Be Now Here

Marbles

2011-03-06T16:44:00.000-08:00

landscapes are often places where people lose things, lost in the tall grass. People also sometimes dispose of things that are otherwise hard to get rid of in the landscape, like cans of old gasoline. It's pretty common for people to dig a big hole and throw in whatever garbage they have lying around, sometimes burning it before it goes in. Blue corrosion on punctured batteries. Sometimes people bury the evidence of a crime in the garden, like a pistol under the boxwood. When I'm gardening I never know just what my shovel might turn up, but it's always a treat to find a marble, the unbiodegradable marker for obscure games of yesteryear.

For Your Eyes Only

2011-01-23T21:48:00.001-08:00

landscape animals (from the ancient archives)

MT ST HELENS: BEFORE

MT ST HELENS: AFTER

these things do happen

Bucky on his needle skiff

Vortex power

thanks sister!

Living Water

2010-12-03T20:04:00.000-08:00

Stigweard Productions is proud to present Living Water, a bioactive wildcrafted spring water from the remote mountains of Southern Oregon. Collected by hand from Pumpkin Gulch, a historic water source for miners and travelers. The spring emerges from the ground in a grove of old growth douglas fir, flows through the undergrowth of salal and sword fern, over mossy rocks and under fallen logs. Imbued with the microscropic life energy of a healthy forest and rich in the minerals of bedrock, Living water is a potent elixir. Eight one-gallon green glass jars were filled and carefully packed a mile back to the car. Six gallons are still available.*

*NOTE: this is a totally unfiltered, highly biological product and contains living microorganisms. As such it is not legally or culturally permissible to consume. to life!

Mountain Lions

2010-09-09T22:49:00.000-07:00

Last week while we were vacationing in southern Oregon I read in the local paper that a cougar had been shot over on Whiteschoolhouse Road. There's a herd of miniature horses in the area and apparently this cougar had been culling. A team of trackers from Selma OR were called in and within a few hours they had shot the 6ft long female cougar. Date, August 27th.

.

http://www.illinois-valley-news.com/archive/2010/09/01/cougar_killed/

When I get home I read in the news that on August 31st a cougar had been tracked and shot in the upscale gourmet neighborhood of North Berkeley.

http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Police-shoot-mountain-lion-in-Berkeley-101935053.html

Based on the newspaper account I put together a Google Map that shows the route of the cougar through North Berkeley and key points along the 1 hour and 13 minute hunt. Interestingly she makes a large loop through the neighborhood, ending up only 300ft from where the chase began. Returning to a kill? Returning to a den? With young? Not sure, but I hope to stop by the area tomorrow (A memorial has been set up at the corner of Cedar and Shattuck) and retrace the hunt, giving the few blocks around the abandoned Elephant's Pharmacy a quick search.

CLICK TO BIG

GOOGLE IS BUGGY SORRY

View Cougar Chase in a larger map

microbiomehomedome

2010-08-18T23:44:00.000-07:00

gardening again
landscape again

one spider out, one spider in

microbe man... great resource on compost tea brewing specifics.
bacteria create gold
tree farmers - why in quotes?

Archstoyanie wins the day

2010-05-28T22:34:00.000-07:00

0nce again everybody's favorite russian architecture festival event Archstoyanie brings us pure joy

the standout for me, being landscape inclined, is a project by Atelier 710 that use the grounds of the festival to create a sort of lo-fi ecological/agricultural park using specific landscape-making tactics and recipes.

They outline both the tools and the ideology of their project,

(from the project statement here)
Atelier’s working principles include traditional landscape architecture means – trees leveling and heading, seeding the territory, gardening, building wood seats and pathways – as well as new experiences and means of landscape creation.

“Atelier 710” follows ecological principles and deny integration of alien systems and reject the idea of territory development via destructive urban approaches.

the project is planned for many-years-process where gradually developing functional elements will give birth to new life in old lands.

They want to grow a landscape using non-destructive practices, enriching the ecologic landscape at the same time as they create a new human landscape.

hard to tell just what they did, mowed and put out some cows to graze? always hard in practice, but the direction they're going is where we should be headed: a process-based pro-biotic method of creating functional productive landscapes. no problem!

some of the other highlights from the Summer 09 series:

Hyperbolic cooling tower

Air-port

Brodsky's rotunda

and the wood they use!

check the archstoyanie archives there are some real gems:

http://arch.stoyanie.ru/en/objects?page=0

SCHOOL'S OUT

2010-05-03T23:51:00.001-07:00

AND IN OTHER NEWS

this guy

is charlie patton, he just invented this

it works like this

the seawater greenhouse

a greenhouse passively converts cold seawater into freshwater. the plants get watered and the temperature is lowered, providing perfect growing conditions for arid coastal areas.

these guys will build it for you

and they did all the science here

and exploration architecture... blew it up here

the basic design pulls warm salty air through a porous cardboard wall that has cold seawater trickling down it. this cools the air in the greenhouse. as the cool air is sucked out the other end of the structure it encounters yet another cardboard membrane, but this one has seawater that has been heated in overhead pipes trickling down it. As the cool greenhouse air meets the warm seawater it gets hot and humid. This heavy air then runs right into a series of pipes that have deep cold seawater in them. As the humid air rapidly cools on these condensers water droplets form and then fall to collect in a subsurface cistern.

