Newtonian science was sober-minded; Archimedes' science was not. Archimedes was famous for hoaxes, enigmas, and circuitous routes. These were not some external features of his writings; they characterized his scientific personality. Science is not--mathematics is not--dry and impersonal. It is where one's imagination is allowed to roam freely.
This selection is purely incidental to the subject of the book, but given my recent interest in the letter, this caught my attention. The letter is something you will see me going back to from time to time. I somehow feel we're really losing something in switching from letters to e-mails.
E-mails are short on ritual. There is no walk to the mailbox, no looking at the stamp, no slicing the envelope, no guessing the handwriting. They just pop up unbidden on your computer screen while you are engrossed in your daily business. Some of them, like little electronic terrorists, can blow your mind and change your life.
My review of Something About the Blues should be submitted sometime tonight and published within a couple of days.
I am already well into the next, utterly fascinating, book--The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist.
Here's a NOD from its preface (I keep reading, lately, about the crusaders, in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War; The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In; Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics; and now here):
In April 1204, Christian soldiers on a mission to liberate Jerusalem stopped short of their goal and sacked Constantinople, the richest city in Europe. . . . . The looted city had many more books than people. It was the first time Constantinople had fallen in the 874 years since Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome founded it in AD 330. . . . [T]he city held the literary treasures of the ancient world as its inheritance. Among the treasures were treatises by the greatest mathematician of the ancient world and one of the greatest thinkers who had ever lived. He approximated the value of pi, he developed the theory of centers of gravity, and he made steps toward the development of the calculus 1,800 years before Newton and Leibniz. His name was Archimedes.
(Published Dec. 11, 2007 in BC Magazine)
ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide is a big book to read straight through. Whether you read it from front to back or dip into specific chapters depends on who you are and why you are reading it. In any case,Ecohouse is loaded with interesting and important — shocking, disturbing, inspiring, and enlightening — information, as well as very useful and practical technical guidance for building with both the health of our planet and the health of people — individuals, families, and communities — in mind.
This edition, for those who have not read the first and second, includes the introductions to all three. They are themselves well worth reading. In the introduction to this edition, Sue Roaf writes that the "theoretical concerns over climate change and fossil fuel depletion" covered in the introduction to the first edition were, by 2003, "firming up with the emerging reality of more extreme climate events and growing publicity over the issue of 'Peak Oil'." That is when the second edition was published. So why a third edition now?
Roaf provides several reasons for this new edition, and sees a fourth edition on the horizon. For one, "[e]ven in America the cozy talk amongst the educated architects of 'Sustainable Buildings' has turned to discussions of how we design for 'Passive Survival' in our own homes, when the power fails and the storms menace." Behind this not-so-veiled reference to America's lagging response, the point is that people are, in the face of irrefutable evidence of climate change, beginning to heed the calls for action. Secondly, there are now politicians around the world who are beginning to take notice because of the "growing economic impacts of climate change." And finally, more to the point in terms of the content of this edition, it has become clear that the technology to survive already exists. "What we desperately need now," Roaf writes, "is the 'Eco-society' that will enable the necessary changes to happen in time to ensure that everyone, especially the vulnerable, can 'future-proof' themselves against what lies ahead." This edition serves as a technical guide and inspiration to that end.
Sue Roaf, PhD was brought up in Malaysia and Australia, and studied at Manchester University, the Architectural Association, and Oxford Brookes University. Roaf has spent ten years in Iran and Iraq, working as a landscape architect, studying building technologies, and teaching at the University of Baghdad. She has been a professional Training Adviser for the Oxford School of Architecture and is now Visiting Professor and Architectural Consultant at both the University of Arizona and the Open University in the UK. Significantly, she designed and built her own ecohouse in North Oxford in 1995, a fact to which I will return. In addition to writing Ecohouse, she has also writtenClosing the Loop: Benchmarks for Sustainable Buildings and Adapting Buildings and Cities for Climate Change: A 21st Century Survival Guide.
