From Streetcars To Spaceships

UMPCs get more variable from here.

As somebody who has been watching the subnotebook market since the mid-nineties, I'm delighted with recent developments but think that there's a basic form factor change that is coming soon enough that we should be keeping it more in mind.

E-paper is a new thing. It is not just another glass-fronted, high complexity variation on the same old variables we've all done our best to accommodate since the days of the first luggables. In terms of mechanical behavior and limitations, it looks like it may truly be quite a bit like a thick sheet of paper. Rollable, inexpensive, and very low power indeed.

That being so, I suspect that it's not too many years before we see portable computers that, when not in use, are basically tubes. I would guess they will settle into a diameter a  little larger than an inch, at most two inches. The display means will be e-paper that is rolled out of the tube on a spring-loaded mechanism that can both become rigid enough to hold a flat form and malleable enough to spring right back in when released from some sort of adjustable frame. This also means that you can pull out only as much display real estate as you need. Standing on the bus? Roll out a few inches. Sitting at a desk? Pull out enough to get six to ten inches of length. Maybe even more.

With such a low-power display means and the direction power consumption in general is going, look to see these devices capable of running off no more than the power generated by the act of carrying it around. In the unlikely event that you run low on power, just hold it up and shake it for a bit. The one variable that doesn't seem to be improving much is power consumption for telecommunications. Haven't got anything to say on that one; I simply don't know enough about the tech or the regulatory future.

These things being the case, many of the discussions we're seeing now about what "the" form factor and optimized interfaces for things like ebooks will be seem a bit silly to me. Might as well discuss the weather on one specific day two dozen years from now. We just don't know yet and might as well admit it. If anything, as the technological options get broader, we should expect that these devices will become more like what USB flash drive cases and LED desk lights are becoming now - a few basic constants to an otherwise entirely plastic set of dimensions, proportions, case materials, and retail prices. In fact, if I were a young industrial design student right now, I would be playing around with every possible combination I could possibly come up with, from massive bronze cases to unfolding plastic trees to ones that look just like yellow legal pads and are designed to be disposable. There will be a lot of demand for people to demand such things in the not too distant future and the few who have truly built a track record of exploring radically different form factors will be sitting pretty.

We've got a long way to go and some serious paradigm shifts along the path before we settle down.

Happy holidays.

Urban Agriculture: what exactly ARE our options?

There has been a steady increase in buzz in recent years about urban agriculture. While cities like Havana and Manila have been seeing comprehensive implementation of this for years now and while projects like Growing Power in Milwaukee and Chicago have been pioneering techniques, here in the U.S. we really don't have even much of a sense of just how much land in a given city would actually be suited to this or even how to make that determination.

Well, here in Portland, there has been a wonderful project called Diggable Cities that has taken on just that. I was lucky enough to have dinner tonight with Kevin Balmer, one of the authors of this remarkably complex and throrough study so now I'm posting the link here.

Hopefully this will serve as a model for such projects in other cities. Maybe even interwoven with the kind of city reinvention that Flint, Michigan is now embarking on and others may take on soon.

It makes it easier to get up in the morning knowing that this kind of work is going on.

-Rustin

How cheaply and how quickly can an abandoned lot be made into a park?

I've been thinking about this for years and puttering away at it now and again in the real world. If you have access to an asphalt-covered lot, especially one that you don't actually have rights to, how much could you do and how cheaply to make it beautiful? I think that there are some non-obvious answers, especially if you have access to a vehicle and a couple of friends. Since moving next to an abandoned area of over five square blocks I've actually been doing some slowly more ambitious jiggerings of the dynamic and maybe one day I'll write about that here but for now let's consider one thought experiment.

Let's say you've got access to a double-sized lot that is covered with parking spaces and (pretty much) ignored by the owner. We'll assume a temperate climate for now. We'll assume that the temperature never goes below 45 degrees Farenheit in the time that you're working.

So let's say that in one day you go with friends and pick up a few hundred used bricks somewhere. Perhaps you found them on freecycle. This is your starting gun since it can take months to get that cheap load of bricks. That night or soon thereafter, you all go to Home Despot and buy 80 cinder blocks and various other supplies.

