’s archive of very early colour photographs from the first two decades of the 20th Century.
Related links below were previously on Goodreads (04w20:2; 04w22:1) and are of Charles Cushman’s archive and the images of Russia from the second decade of the 20th C.