Over time a thick skin of evaporated salt crystals forms on, and eventually replaces, the cardboard.

prototypes and pilots

This seems to me like one of the best ideas I've heard about in a while.

but always operating across scales

here

the skin can be recyclable recycled plastic.

off gassing is an issue. dunno, UV stabilizers help.

high speed small scale living systems.

top image, Copywrite. "The New Riviera." 2010. HODGES & CO all rights revealed.

jump up

2010-04-28T02:48:00.001-07:00

img017

only three days to go!

Infrastructure animal

2010-04-23T17:56:00.001-07:00

massive integrated network ecologies

footbridges

2010-04-21T21:09:00.001-07:00

some great images of footbridges have been cropping up. I'm always mystified by the enormous gap between the vernacular created for function through trial and error and the hyper-engineered solutions produced by the constriction of regulatory frameworks. as per usual, resiliency requires an increase in risk.

Top two images from SPIRO (UC Berkeley image archive) bottom image from here the amazing root bridges of india, worth the click!

love,

nathan

AARC Memo 1 - Radioshack

2010-03-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that the Animals in Advertising Royalty Concern protest organization has successfully mailed a notice of the wrongful use of an animals image in advertising to the Radioshack Corporation for their abuse of both the grizzly bear and bald eagle.

The final paragraph from the memo sums up the position of AARC

Beyond the factual and ecological errors in these advertisements it is the overwhelming sense of sadness that is evoked by these images that forms the basis for AARC's action. We as humans have so completely and irrevocably altered the world in which we live that the existence of the grizzly bear and bald eagle is dependent on the power of our collective conscience to stay the hand of unbridled growth. By no means are we required by the law of humans to honor the beauty and individuality of all life, but we are given a choice to do so. AARC deeply hopes Radioshack has the courage to make the right decision and give the grizzly bear and bald eagle the respect and freedom they deserve. (For full text of letter click here)

AARC is calling for Radioshack to accept their corporate responsibility and donate an appropriate amount to two non-profits who are dedicated to the preservation and conservation of these two animals.

Bucky was almost right

2010-02-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

Buckminster Fuller proposed building massive domes over entire cities, large enough to have their own weather and float suspended on the cushion of warmed air that they created. A truly awesome vision.

Here on Alcatraz Ave we're facing a couple of problems. Rats eating our vegetable starts, pollution from the busy roads, and a cool canyon climate created by the shadow of the building next door. The solution is to scale down Bucky's dream from massive infrastructure to the home. A simple large greenhouse would be built to cover the entire lot, dug down it would keep out rats, a double walled skin would moderate the temperature, and block air pollution. Integrated rainwater capture would feed into precision targeted irrigation, allowing for year-round food production, aquaculture of tropical fish species, and maintenance of a Living Machine-type wastewater treatment system.

Superfoods Stewardship

2010-01-15T00:01:00.001-08:00

Careful scrutiny of the grocery store aisle reveals a burgeoning market for native "superfoods" sourced primarily from South America and "the Himalayas." Maca root, goji berry, chia seed, cocoa nibs, hunza raisins, acai, golden berry, taro, quinoa, others? Rich in antioxidants, complex proteins, vitamins, plant sterols, essential minerals, amino acids, endocrine nourishin alkaloids, polysaccharides, and healthy fat, superfoods help us thrive. I enjoy many of these foods and beverages and their presence on the shelves means that the genetic resources of our edible plant community are being protected, rather than diminished. The story on the packaging usually assures me that the people who grow it are being treated right and the price tag attests to their efforts to maintain a healthy world in an artificially cheap food market. It still travels a long way, and while I can testify that the magic volcanic soil and mineral rich glacier water really do make my raisins tastier, what if I could taste the jet fuel and diesel that brought them to me? With this in mind I started thinking about other indigenous superfoods, the ones right in my backyard.

Coastal survey map from 1859.

The same territory my little apartment in Berkeley sits on is thick with human history. In 1542, when Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed up the coast of California under a Spanish flag, my rented land was occupied by an entirely different culture; the Huichan, part of the larger Ohlone group, (now included in the petition for federal status by the Muwekma). Pre-Spanish California had an unusual density of languages and neighboring tribelets within a few square miles might only understand a few words of one another's vocabulary (map here). The precise count of villages and their populations is muddled by the rapid obliteration of the tribes by disease and missions, but evidence suggests that the East Bay area was home to some 30,000 people. They may have lived on or near the Emeryville and University Shellmounds. Rising 60 ft these mounds were massive accumulations of marine detritus, ashes, broken bits of material culture, and thousands of human burials.

Current aerial photo of Emeryville shellmound site with mound height & burial location map superimposed. Green is the highest and deepest point of the historic mound approximately 60 feet in height (400ft in diameter). The site is now a large outdoor shopping mall with townhouses above, looking down on a false mainstreet. The bodies that were disinterred during the 1992 excavation were returned to the site, where they remain.