You bring them all to your chosen lot.

There you mix some concrete.

You pour a broad line of concrete in a wide circle about a foot and a half wide, about an inch tall, and about 11 feet in diameter.

Along the inner line of this circle you put the cinder blocks so they will be held to the asphalt by the hardened concrete. Around four inches outside that circle of cinder blocks you put a ring of bricks. Inside the ring of cinder blocks you fasten about five or six granite "Belgian blocks".

Five of six cinder blocks are fastened to the asphalt with concrete in "random" locations in the lot. Each of these cinder blocks is bordered by one to three Belgian blocks placed a couple inches away but aligned with the cinder block to create protected nooks and crannies for plants to grow in.

In each corner of the lot you use the remaining cinder blocks and concrete to create one brick high boundary walls about a foot and a half from the actual lot line.

Then everybody goes home and leaves the concrete to cure.

The next time you can all get together you all go back and pour about an inch of rough gravel or sand into each cinder block, into the space between the cinder blocks and bricks, and for about a foot outside the bricks and inside the cinder blocks. Onto all the cinder blocks you spray "moss smoothies".

Pour soil over the whole shebang, every brick and cinder block, until they're barely visible. This will settle quite a bit.

Into this loose soil you shove hundreds of various beans obtained by the simple expedient of buying bags of beans at the supermarket. Each bean should be about two inches down and you should end up with about ten various beans per square foot.

Into this soil you also put hundreds of drought-resistant "plugs" of sedum, alyssum, and other very tough plants that propagate themselves and can stand up to plenty of abuse.

Over ALL of this, you then spread a thin layer of fine gravel. Fine enough to be the type used in fish tanks. This will allow things to "rest up a bit" and get settled and keep soil from blowing away or be forced to the side too much by things like dog pee.

Before leaving that day, water this all copiously.

Think of what this would all look like within a month. It would be elegant, welcoming, and have the beginnnings of a local ecosystem. Among other things, some kind of plants or other will "volunteer" and start growing there without your having had to put them there. All those bean vines will be encouraging the soil to stay healthy and tying it all together, literally.

The last step, just to add the final touch to bring people in, is to occasionally scatter inexpensive pretty things around the space. On the lots near me I scatter handfuls of semi-precious stones like cornelian, hematite, and clear quartz. Bought by the pound from the right stores, they're only about eight dollars a pound. Shells work well, too. Just be sure to not put them all out on one day or in one place. You will be amazed at the sense of magic it gives somebody to find something like a tiger's eye lurking under a bean vine.

Now let's itemize out our shopping list to see just how much this would all cost. I need to get to bed so I'll come back later and fill in the prices.
80 cinder blocks ($1.40 x 80) $120
200 bricks (used)
40 Belgian blocks ($2.60 x 40) $104
6 bags of cement
6 bags of sand for concrete
3 landscaper's flats of mixed plugs (3 x $50) $150
10 bags of beans ($1.20 X 10) $12
20 bags of soil ($2.30 x 20) $46
30 bags of rough gravel or sand
5 bags of fine gravel
semi-precious stones $40
transport costs $100
random tools,etc. $60

Anybody care to tell me that this will cost more than a large party?

In parking lots, more of the right trellises might be a very good idea.

Okay, so let's see if I'm understanding this correctly.

1.) Drivers tend to park under vegetation if they're given the chance. Shade is good for both keeping the temperature of the car down and for the finish. Bird crap sucks but most folks think that it's worth the risk.

2.) Parking lots are notorious sources of stormwater runoff. Really toxic runoff, at that. They also concentrate pollution by putting all those starting, stopping, and idling vehicles in one place.

3.) All that bare space and all those vehicles make parking lots, especially big ones, prime offenders in the heat island effect.

4.) A lot of species, most notably small animals like squirrels and some birds, will cross a small gap just fine. Put ten feet of asphalt between two vegetated areas and everything from racoons to frogs will make the leap. But put a large parking lot in place, a vast, unbroken vista of bare space several hundred feet across, and many species won't cross. General rule - the larger the unbroken area without living things, the more you isolate the species on both sides. Possibly with an impact reaching for miles, especially at breeding times.