Five of the fourteen chapters in Ecohouse are a bit more on the conceptual side — "The form of the house": "The building as an analogy"; "The environmental impact of building materials"; "Pushing the building envelope"; "Building-in soul"; and "Health and happiness in the home." Yet even these contain various concrete examples, complete with illustrations and captioned photographs. Though all readers would be well advised to read the entire book, even if not all at once or in sequential order, these are arguably the chapters with greatest appeal to the lay reader or eco-enthusiast, as well as to the architect or builder just learning about eco-architecture. But the other chapters — "Ventilation"; "Passive solar design"; "Photovoltaics"; "Solar hot water systems"; "Using water wisely"; "Small-scale wind systems"; "Hydro power"; "Ground source heat pumps"; and "Lime and low-energy masonry" — contain a healthy amount of technical information and guidance, including formulae, charts, graphs, floor plans, diagrams and illustrations, and photographs. Less technical readers may find some of these a bit tiring on the brain.
Chapter one discusses the form of the house and useful analogies. It begins with a reference to a single analogy coined by the French architect, Le Corbusier, that has largely influenced twentieth-century architecture. He envisaged the building as 'a machine for living in.' This analogy, it is argued, is fundamentally flawed because "a machine is an inanimate object that can be turned on and off and operates only at the whim of its controller" and is a fixed, static object "amenable to scientific assessment," whereas "the driving force that acts upon the building to create comfort and shelter is the climate and its weather, neither of which can be controlled, predicted or turned on and off." This argument is a bit weak. Buildings are static, inanimate objects, even though they are acted upon by climate and weather, and I'm sure atmospheric scientists and climatologists would argue that climate and weather, at least to a point, can be predicted, though not yet significantly controlled. Buildings, the author continues, "are part of a complex interaction between people, the buildings themselves, the climate and the environment."
I suspect the argument is a bit weak because the author is actually after something both more complex and less tangible here, and has a hard time putting a finger on it without devoting too much time to it. The machine analogy fits into, and derives from, a worldview that sees humans as separate from and above nature. Building design within this conceptual — one could say philosophical or ideological — framework is disconnected from nature and can often seem calculated, sterile, inorganic and lifeless. Three basic and very sensible principles on which all buildings should be based are proposed, and I hope architects, builders, and city planners are taking note.
1) design for climate
2) design for the physical and social environment
3) design for time, be it day or night, a season or the lifetime of a building and design a building that will adapt over time
A number of other analogies are then offered that have the potential to create a shift in how the house is regarded. The analogies suggested are: our third skin; a heat exchanger; a tea cozy; a greenhouse; a swallow; an igloo; a bucket; a brick in a storage radiator; a Roman bath house; a periscope; a tree in the breeze; a cool-core building; an air lock in a space ship; and a Hobbit hole. In discussing these analogies, readers also learn about such interesting structures, and their form-based properties, as the ice-house, yurt, and igloo. The latter two, because of their unique characteristics, can help people survive some of the harshest winters in the habitable world. Most importantly, however, these analogies help the reader see more clearly how the form and function of a building fits into various environments.
A number of chapters are devoted to technologies that generate or save energy, such as photovoltaics (solar panels), solar hot water systems, small-scale wind systems, hydro power, and ground source heat pumps (GSHP). These chapters should prove very useful to owners of existing homes in making them more eco-friendly, as also to designers and ecohouse builders. The other part of the energy equation is also covered well. There is a good discussion of the energy that has gone into the various materials we use in constructing our dwellings, as also of the emissions for which they are responsible. The terms embodied energy and embodied emissions are used. The term embodied energy stands for all energy used to create an object, from "extraction of raw materials, transportation to processing plants, energy used in factories, transportation to site, and energy used on site to install the product," while the term embodied emissions stands for all emissions, mainly of CO2, but also of toxins, released during its creation.