The stratigraphic analysis of these shellmounds suggests that the geography and culture of the Ohlone changed little for over 5000 years. Their diet consisted of an astonishing diversity of plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fungus, insects, and shellfish. Every part of their environment was known and used based on millenia of experience. A reliance on biodiversity for a secure source of food, fiber, and shelter seems to have fostered a culture that valued and managed land for total system health and resilience. For example, if the acorn crop got wormy they could always eat the nuts of Aesculus californica, if rabbits were scarce gophers would do.

What we might call a "natural landscape" provided them with the raw materials for homes, groceries, hardware, clothing, weapons, household goods, and a complex mythology that wove the relationship between humans and an ecosystem into a coherent cultural framework. In exchange for this richness the Huichin were careful stewards of their productive landscape, understanding that in order to take resources from the earth a reciprocal act of maintenance (physical or spiritual) had to be given in return to insure the long-term stability of their way of life. What developed was a form of agroforestry aimed at the reliable production of food/fiber through the careful maintenance of multiple successional stages in an intricate spatial and temporal matrix. Controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, sowing seeds, transplanting, irrigating, pruning, and potentially composting (as Dr. Lee Klinger argues here..PDF) were all common practices that held the landscape in peak productivity and (in contrast to agriculture) biodiversity. For a thorough treatment of the wide variety of management practices used by native Californians I'd highly recommend M. Kat Anderson's Tending the Wild. While there is certainly evidence of over-exploitation of resources, such as some marine mammals, a relatively static culture persisted for millennia in a geographical area of a few dozen square miles, indicating a viable cultural resource management strategy.

Luseno song

Early maps of California consistently depicted it as an island. The landscape changed as they generated more accurate maps; introduced grasses, cattle, and the steady decline of indigenous stewards changed how the land looked and functioned.

The rules have changed in the 500 years since the Huichan walked through my backyard, and it's unlikely that we'll all join the neo-anarcho-primitivist camp and make do with our bodies' capacity to produce what we need from our local territory. However, the burgeoning indigenous foods market suggests a way to steward the land in a more traditional way, safeguard the diversity of our forests, and make a bit of cash for communities up against a wall.

Map of California's forested, non-agricultural land. These forests grow where the rain falls.

The mountains and forests of California produce large volumes of food & fiber on otherwise non-arable land. Some of this food is being taken advantage of; wild game, shellfish & fish, easily recognized edible mushrooms, some greenery for the floral trade, and of course timber. Most of what these forests produce is given over to the squirrels and birds. Many of these wild indigenous foods could be considered "superfoods", rich in complex vitamins and minerals that are increasingly rare in our overbred fruits and vegetables. And with the exception of matsutakes & chantrelles I can't buy any of it at my local grocery store. Indigenous superfoods from the global south? Whole Foods. Superfoods from my backyard? Fringe.

A cluster of number one matsutakes just uncovered in the mountains of Southern Oregon. These mushrooms can fetch exhorbinant prices in Japan and high end groceries along the West Coast. I sold these to Cambodians in a shipping container sitting in a gravel parking lot for $8/lb. Experienced pickers guess that the yearly hunt for these heady fungi manages to find 10% of the total crop.

The danger of course lies in the power of money to incentivize quick profit over sustained yield. When a single part of a forest is marketable it has resulted in over-exploitation of that resource (pre-1900 hunting nearly destroyed most wild game populations in the U.S and did the passenger pigeon in). What's to keep these agroforestry products from being decimated by market pressure? I think a demand-side pull for these goods to be sourced with specific techniques is most likely. The market is niche anyway, and the better the story behind the product the better chance it has of gaining a foothold. "No fossil fuels were burned in the growth, harvesting, preparation, and transport of this food." Forage SF is a great example (that is BLOWING UP) of a supplier in this potential chain, providing boxes of wild foraged California foods (including fish) to people in the Bay area, as is Foraged and Found Edibles in Seattle that brings wild food to farmer's markets in the city.

I think the next step is to stop looking at the landscapes where foraged foods are gathered as wild areas that we snag from, and start thinking of them as gardens that we tend. Start using the action and energy of foraging to manage the land with the goal of producing more of what you just picked next time you come to pick it. Pruning, removing brush, loosening soil, burning small biomass piles where appropriate, and sowing seeds for desirable non-aggressive, preferably native, perennial food crops. This might seem like heresy to the ardent protector of wild lands, but the notion of a silent lonely wilderness is a recent cultural construct. These lands are not wild, they're feral, and there's evidence (M. Kat Anderson again) that not only do many of California's distinct ecosystems benefit from human action, some actually require it.

Top photo is from Tilden Park in the hills above Berkeley. The trees in the middleground are invasive eucalyptus that suppress understory vegetation with their heavy allelopathic (toxic) litter. The areas of the park where this plant has not invaded are rich in resources like acorns and the epic Golden Chantrelle of California. The largest chantrelle in the world.