5.) Vegetation acts as a windbreak.

6.) People just plain old like vegetation. It's purty and makes people feel good.

So, all of these would tend to take us somewhere that's pretty much a no-brainer. It takes no great insight to conclude that planted areas are healthier than bare cement, asphalt, or even pavers. The interesting question becomes, how can we add vegetation without significantly reducing available space for vehicles and at a low cost?

Seems to me that one good answer would be to mount raised vertical trellises between parking spots, trellises that start about eight feet above the ground (so as to not impede visibility) and, possibly, with some arched over occasional spots, creating a "skin" of vegetation that is low cost to install and low-maintenence once it's up and running.

A few decisions would be key to pulling this off effectively. Most of these will be familiar to folks who know about projects that I've done and related deocuments I've created.

Instead of starting out with transplanting relatively mature plants, accept the uncomfortable approach of using multiple small starts and allowing them a few years to establish. To buy time in terms of preventing a bare appearance in early years and display the utility of the system, also place quick-growing, low maintenence annuals like morning glories in useful spots. And then (I suspect that a lot of you will hate this) leave the dead, brown remnants of the ivy behind at the end of every growing season to help build the mass of vegetation and speed the creation of a suspended ecosystem up there.

Plants are started in small (about 5 inches across) containers, possibly blow-molded plastic, into which are put starts that have been grown in plain old jumbo styrofoam cups chosen to just fit in the planters. These are dropped in just as is, turning the styrofoam into permanent thermal insulation and a bit of a way to stretch the room for roots at nominal weight and cost. If funding allows, eventually these plants can be transplanted into larger containers but even then the styrofoam can be left pretty much as is, since roots will tend to go right through it anyway.

These containers are mounted about ten feet up.

Trellises are built of gridwall that has been heavily painted with waterproof paint like Rustoleum (as in four or five coats on top of two or three coats of primer) and ideally purchased at surplus. Frames are made of plumbing pipe, in some places bent with a standard pipe bender into arches and into goose necks for light fixtures and then, again, painted heavily with waterproof paint. These pipes are placed into holes that are about five inches in diameter larger than the pipe and about four feet deep in the asphalt and whatever subsurface is below it. Concrete is then poured into each hole and the pipe is just dropped in and supported with a temporary frame until the concrete dries.  We're going for low-cost, low-skill, low complexity. Not to mention that since most of this is plain old steel and concrete, it's comparatively non-toxic and recyclable/reusable if need be.

Ideally this time is also taken to reduce the number of those awful sodium lights that so ugly up our commercial spaces, replacing them with smaller, evenly distributed LED fixtures mounted to the same frames as the trellises and powered by photovoltaics, small wind turbines, or other power generated right there at that facility.

I know that none of this exactly sounds like rocket science but I've never seen it done yet and it seems to me like a viable, low-cost, low-risk way to ameliorate a lot of what is worst about those commercial parking lots that so demoralize so many of us. There are hundreds of possible variations on this. In a perfect world, I would love to team up a few classes of industrial design students with a few classes of landscape architecture students and advised by physical plant managers of a few local malls, hospitals, etc.

But for now, I ask that you just take a few minutes and visualize this as described here. Just a typical commercial parking lot with one of these trellises for every twenty parking spaces, ideally staggered a bit as seen from above. Could the cost be gotten down to two hundred bucks per trellis, installed? I suspect that it could. Could the marginal cost to site maintenance be gotten down to fifteen minutes per month per trellis? I suspect so and that lot of it would come down to providing the crew with the right rolling ladders and the right battery-powered tools. Is there, perhaps a better idea that you would prefer to see done?

Think about it.

Thanks,

-Rustin

Shame about all those highway deaths.