When one considers how many distinct products go into a house, the mere thought of trying to determine not only the embodied energy and emissions of each product, but indeed of the entire house, may well result in an overheated brain and complete loss of motivation. It seems overwhelming. The ideal would be to have a comprehensive and straightforward list of products and their embodied energy and emissions. Figures of these things are not yet widely available, but it is argued, quite sensibly, that what we really need is to understand the factors affecting embodied energy and emissions so that we can ask the right questions when selecting materials. Ecohouse devotes a fair chunk of space to this topic, including a section on the embodied energy of different building materials from plastics, to metals, to timber. There is also a case study and a good recommended reading list on material selection and life-cycle analysis.
In "Building-in soul," material selection is revisited in a different context. Building one's own house, though expensive, is not nearly so expensive, "perhaps not one-fifth, so expensive as having something built for you." And it is further pointed out that "most importantly, you invest your soul in what you build, which is why self-built homes are so soul-rich to live in." What buildings are made of, it is emphasized, contributes greatly to their character.
Wood, earth, brick, concrete, steel, glass or plastic buildings are totally different from each other to see, to live in, to build and in the forms their construction logically and characterfully demands. . . . So, very important in terms of their pollution and environmental costs, are their manufacturing biographies and how they end their life — do they return to nature or become refuse?
Though this chapter goes well beyond the selection of materials, discussing such things as the character and identity of a building, especially one self-built, as well as its connections to a wider community, economy and ecology, it also does a good job — better than the earlier argument against the building-as-a-machine analogy — of getting to the root of the difference between the common mass-produced house and the ecohouse. Materials, we are told, "connect us to the world from whence they came: living and life-cycle bound by nature, or lifeless, dead industrial processes." And the following quote both provides a general rule for material selection and a summary of how to create a vibrant, connected, almost living house:
We use thousands of materials in modern building, but a general rule is that the nearer something is to life, the more compatible it is: the healthier to live with, the more recyclable back to earth, thence to living matter again. It also needs more care for longevity — but this care, like the care given to its making, is imprinted into its substance and emanates from it, to nourish those who live next to it. Mass-produced products can never do this; the imprint of care is, by definition, absent.
There is a bit too much talk of soul for me here, giving it somewhat of a New Age tone, but that is mainly a matter of word choice. I would have just stuck to the language of psychological and emotional connections, as that is what it really comes down to.
Significantly, Sue Roaf has designed and built her own ecohouse. This is significant in terms of credibility. It demonstrates that she has not only a good theoretical understanding of ecobuilding, but also direct, hands-on experience. She provides it as one of the case studies at the end and refers to it from time to time throughout the book. Part of the motivation for designing it, she says, "was to put paid to the notion that pursuing a high quality of life necessarily entailed irreparable damage to the environment," the challenge being "to prove that those in richer countries could maintain an acceptably high standard of living without polluting the planet at the cost of those in poorer countries."
The authors of Ecohouse predict that we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes by the middle of this century, and hope that "[t]he seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond." While the hope is admirable, how this will be achieved is not much discussed. Who can afford to build an ecohouse? Certainly not the bulk of homeowners even in so-called first-world nations in North America and Europe. Of those who could afford to, the vast majority have neither the desire nor the necessary knowledge. The vast majority of even well-to-do homeowners prefer to buy large, hastily-constructed, energy-profligate houses in suburbia or exurbia. These are most often cut-and-paste houses equipped with energy-greedy cooling and heating technologies, houses from which they drive — not walk — to work and the big box store. How we can combat these things is not adequately addressed in this book, nor how to make ecobuilding affordable to the common people.
Also not addressed, though they would have fit so nicely into the discussion of embodied energy and embodied emissions, are environmental racism and green-washing. It may be argued that this is a design guide, not a book of theory, but even a paragraph or two on these topics would have rounded the book out a bit more and at least acknowledged some of the darker aspects of eco- this and that. At whose expense are the products with the most embodied energy and emissions produced? Who suffers the most from the pollution both of producing these products and, increasingly, of recycling them? The feature documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, by Jennifer Baichwal does a decent job of illustrating this, though it has nothing otherwise to do with ecobuilding. It is often those in poorer so-called third-world or developing countries. Ecobuilders should pay as much attention to these aspects of material origins and selection.