This would open up acres of California's land for the production of a variety of edible native plants, animals, and fiber including building materials & biomass. Currently most of this land is public and managed for timber, usually Douglas Fir. While historically a boon for small rural communities the shine is off the timber industry and many towns bordering federal lands are betting on the marijuana boom to keep them afloat. If marijuana is normalized and the bottom begins to creep out from under the market, where do we go? Agroforestry as an alternative requires biodiversity with a complex ecosystem and produces food that has the potential to reconnect people with their land. For example Lomakatsi Forest Restoration teaches communities how to care for their oak trees and is working to bring healthy fire back into forests. Or Whole Trees Architecture a community supported forest in Wisconsin that lets members access the whole range of useful forest products from recreational camping to building stone to morels. Many European parks and increasingly some municipalities in the U.S. have a biomass harvesting program and reuse the nutrients on-site to keep their land energized or market the byproducts of land maintenance, like lumber from urban street trees blown down in a storm.

Small-scale, maintenance intensive forms of land management do not preclude other uses such as residential development. Certainly any Native tribes who want to manage their historical land in this way should be allowed to do so and many of these tribes are amazing resources on actually how to be on land in this way. The profits probably wouldn't be much. At least not at first, but as these foods and materials become increasingly common in our diets and material culture it's possible that agroforestry production could become a staple of the California resource and stewardship portfolio.

Grinding depressions such as these were hollowed in the bedrock throughout California by the intergenerational processing of food and materials.

How we spend our money is how we choose the way we want other people to live. When we buy food (or anything else really) we're throwing our cultural currency behind a specific philosophy of land stewardship and human culture. How do we, as individuals, want people to live on this planet? Every day we get to decide as we go about our daily chores and rituals. Every action ripples out from us pushing at the flow of culture as we move along with it. All action requires energy, all energy comes from the sun and earth. There is no such thing as a personal decision, the interconnectedness is shown to be physical (the car exhaust from freeways can make people sick), and believed to be spiritual. Our individual power to influence the whole is enormous, whether we believe it to be or not.

superweeds

2009-11-24T21:37:00.000-08:00

The above graph nicely illustrates what we're up against when it comes to invasive plants. A few species of highly adapted superweeds are being transported across oceans at unprecedented rates. The California Invasive Plants Council estimates that CA spends a minimum of $82million a year on attempting to control these runaway armies of leafy terrorists with very limited success. The plants continue to spread and new species are regularly introduced despite valiant efforts to intercept these illegals at CA's borders ("Any fresh fruits, vegetables, or living plants with you today?")

The top dozen most wanted weeds in california?

Aegilops triuncialis - barb goatgrass
Bromus madritensis ssp. rubens - red brome
Centaurea maculosa - spotted knapweed
Centaurea solstitialis - yellow starthistle
Cortaderia selloana - pampasgrass
Cytisus scoparius - Scotch broom
Delairea odorata - Cape-ivy, German-ivy
Euphorbia esula - leafy spurge
Foeniculum vulgare - fennel
Genista monspessulana - French broom
Hedera helix, H. canariensis - English ivy, Algerian ivy
Lepidium latifolium - perennial pepperweed

in urban areas these are the plants the colonize the cracks and margins where maintenance is minimal. Once established, these plants can be impossible to eradicate. Many of the plants will readily grow in the rugose spaces of architecture and infrastructure, often at edges, seams, or material transitions where an interruption in the impermeable cap creates a micro-swale for collecting nutrients and water. As the plant grows the expansion of roots, stems, and leaves act like small hydraulic jacks slowly and inevitably pushing aside the built environment to increase the potential for growth, survival, and reproduction. The forces at work are enormous, the sun pump driving massive disintegration of urban spaces through the microscopic multiplication of meristematic tissue. If we stopped our constant hacking, poisoning, mowing, pulling, and burning a handful of feral plants would quickly engulf our homes and cities, attacking walls, roofs, rafters, roads, bridges, skyscrapers, freeways, gardens... a smooth green skin appliqued to the city's
bones.

so how do we stop them?

A few options:
manual control: expensive, time consuming, hard, and effective
fire control: dangerous, many invasives surive or are encouraged by fire
chemical control: cheap, fast, easy, and completely ineffective.

broad spectrum herbicide applications for the control of invasive plant species poses the same risks overreliance on antiobiotics does; namely the inevitability of breeding resistance into the target population. This is readily observed in the proliferation of Roundup resistant weeds in areas that rely on Monsanto for their genetically modified herbicide resistant crops. (another reason to buy organic... less risk of GMOs)

the good folks at grist bring us this:

"In the U.S. alone, glyphosate use jumped by a factor of 15 between 1994 and 2005, CFS claims. And this herbicide gusher has given rise to a host of "superweeds" -- weeds that tolerate heavy doses glyphosate. How do farmers deal with superweeds? By jacking up the dose of glyphosate"

Glyphosate... (key ingredient in Roundup) better than atrazine right? Sure, but that's like saying a Hummer is better for the environment than a Hummer limo, not inaccurate but not entirely true. Wikipedia summarizes.
I'm most interested in this paper which suggests that glyphosate may inhibit the ability of soil microbes to protect plants against pathogens, causing higher incidence of plant diseases in fields treated sprayed with Monsanto's magic SAFE weed killer.

uh oh...

There are now confirmed cases of herbicide resistant weeds in 13 states, reporting a total of 63 different weed species. At this rate Roundup ready crops will be completely useless despite the millions of gallons of glyphosate saturating our soil. This points to a larger problem of herbicide resistance in invasive plants and suggests that it's only a matter of time before English Ivy, pampas grass, and japanese knotweed figure out our chemical tricks.