Funny, we've got all these studies about our dangerous roads, especially crowded highways, because of texting, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, and so on. I read the articles and they suggest remedies. More laws. More cops. More signage. More checkpoints. Wider highways. Cutting down all the trees to clear the sightlines. Driver training. Sorry, but I look at those and think "what the hell are they doing in cars in the first place?" Mass transit addresses all of these, ya know.

I've taken plenty of forms of mass transit so f*cked up that I could barely see. Tired, drunk, distracted. Never seen any of that affect the safety of the vehicle yet.

All of this, I might add, applies just fine to cabs and jitneys. How many cabs could we subsidize to what degree to keep drunk drivers off the roads and have it cut net costs for a given city?

Do I sound snotty? Yeah, I guess that I do. But as far as I can see, this is yet another case of "normal" Americans who live in a way that results in vast processions of deaths, cripplings, torturous pain, and billions upon billions of dollars of costs but even when confronted with all of this they can talk about it for years and shake their heads disapprovingly and suggest yet more spending and never once even consider that maybe instead of more subsidies and more police state tactics, maybe the rational answer is TO STOP DOING THIS THING THAT KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Old 1920's shorts used to treat it as a given that the drunk guy in the Betty Boop or Keystone Kops or whatever film would then shamble off and get on a trolley. A simple, safe (compared to cars) trolley that would then deliver said drunk person to a location a few blocks from their door. This was just obvious common sense with technology we had by 1915. If you think that we can't cost-effectively do it now well, I don't even know what to say.

Oh, right. Yes, I do.

Go play in traffic.

-Rustin

The real New York, in one tidy package.

So, I'm in the middle of using up yet another day of my life formatting the newest edition of the Native's Guide to New York. This is just rebreaking lines for the copies to send out to book stores, which means that I'll be doing this all over again in a few weeks one last time before slapping on an ISBN and finally bringing the "serious" editions to press. That having been said, I cannot begin to say how sick I am of those little pages of text. Once you've read and revised anything this many times, it's like tearing out your own fingernails to work on the damn thing.

But it does remind me of something that I'm going to write up for the next serious revision. If you're ever going to be in New York for a day with a couple of friends and want a real cross section of authentic New York food, forget every place you've ever heard of and get on the 1 train. Take it to 231st and get off. Right under the tracks is a classic New York diner, though these days they sell Mexican, too. A block over to the west is a huge Italian deli that can give you all you need in the way of pizza, heros, and the like. (And they sell a full selection of Manhattan Special. WIN!) Along that strip and on Broadway in the few blocks north you can get Dominican, New York Chinese, and pretty much the whole set. You want to hit a greasy, dark, Irish neighborhood bar? You're good. You want to shop for African crafts? No sweat. You want some gorgeous 1800's churches? Easy peasy. You've even got Riverdale from Archie Comics starting about five blocks away. Feel free to take the Number 10 bus north past the highway stretch and you'll get all the kosher pizza and real New York deli you can handle.

If you want to see places you've heard of and that they talk about on the television shows, then fine, go to Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty and the frackin' World Trade Center site.

But especially if you've got enough folks with you to be able to hit a dozen places in one shot and buy food in all of them, especially if you've only got one day, if you want to see the real New York as New Yorkers live it, screw Manhattan, get up to the Bronx, walk around one little area you've never heard of, and you've all that you need.

You're welcome.

-Rustin

Commercial to residential. Or mixed. It's the smart move.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. America is flooded with surplus commercial real estate. Rental demand is climbing and the available rental unit supply is not up to the job. Thus rental prices stay high (relative to the economy) while hundreds of millions of square feet of real estate sits vacant, not generating income and in some cases, so empty of people as to be at increasing risk of vandalism and theft. And real estate companies are in serious financial trouble. We also need to face that as people get poorer, they'll become more prone to exactly the kind of destructive behavior that any owner of an empty building should fear.

The obvious consequence will be more people living illegally in commercial spaces. Done illegally, landlords will look the other way because they're hungry for the revenue, but the conversions, such as will be done, will be rushed and unsafe and will cause problems ranging from fires to floods caused by amateur plumbing.