Ecohouse is, despite these minor wants, a beautifully designed, well-written and thorough guide to the ecohouse. It is much recommended as both inspiration and a technical guide to architects and students of architecture, as well as designers, builders, city planners, and eco-enthusiasts.
See also:
One of the things so many people are concerned about when they think about living more environmentally-friendly lifestyles is that they will have to live more austere, almost ascetic lives. The following NOD addresses that notion.
One of the motivations for designing the Oxford Ecohouse was to put paid to the notion that pursuing a high quality of life necessarily entailed irreparable damage to the environment. The challenge was to prove that those in richer countries could maintain an acceptably high standard of living without polluting the planet at the cost to those in poorer countries. To help better understand the relationship between individual behaviours and the built environment it is necessary to look beyond the form and construction of a building to the consumption patterns of its inhabitants irrespective of culture, geography, or economy. Environmental accounting methodologies, such as ecological footprinting, can provide a very useful insight into those factors which are most important in minimising environmental impacts.
A prediction:
By the middle of this century we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes. The seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond.
A little on hemp, a very useful product in construction, as almost anywhere else. Concerns not so much its use in construction, which the book does address briefly, but rather its qualities and ill reputation.
Hemp fibre is the strongest natural fibre known to man and is reputedly stronger, weight for weight, than steel. Hemp grows very fast, from nothing to 4m high in four months and is virtually disease resistant. It can be used in rotation with other crops and helps improve the soil. Hemp got a bad name in the 1930s after publicity campaigns by the petrochemical industry linking it to its narcotic derivative, cannabis, got it banned (in order to promote oil-based materials). Nowadays industrial hemp has virtually no narcotic content, but still needs to be grown under license.
This NOD is about harnessing the wind and its relations to solar energy.
The wind has been harnessed since antiquity to power windmills, pump water, generate electricity and cool buildings and people. The wind gains its power ultimately from the sun and wind power is essentially solar energy in another form, as it is the sun which warms air and creates the variations in pressure that drive the wind.
Today's NOD has to do with ecotechnology and, as the chapter title from which it is taken suggests, health and happiness in the home. It also has something to say about the tone and overall intent of the book.
Solar panels and ecokitchens, and the way we eat and the way we live our lives, are all important parts of a larger strategy to reduce our impact on this planet before we destroy it completely. This book, however ordinary the issues and ideas in it are, isn't about bling -- it's about survival.
For a few years now, I've been watching developments of electronic paper display, or electronic ink technology. I checked the E Ink Corporation web site from time to time, hoping to see products on the market useful to readers and writers. Suddenly now, there seems to be an explosion of devices on the market making use of this technology.
The resolution is not yet very high, and they don't have video or even colour. But being able to carry with you one device about the size of a paperback novel (maybe a little smaller) that can hold hundreds of books, and that, unlike previous generations of e-book readers, despite being digital, is as easy on the eyes as paper, is exciting. Before e-ink, digital books simply were not appealing to me because of the strain on the eyes of looking at a screen. PDAs, though fun, were not viable as readers either, for the same reason.
A recent e-mail from Amazon.com introducing Kindle, their own reader with electronic paper technology, got me going again. Since I cannot afford to go out and purchase it now, especially since I need to research different options first, rather than jumping on the bandwagon with the first product placed under my nose, I will hold off a bit.
What I did do instead of running to the store to purchase Kindle, was a little research. I found the following companies offering readers with electronic ink displays (listed in no particular order):
- Amazon--Kindle
- eREAD--STAReBook
- 3GC, llc (dba. MyAirplane.com)--eFlyBook
- Emano Tec, inc.--MedTab
- iRex Technologies--iLiad
- Polymer Vision--READiUS
- Sony--Sony Reader
- Tianjin Jinke Electronics Co., LTD--Hanlin eReader
If I can arrange it, given my limited income, I shall be reviewing these items here as I can get a hold of them. I normally wouldn't review electronic gadgets on this site, as it is firmly a litblog, but these are alternative book technologies (for reading and writing) and thus directly relevant to this site.