I imagined a sort of high-tech government facility deep in the Ozarks where top-notch plant breeders are hard at work developing the most virulent and unstoppable weeds imaginable. The vigor of Arundo donax, the taproot of knapweed, the rhizome of bamboo, the seeds of a thistle, the thorns of himalayan blackberry, the roundup resistance of Monsanto's weeds, and the speed of kudzu.
Weaponized weeds.

So what can we d0?
biomass production seems like an obvious solution. these plants can be converted into compost or energy (or both via biochar) and used to increase soil fertility in the degraded zones that often have both the absence of maintenance and competition that incubate these over-zealous castaways.

(example showing Jean Pain's biomass experiments)

This requires, like always, a ton of maintenance and given the tendency for machines to make the problem worse via incomplete removal and meristem shattering, it will probably have to be done the old fashioned way, by hand. This, of course, is radically expensive and would seem to encourage more creative incentives for invasive control, such as exchanging space for time (the homestead approach).

There is the possibility that the proliferation of exotic invaders that destroy our human-made environment are a sort of built-in mechanism for biosphere regulation. Invasive plants are the land's attempt at fighting back against the suffocating cap of impervious surface, a bioclimatic reflex. Combined with crazy rasberry ants: eating electrical devices throughout the southern U.S.(!), H1N1, and zebra mussels it would appear that the control we believe we have over our environment is a wayward delusion persisting from the mechanistic roots of enlightenment science. Maximum control only pushes the inherent energy of the system into other channels (why fences are always hopped). We exist at the mercy of our fellow lifeforms and rather than fighting them we need to focus more of our energy towards developing complex probiotic solutions to our abiotic actions.

weeding exercise

2009-11-22T21:45:00.000-08:00

visiting tilden park is something we love to do
our dog can be off leash, there are rock outcrops and big oak trees.
we went up to the quarry trail and i spent a few minutes pulling out weeds before we went on our hike. According to the law this is an illegal act. We have collectively entrusted the management of our public lands to government agencies who protect us from ourselves by outlawing resource tampering. Tilden is overgrown, muddy, choked by eucalyptus and blackberry. The forest could use some maintenance, but the law would seem to limit the power of the individual to make a difference.

FROM East Bay Regional Park ORDINANCE 38, Chapter 8 "Park Features Protection" (M/I ) SECTION 804 "Damage to Plants"
No person shall damage, injure, collect or remove any plant or tree or portion thereof, whether living or dead, including but not limited to flowers, mushrooms, bushes, vines, grass, turf, cones and dead wood located on District parklands. In addition, any person who willfully or negligently cuts, destroys or mutilates vegetation shall be arrested or issued a citation pursuant to Penal Code Section 384a.

SECTION 807 "Special Permission" however, says...
Special permission (Section 103) may be granted to remove, treat, disturb, or otherwise affect plants or animals or geological, historical, archaeological, or paleontological materials for research, interpretive, educational, or park operational purposes.

weeding in tilden from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

the nomadic city

2009-11-15T20:32:00.000-08:00

an interview with constant nieuwenhuys by linda boersma at bombsite
http://www.bombsite.com/issues/91/articles/2713

has images CN made around his imagined urban environment "New Babylon" (text) a city for Homo ludens freed to romp in their creativity. Inspired by a gypsy camp near Alba Italy, CN saw the ceaseless wanderings of people as attempts to
realize a need "for playing, for adventure, for mobility."

His answer was NB:

"where, under one roof, with the aid of moveable elements, a shared residence is built; a temporary, constantly remodeled living area; a camp for nomads on a planetary scale."

Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon (detail) (Symbolic Representation of New Babylon), 1969, collage on paper, 55×60”. Photo: Victor E. Nieuwenhuys.

He envisaged a system where all work would be fully mechanized and, living within the meta-construct, we would be free to drift in a timeless state, space becoming an effortless media through which we could move, manifesting our creative spectrum.

"Mobility, the incessant fluctuation of the population -- a logical consequence of this new freedom -- creates a different relation between town and settlement. With no timetable to respect, with no fixed abode, the human being will of necessity become acquainted with a nomadic way of life in an artificial, wholly 'constructed' environment"

While fully in the Situationist's camp CN was, however, criticized by Debord. (excerpt from "Non-plan" by J. Hughes)

i think this is a valid critique of the project, which reaches just a bit too far past the present to ever get any closer to now, but ad-campaigns do change the way people live. Maybe by comparing NB to a Coca-Cola ad Debord was slyly congratulating CN on creating an alternate future that was so rich and compelling that people wanted to live there.

the deliverables are great anyway

Secteur Jaune (detail) (Yellow Sector), 1958, wood, metal, Plexiglas, 9×37 x 35”

http://rebeccareilering.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/metabolic-city/

maintenance

2009-11-10T00:28:00.000-08:00

these are people that the government is forcing to do land maintenance, usually for vegetation suppression around roads and airports.
They're being forced to actualize a cultural belief about how land is supposed to function.