This being the case, smart municipalities should be exploring passing temporary variances to allow, and perhaps even assist the use of some commercial spaces as residential. Maybe even allow or even encourage the conversion of zoning with an option for those conversions to be permanent. Or, even better, allow more spaces to be zoned more flexibly, allowing mixed use to be not just within complexes but in side by side units.

Commercial space, in normal times, rents for more per square foot than residential. Many landlords also consider it far less of a headache. 

But these are not normal times.

It's time that we started doing a better job of thinking through how or society can best adapt to that.

Building panels - another simple thing.

Occasionally I read about relief efforts or simply about generic low tech construction and it blows my mind to still see references to tons of galvanized, corrugated steel sheet being provided as the default material for refugees, remote corporate buildings, and so on.

Let me suggest a simple alternative that, I think, would give vastly better results.

Take a sheet of metal about eighty percent the thickness of standard galvanized, but not corrugated, just flat.

Stamp it with a low-relief pattern, maybe a sort of diagonal "plaid". Something that gives it a bit more bite when things like cement are attached to it.

Spray one side with adhesive and then attach a slab of inch and a half blue insulating styrofoam to that side.

Spray more adhesive on the other side of the styrofoam and add a sheet of aluminum about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil.

Take the exposed side of the original metal sheet and spray it with a coat of standard primer.

Okay, so you've now got a rigid sheet that is fire-resistant (a bit), a better insulator than any shelter that I've ever heard of, not to mention better than most uninsulated wooden houses. Because it's not corrugated, it's much easier to work with, including being more readily used to make repairs in existing structures. It can be cut with a good hand saw and will, when done right, take screws like a dream. The inside surface is a reflector. The outer surface will have middlin' decent adhesion for paint, cement, cob, or any of a wide variety of other materials. It's still cheap to make and to ship. Again, since it's both not corrugated and is rigid, it's cheaper and faster to build with. It will also fit in better with many local techniques. The only serious problems that I foresee with it is that it doesn't bend worth a damn and that, inevitably, locals will use it to insulate woodstoves and the like. This will obviously lead to grief.

But overall these would be cheap, easy to make, and, I'm convinced, would do far more to help people build new, durable homes that the sheets of metal that, rusting and decaying, have become a signature of the poor worldwide. These panels would also work far better than sheet metal for making outbuildings of all sizes, from little cabins for pottery work, to machine shops with ten meter ceilings.

And just in case it isn't obvious, let me note that there are now ecologically-viable adhesives  as well as plant matter-based foams that would work just fine instead of styrofoam.

What I have described, in fact, is a low-budget version of the standard panels that have been used for decades to build walk-in freezers. They are standard because they work. They are the kind of thing that contractors have come up with to solve problems when they're left to do what actually makes sense. And these do make sense. Composite panels not too different are used to make things from high-end furniture to airplane parts.

I really don't know what more to say. If I had the twenty thousand or so it would take to make a few stacks of these and have them shipped to refugee camps around the world I would. But I don't. If I could convince a large contractor to make a stack of these for their non-residential free standing structure jobs, I would. But I don't have the persuasiveness or the resources. If I had the means to get Lowes or Home Depot to make and sell these, I would be delighted to do so. But I don't. So for now, well, here it is.

Make of it what you will.

-Rustin

Residential prices stall, commercial plummet. REAL loft living can't be far behind.

Here in Portland and all around America, residential rental prices continue to be crippling. The outrageous rises of the past twelve years haven't really retreated much at all. Meanwhile people are broker by the day and, with more and more people losing their homes and mortgages out of reach, the demand for rentals can be expected to go up. And while all of this happens, commercial real estate is, in a word, screwed. Overbuilt, overpromoted, deep in debt, and racked with cubic miles of empty space before the latest few months.

Seems to me like two things are as predictable as gravity at this point.

Far more people are going to start living illegally in commercial space. In truth I've already heard about two more in the past few weeks.

Smart owners of commercial real estate will agitate for some kind of temporary zoning variance, allowing them to rent their spaces for residential uses for some short period. Maybe five years. Less sophisticated ones will simply turn a blind eye to such conversions.