Here are a three quotes from a chapter entitled "Building-In Soul." What they have in common, aside from that abstract thing the author calls 'soul', is the relation of the house to nature.
Buildings are substantive -- what they are made of is very much part of their character. Wood, earth, brick, concrete, steel, glass or plastic buildings are totally different from each other to see, to live in, to build and in the forms their construction logically and characterfully demands. . . . So, very important in terms of their pollution and environmental costs, are their manufacturing biographies and how they end their life -- do they return to nature or become refuse?
Not coincidentally, wood is a material from life. Iron is from the earth, but by way of intense heat and heavy industrial rolling. Plastic is from oil and coal deep beneath its surface, after so numerous chemical synthesis operations that it is totally removed from life. These materials connect us to the world from whence they came: living and life-cycle bound by nature, or lifeless, dead industrial processes. Whereas plastic needs industrial equipment suited to mass production to form, wood needs only a pocket knife. It is more appealing, accessible and healthy to work with. Indeed, you can put your heart into what you make out of it.
We use thousands of materials in modern building, but a general rule is that the nearer something is to life, the more compatible it is: the healthier to live with, the more recyclable back to earth, thence living matter again. It also needs more care for longevity -- but this care, like the care given to its making, is imprinted into its substance and emanates from it, to nourish those who live next to it.
Here's a NOD from the 3rd Edition of ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide:
Three principles upon which all building should be based are:Imagine if these three simple principles were considered before any building took place, whether of an individual house or a new housing development or subdivision.1. design for a climate
2. design for the physical and social environment
3. design for time, be it day or night, a season or the lifetime of a building and design a building that will adapt over time
(Published Sept. 26, 2007 in BC Magazine--Book Review: An Ocean of Air - Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere by Gabrielle Walker )
We tend to think of ourselves as surface dwellers, roaming about on the surface of Earth, far beneath the inhospitable emptiness of space. There are blue skies above us and life-sustaining air all around. It seems so light, this atmosphere of ours, that we hardly give it any thought. Indeed, unless it threatens us with disastrous weather, we take it largely for granted. But air is not as light and insubstantial as it seems, nor is the dangerous radioactivity of space all that far away. More than 99% of the air in our atmosphere is within only 100 Km of the surface.
As Gabrielle Walker reminds us in her new book, An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, we live, thankfully, at the very bottom of this ocean of air. In this beautiful and eminently readable book, Walker tells us the story of air and how it transformed Earth long ago to make it hospitable to larger life forms, including ourselves, but also how it continues to protect us from the dangers of space and now must be protected by us.
Gabrielle Walker is a freelance writer, broadcaster, and speaker specializing in science and technology, with particular emphasis on energy and climate change. She has been an editor at Nature and Features Editor at New Scientist, for whom she now acts as consultant. She has a doctorate in chemistry, has written, broadcast, and lectured widely on science and policy issues, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University. Her first book was Snowball Earth: The Story of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life As We Know It, the story of Paul Hoffman's quest to prove that the Cambrian Explosion, the moment in geological time when multifarious complex life forms first emerged, resulted from a cataclysmic explosion some 700 million years ago. An Ocean of Air: is her second book.
An Ocean of Air opens with the story of Captain Joseph W. Kittinger, a test pilot for the U.S. Air Force, "the man who fell to Earth and lived." Walker throws her readers right into the story of air by taking us twenty miles up into the atmosphere, a place with air so thin we couldn't possibly survive without the protection of a pressure suit. Instruction begins immediately. We observe, with Kittinger, the thin blue line that "has transformed our planet from a barren lump of rock into a world full of life... the only shield that stands between vulnerable earthlings and the deadly environment of space." As he steps off the platform of the gondola hanging beneath a giant helium balloon, we plunge with him through the layers of air at close to the speed of sound. We learn, as he falls, about solar wind channeled away from Earth by its magnetic field, lethal x-rays intercepted and absorbed by the ionosphere, dangerous ultraviolet rays soaked up and diffused by ozone, and about the troposphere, that "thick, life-giving blanket of air, wind, and weather that turns our planet into home." Sounds like an action hero story.