These are vegetables planted in the parking lot of a Chinese food drive through in Fort Bragg CA. It looks like it was recently converted from a mass of junipers, a prickly tough shrub. The owners removed the junipers, created small berms and planted bok choi, squash, cucumber, and beans. A single juniper was left in the beds and when we walked by a man was carefully pruning away the dead branches to reveal the trunk.

He was actualizing a cultural belief about how land should function.

data boom

2009-11-05T01:17:00.000-08:00

The above two images show an aerial view of the Ashby fleamarket that happens every Saturday and Sunday in the parking lot of the Ashy Bart Station. The top photo is from the USGS Seamless database and is 0.33' for Alameda County, the bottom is from Google Maps. The GM aerial seems to be taken at an earlier date, based on how the shrubs along the north edge of the parking lot have grown in the USGS aerial. (or were they pruned?) Despite this the similarity in the layout & temporary structures of the flea market itself make it seem like images could have been recorded on the same day, perhaps just a few hours apart. Why do I only have access to aerial images that were taken on the weekend?
these and other questions, weekly and biweekly.

knowing snails

2009-10-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

Back in 2005 I was working on an undergraduate thesis at Portland State University, studying terrestrial mollusk species diversity in a Portland Oregon urban forest.

It was a fairly straightforward piece of research that wanted to answer the question: what species of slugs and snails live in this patch of woods?

26 sample sites, 844 square feet per site, 21944 square feet total. 1004 total terrestrial mollusks found, 16 species, 1 range extension for Cryptomastix germana germana, 1 possible threatened snail, Megomphix hemphilli.

I crawled around in the rainy woods looking under leaf litter & sword ferns for a few small slugs or snails that I would temporarily corral, identify, photograph, then release.

I brought a few home with me, boxed them up, and sent them to the BLM offices outside Roseburg, where Nancy Duncan preserved them and stored them in their Oregon Mollusk collection.

I also took samples of the leaf litter, baked all 26 liters in the oven in our small apartment, then sorted through the detritus with a hand loupe looking for microsnails about the size of a pinhead.

the thesis is here, the associated field guide is here

The thesis process was great and the results typically "scientific" but they both lacked, in retrospect, any kind of discussion of the subtle character of the snails & the environment. There is no subjective information, information without numbers, or purely intuitive data in this kind of product. (Journal of Irreproducible Results which has some real oddities)
Snails are full of character, and spending time in their habitat gave me a lot more information than I could package up and put in the report. The literature seems to suggest that snails have favorite foods, preferred & avoided trails, repeat acquaintances, memories, can live for 20(+?) years, and make their way back to their nest even when picked up and moved (no slime trail to follow, how do they know which way to go?) Through my observations and sensing I began to understand how each snail was different, some were gregarious, recalcitrant, feisty, or gentle. Some were strong for their size, some were very curious. Slugs and snails seem to have individual personalities informed by their genetic code and their life experiences. They make choices.

The science that attempts to get at this holistic view is behavioral ecology. This research tends to focus on explaining the evolutionary origins of behaviors rather than finding patterns or meaning in how/why a plant or animal responds to its environment. What is the organism's nature? This is an extremely difficult question for science to answer and would require mountains of data just to establish action, nevermind motive (Do you know why you do what you do? Do you know the snail does what it does?).

Maybe the better method is to use intuition to establish a relationship with a given life form. Perhaps we could all be assigned a creature, like a zodiac, that we are responsible for observing closely. I think we would find that every organism has the potential to invoke empathy in a human. The ability to feel what it's like to be that plant, animal, or (archae)bacteria. While we call this "projection" and dismiss it as a human artifact we simultaneously labor under the belief that other means of knowledge production are objective and can create a reality divorced from individual experience, with repeatable results, and no fingerprints. A myth, that we believe in to guide our actions.

The explanation many indigenous indians in California gave for how they knew which plants were good to eat, weave baskets with, heal wounds, calm babies, make rope, was much the same; the plants told them what they were good for. A dialogue. Trial and error over long periods seems a likely way to have this conversation, but keeping the records would be no mean feat. Most California tribes had names for each plant, but also a more refined name that depended on where the plant grew. Perhaps our capacity for empathy is great enough that, if trained and valued, we can intuit our relationship to other organisms.

We're currently driving many species extinct without understanding what they can do. Human action has outpaced the system we have of establishing cultural limitations for those actions; science. Eliminating variables before we know what they are, erasing unknown knowledge, foot shooting. catch up quick! it's an emergency.

maintenance

2009-10-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

a beautiful, healthy, and abundant landscape requires a lot of it at small spatial scales
replacing humans with machines may also mechanize the ecology
but for maximum resiliency use maximum diversity
we just have to start tending every square inch