I'm also guessing that a few smart legislators will have the brilliant idea of New York style loft laws, allowing residential conversions but only on terms tailored to maximize political gain and socially engineer who gets that housing and for how much. Meanwhile, at least a few dimwitted government departments in various, probably authoritarian cities will go on rabid binges of enforcing fire and zoning codes. Probably after some disaster that hits the front pages or simply as yet another round of our continuing war on illegal immigrants.

It's going to be a good time to be a maker or retailer of do it yourself plumbing and room divider materials. And it's going to create an entire new generation of scofflaws. People, most of them creative, ambitious ones, who have made their peace with living lives that are fundamentally dependent on living in a way that is illegal. This will push them even further than the past decade has in the direction of seeing police officers, firemen, meter readers, and just about anybody else in uniform as an enemy until proven otherwise.

Anybody but me realize that every week that legislators put off variances or rezoning is a week we fall further into trouble?

-Rustin

Do you think that you know what it means to get truly seriously injured?

It's been over four years since I blew my apartment to smoking ruin and myself to a charred, bloody invalid. Four years, one month, and twenty-four days, to be precise. And to look at me, I'm now again a vigorous, energetic guy. Somebody who seems to do just fine moving furniture, walks for miles at a time, usually carries a messenger bag heavy enough to make people uncomfortable if I have to check it at a counter somewhere, and leaves most people asking me to slow down when they walk with me.

And that's great. For what it's worth.

I just picked up a seven pound package and a ten pound package at my mailbox and just the act of carrying them the twelve blocks or so to the bus stop was enough to leave my biceps spasming. Now, admittedly, I haven't slept much in the past few days and I haven't exactly eaten as well as I should but I haven't done anything all that strenuous and I do get exercise on a regular basis. What might have happened after six or seven hours of exhausting physical effort before the fire now sometimes happens after ten or fifteen minutes. And I never really know before it happens is this is one of my "good" days or one of my "bad" days.

What's my point? That when you're dealing with people who, like me, have survived serious injuries, the type that leave you in and out of hospitals for months, the kind that leave you needing to learn to use limbs again or dress yourself again or spending a year or more waiting to be able to breath normally again or eat normally again, when you're dealing with people like us, remember that even when we seem healed, even when we walk just fine and don't talk about pain anymore or otherwise seem "still sick", we're still not back to who we were before. And, crucially, you will never be able to judge again what they will find painful or difficult.

People meeting me now don't notice my scars unless I point them out. My body language has returned to what it was. I talk just fine. Unless you're really paying attention, I don't do anything visibly different from a "normal person". But I'm telling you that I work around my considerable remaining physical problems all the time every single day. And, frankly, it's five times more obstructive and tiring to tell people about what the issues are and try to get them to accommodate than it is to just deal with it myself. So don't assume that if somebody doesn't tell you that something is wrong that thereby you know that nothing is wrong.

I just went to pick up a pocket dictionary and it hurt enough to leave me tempted to give up and just look on line. This happens all the time to me now.

Just in case you still don't see my subtext here, let me bring it right out front. Courtesy of the last seven years of warfare by our citizens, we've now got hundred of thousands more Americans who are crippled. Millions by some definitions. And when you're dealing with those vets, try to remember what I wrote above.

Point one: Even if they tell you that they're okay, they're probably not "okay".

Point two: It's not for you to decide how they should cope. If they want your help, give it to them. But remember that they're adults and it's not up to you to decide for them how they're doing.

Point three: We'll be dealing with walking wounded for at least the next fifty years. "Normal" ain't normal anymore and never will be again. If you're still stupid enough to think that things like ADA requirements for buildings are foolishness then I hope that your legs break tomorrow and you have to climb fifteen flights of stairs without crutches. Every day. In the dark. While it's raining. And your ears are screwed up and you can't keep your balance.

My friend Sara refers to most people as "temporarily able-bodied" to keep the point in the foreground that today's aggressive yuppie running for the train and pushing everybody else out of the way may well be tomorrow's emergency room visitor. This applies to you, the reader.

Keep it in mind.

-Rustin