An Ocean of Air: is a scientific book, but it certainly does not feel like it. This book is an interesting, fun, and mostly light, read. It's not just the near total absence of scientific formulas and jargon that makes the book so readable. Don't be fooled. This is not dumbed-down science. What does the trick is Walker's use of narrative, her storytelling. An Ocean of Air: reads like an anthology of short, interconnected stories that just happen to have a unifying scientific theme. She tells the story of air by stringing together short biographical tales of the many natural philosophers, as scientists were formerly called, whose discoveries and life's work have shed light on the mysteries of air. These stories are like a scientific relay race in which material is added into the baton by each runner, and we, the current holders of the baton, have not only benefited from the accumulated knowledge contained therein, but continue to add to it.
As Simon Singh from The Daily Telegraph writes on the dust jacket, "[t]he scientists are almost as interesting as their science." They are indeed. After Kittinger, we learn about Galileo Galilei, the man who is said to have muttered after his famous forced recantation, "Eppur si muove!" ("And yet it moves!"), yet could not bring himself to believe that the atmosphere itself was heavy. Then there is Evangelista Torricelli, the young man who worked with Galileo in his final three months, who proved that vacuum doesn't suck, but rather that air pushes. It is from Torricelli that Walker borrows the title of her book, for he wrote that "We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air."
There are so many memorable characters in this book. Allowing us to get to know each person a little, to get a little glimpse of the individual, not just the scientific discovery attached to the name, makes the science easy to read. That and the fact that the language is straight-forward, though not plain, and omits much of the highly technical stuff behind the science. Most of us have likely heard of a great many of the scientists, mostly men by virtue of the times, and have learned some of the things they discovered. But knowing a little more about the people brings the stories closer and aids memory. The overall intent of the book, so it seems to me, is not to pass on minute scientific details, but rather to impress on her readers the larger picture of the wonder that is the air, as also its importance to life as we know it.
Air is the protagonist of An Ocean of Air:, with the various scientists who discovered the various properties and functions of air cast as important but supporting characters. Air and the atmosphere it forms is in many ways presented as a superhero figure, a figure responsible not only for the emergence of larger life forms on this planet, but also for protecting the same life forms from the hazards of space. In some ways, to continue the dramatic metaphor, scientists play the part of the chorus that interrupts the narrative from from time to time to draw attention to or explain something important, or to warn us of impending danger. Where do we fit in, we the reader, the non-scientist? We are not merely the audience. We have been for too long. We have an important role to play. It is up to us, something made clear in the sections on climate change, to ensure that we protect the atmosphere that protects us. Even in this, Walker is not preachy. She merely tells us stories.
An Ocean of Air: is a wonderful journey behind the science of air through a series of biographical narratives. This is a book for scientists and non-scientists alike. A useful book in a time when we finally are beginning to realize that we are all a part of nature, that our actions have consequences for the planet. This is a book to be read and re-read.
See also:
My review of An Ocean of Air should be published by tomorrow night. Here is the last NOD to/from it:
Clamped to the sea floor of our ocean of air, I try to picture its uppermost layers. But in spite of everything that I've read, I can scarcely believe that air too thin for me to breathe is yet strong enough to fend off everything that space can throw at us.
Yet it is.
And now I turn to Virtual Worlds. This one's not so much about trying to understand the world around us, the physical world, but rather turns towards an examination of how abstract, virtual worlds created with and within modern technology affect our emotional lives. Look forward to some NODs from it beginning tomorrow.