photo from peter sucheki: 1/2 mastermind behind redstart
taken in blake garden

Back to the Land

2009-09-20T20:39:00.000-07:00

After a long summer away from the Doghouse I've been putting energy into the garden, testing out some ideas and research I've been doing about taking care of the soil. What I've done thus far:
1. Fork up the beds whose summer crops had died back.
2. Mix in some composted horse manure bought at a premium from Berkeley Horticulture (the guilt)
3. Seed a variety of cover crops into areas that I'm not quite ready to plant. Fava beans, Austrian Winter Vetch, and some Red & White Clover. I sprung for the innoculant.
4. Seed a bed with a few varieties of radish and some turnip.
5. Seed a six pack of broccoli & cabbage for transplant once the soil is ready.
6. Transplant in giant chard, italian parsley, sage, and peas.
6. Snag a few bales of straw from David's house via PARK(ing) Day: "Hollywood Hoe-Down"
7. Harvest the forest of Arundo donax that regularly springs up along the fence and prop it to dry for eventual chipping via Anida's chipper (Assuming it's still up for use.)
8. THE CHLORAMINE ISSUE. Treating garden water with aquatic life protector & a few teaspoons of quality liquid fertilizer with no industrially processed nutrients.
9. Trap out 5 rats, all five clean kills, buried in corner by comfrey.
10. New garden gate: 1 redwood post, wire.
10. General weeding, raking, trimming, pruning, hacking, spading, picking, chopping.

Things learned:
1. Rats are suckers for peanut butter with a small piece of bread and a raisin stuck in it.\
2. Leave No Trace ethic is incorrect, it should be "Choose What Trace To Leave".
3. Deferred maintenance is often more difficult, time-consuming and tedious than daily maintenance.
4. Using weeds in the garden is tricky, my field mint was getting out of control but seemed to be keeping the ants out of the NW bed.
5. The distinction between and ecological decision and an aesthetic decision is constantly evolving.
6. The three primary elements are Camper, Campsite, and Campground
7. Started the 1859A Log, a journal of activities related to the house & garden that stays with this place the next tenants.

After a few months away from this project I decided that I should never be too busy to have a garden. Everytime I work around the house I have a sense of immense satisfaction and feel good physically and mentally. I also receive the added benefit of good food and increasingly healthy soil. I always have the time to garden but I often choose to spend it doing other things and pay farmers to do my gardening for me somewhere else. I think I have to put the same amount of calories into land as I take out or other energy sources have to be tapped to make up for the deficit, like fossil fuels. With all that extra energy we go the moon, make hollywood blockbusters, and build helicopters.

POLL

2009-09-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

Insufficient turnout at the poll prohibits statistical conclusion analysis.

Photo Copyright. Shared Territory. 2009. HODGES & CO. all rights revealed

Utility Sleeper

2009-08-29T13:35:00.000-07:00

The Utility Sleeper utilizes a ubiquitous urban infrastructure skin to camouflage a small homespace so that a human can sleep without getting hassled by the cops. Solar panels embedded in the skin provide power to a small fan that draws cool air from beneath the Sleeper and into the homespace to ensure adequate ventilation. click to enlarge or go here for mouseover version.

UPDATE!:!:! HISTORICAL POLL RESULTS E-RAZED!

2009-08-28T12:28:00.001-07:00

attempting data recovery. sad loss but everything begins, middles, and ends. RIGHT?

Photo Copyright. territorial dispute. 2009. HODGES & CO. all rights revealed

plumbing the depths

2009-08-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

Humans, despite our obvious shortcomings, are phenomenally good at pushing ourselves outside our comfort zone in search of larger, often obscure meanings. The elasticity of both the mind and body continually punch holes in the gypsum board of cultural history and reach through to the unknown. Michel Siffre is a favorite and recently the voyage made by Jacques Piccard & Lt. Don Walsh has floated past and captured the old imagi-nathan.

On January 23, 1960, Piccard and Walsh, made a dive in the Trieste to the deepest known point on Earth. The team descended 35,810 ft (10,916 m) to Challenger Deep. Piccard and Walsh sat in a 6-ft-diameter (1.8-m) steel bubble tucked underneath an enormous tank of gasoline (a buoyant fluid that does not compress) while the vessel made the a five-hour dive to the ocean floor. The Trieste provided completely independent life support, with a closed-circuit rebreather that used soda-lime to scrub CO2 from the air. Power was provided by batteries.
As the sphere passed 9,000 feet the thick plexiglass window suddenly cracked, shaking the entire sphere, but remaining water tight. The two men spent 20 minutes on the ocean floor, eating chocolate bars and staring out into the deep sea, lit up by quartz-arc light bulbs, watching small fish swim by.

This is the only time that humans have been this deep. In the years since no one has come within 10,000 feet of their record.

Interestingly enough the depths of the ocean below 1000 meters form the largest habitat on the planet by volume and also happens to be the least explored. Recently a remotely operated submersible off the coast of California spent a few hours in this zone and came back with a treasure trove of new species. The earth is fantastically thick with life, thicker than we can ever imagine due to our limited spatial and temporal scale. From the film of bacteria, yeast, and spores that coat every surface on the planet to the giants of the deep that we dismiss as myth without ever having taken a peek into their world. Here's to our constant (and increasingly forgotten) companion, the unknown.