The review of An Ocean of Air is almost due to be published. In the meantime, here's today's NOD to/from the book, a little section explaining the Coriolis Effect:
think of the shape of Earth: a sphere spinning around an axis that goes through its center. Although every part of the planet rotates precisely once a day, some parts have farther to travel than others. The equator has the hardest task. Being the broadest part of Earth, it has much the farthest distance to cover in its twenty-four hours, and every point on its surface is perpetually hurtling through space at more than one thousand miles per hour. Farther north or south, the planet is narrower, and the speed of travel is much slower; by the time you reach the poles, the surface doesn't move at all.
Air is affected by this because it is in contact with the spinning ground, and yet is free to move relative to it. The Ferrel (Coriolis) effect isn't a force so much as an optical illusion, brought about because we forget that we too, are spinning with the ground beneath our feet.
Not much today. It's Friday and I'm tired. But here's another NOD to/from An Ocean of Air, one that references some dichotomous thinking about the humanities and sciences that persist to this day.
Some of Tyndall's poet friends complained that learning science could deaden one's appreciation of nature, but Tyndall himself was exasperated by this attitude. For him, the better he understood the world, the more wonderful he found it, and his skill at explaining carried many others along with him. He said that science required imagination (italics in original).
Here's an interesting observation made by Antoine Lavoisier, a very important scientist of the eighteenth century, upon realizing that breathing (intake of oxygen) and eating were intricately connected activities, and that harder work meant faster breathing, which meant more burning up of food.
"By what mischance," he demanded, "does it happen that a poor man, who lives by manual work, who is obliged, in order to live, to put forward the greatest effort of which his body is capable, is actually forced to consume more substance than the rich man, who has less need of repair? Why, in shocking contrast, does the rich man enjoy an abundance which is not physically necessary, and which seems more appropriate to the man of toil?"
Here's today's NOD (I love etymology!).
Lavoisier had found the magic ingredient, the active part of the air... By applying his painstaking system of accounting to science, he had looked into the heart of a flame. He now knew what fed every fire on Earth.
But what to call it? ...since it seemed to be trapped in many different kinds of acid, he named it "oxy-gene," which means "acid-born."
It is said that an image is worth a thousand words. That may be a truism, but not one with universal applicability. With reference to a great many modern images it is mere hyperbole. But with reference to some, such as the one below, it is an understatement. It speaks not a thousand words, but volumes.
This image is so pregnant with meaning--cultural, economic, environmental, political, social--that it could well serve as the opening to a university course on human geography. I hope it is put to similar uses. It is stunning, mind numbing. I sat there for quite some time, just staring at it, looking at various areas of the globe and comparing those to other parts.
The scope of its significance is such that I could not immediately think of a term to adequately categorize it. Fortunately my partner piped up and gave me the term 'human geography', a definition of which is as follows: "the branch of geography dealing with how human activity affects or is influenced by the earth's surface" (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2nd Edition). Although I don't particularly like or trust Wikipedia, certainly not as an independent source, operating as it does on the principle of 'democratized knowledge' (the facts are what the people say they are), they do have a useful and current definition of human geography here, providing a good sense of it's scope.
Take a moment to think about what light means to human civilization, particularly light based on electricity. Two technologies, arguably, underpin the giant leap made by the Western world generally, and America particularly, in it's development (in terms of power especially) ahead of the rest of the world, ahead of civilizations that already had sophisticated systems (architectural, agricultural, civic, cultural, economic, intellectual, literary, philosophical, religious and social) when the so-called Western world was barely emerging from primitive, tribal, hunter-gatherer existence. I think specifically about ancient Babylonian, Chinese, Egyptian, and Indian civilizations here. Pick up some texts created in those civilizations some time, or visit a relevant section of a Museum, to get an idea of what I am talking about. I'm speaking of course of the printing press, of Gutenberg, and of electricity, of both Edison and Tesla. The former helped Europe emerge as a world leader through the easy and rapid duplication, sharing, and consolidation of information and knowledge, while the latter catapulted America onto the world stage as a technology leader.
There is so much more to say about these things, but this shall suffice for now. Consider this little nugget, this sound byte, as a little thought-stimulant, a little virtual caffeine for the brain.
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