Packgoats

2009-08-23T23:11:00.001-07:00

Packgoats are apparently a fantastic method of material transport in rugged areas.
Usually it seems packgoats are castrated males, quite friendly, even tempered, and a good pal too.
Could you pack with milk goats and make cheese with their milk and their body heat as you move through mountainous terrain? What's the average rate of travel for nomadic goat herding?

back in school

many wondorous happonings app-ear-ing natturally

photos from here

how to build a tree

2009-06-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

how to build a tree from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

design tourism

2009-06-10T01:13:00.000-07:00

in thailand
regular programming to return momentarily.
in the meantime...

all the news in 1000words or less

taco flat

2009-04-20T22:36:00.000-07:00

new squatter communities are springing up like mushrooms throughout the west. for a good rundown check out this article

and

these photos

is access to land a right? is territory the basis of action? can these places create new solutions? or are they problems?

the ability of the capitalist system to satisfy the demand for low-rent informal housing is clearly nonexistent. so thousands of people are sidestepping the dollar and squatting land that does not belong to them. new types of stories are unfolding, new policy is forming to either eradicate or metabolize these growing communities. but what if they're allowed to stay? would the security of tenure encourage squatters to make a greater investment in their homes and community? (dignity village is a good example)

flickr here

this land is our land and we've never been able to live on it without paying for that privilege. but through the courts we seem to be deciding that sometimes that's okay. recently in colorado a couple were awarded a 1/3 share in a million dollar vacant lot because they had used it continually for 20 years. They planted a garden there and stacked their firewood. They say they held parties there and walked the land so often they wore a path in the grass (latimeshere).

all it took to make the land theirs; using it.

i suggest that a new era of property rights is being phased in, where if land is not being used it can be taken by people who can use it without paying for it. We'll be joining a host of other countries where self-built squatter communities are becoming seen as solutions to homelessness and a way to build community capital. (boston globe here)

and to end, a quote

The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony... consists in this—that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.

KARL MARX AND YOU LIKE IT

from here

and finally the amazing ben peterson who is trying to imagine how it will all feel

more here (thank you to david godshall of the nurserymen for sending me this link)

Dreams Are the Sun & the Earth Speaking to Us

2009-03-31T19:12:00.000-07:00

An still image of the earth's magnetic field, a dynamic system wiki here

A very odd study recently published in the Medical Hypotheses journal correlates the bizarreness of dreams with local fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field.

Darren Lipnicki kept meticulous records of his dreams for 8 years and then scored them on a 5-point ranking of strangeness.

On the low end were mundane dreams - "I am sitting at a table doing some maths or physics homework."

In the middle of the scale were the possible but unlikely - "A friend is in the backyard of my house, building a wooden platform atop of 7-foot high stilts."

And into the zone of being unlike Darren's waking reality - "I was stranded on a foreign coastline with a monkey that spoke English and a woman that suddenly became small, almost doll-sized. Then I was at home."

He found that it was during the times when geomagnetic activity was least that he had the strangest dreams.

An image of the sun's solar wind bombarding the earth's magnetic field. wiki here

Geomagnetic activity is caused by solar wind bombarding the earth's magnetic field with supercharged plasma. Fluctuations in the magnetic field, in turn, affect the Telluric currents. Telluric currents are the vast rivers of electrical energy that flow through the ground. They make earth batteries work and powered the telegraphs. They are used by industrial prospectors to find oil, ore, water, faults, and magma chambers. It's like the sun's energy is being sung by the earth. These giant fields of magnetic and electrical force swarm all around us and buzz, zapp, and frazzle our brains, just like a big solar storm could wipe out the electrical grid. In addition all of our electrical appliances and power infrastructure emit electro-magnetic fields, potentially further affecting our dreams.

BUT it was only when the geomagnetic activity decreased that Darren's dreams turned strange. And what are strange dreams? Many people do not consider the dreamworld any less real than our waking world. Isn't it strangest of all to dream a world just like the one you're awake in?

this is all too silly, but i would suggest not sleeping with your laptop under your pillow.

Snail Farm Cart - UPDATE

2009-03-31T14:52:00.000-07:00

the nice folks at the Food For Thought Competition awarded the Snail Cart 6th out of 100 entries.
check out the other winners at http://www.24-7sandwichshop.org/
order yours now.

Snail Farm Cart

2009-02-19T14:50:00.000-08:00

A recent project for the SFFlower&GardenShow Sculpture Contest & the Food For Thought Design Competition.
A mobile integral unit for growing, preparing, cooking, and selling snails.

PDF HERE

the ecosystem model of everything

2009-02-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

(image of antiobiotc resistant Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus original here)

A flurry of recent news items and newly minted research consortia have drawn unprecedented attention to the nether world of microorganisms that exist within and upon us middle-of-the-universe humans. I've discussed this before. The most significant is the Human Microbiome Project, a multi-disciplinary research group with the goal of cataloging all the flora and fauna that lives in and on the human body. The research thus far makes it uncertain if this is even possible, but does open up an entirely new can of worms where the boundaries between humans and their environment are increasingly blurred.

One of the first papers to come out of this collaboration details the unique tribes of bacteria that dwell on the skin of your inner elbow (nytimes article here). The skin, in general is loaded with microorganisms, even after you wash there are approximately 1 million of these tiny creatures on every square centimeter of your body. For the most part these hitchhikers are commensulate, feasting on our dead skin cells in return for keeping us clean and moist. On the inner elbow a team of researchers sampled five people and found that everyone had 6 major tribes of bacteria in common, with a few specific tribes depending on the individual. This was good news for the researchers; it meant that developing a general model of human microorganism communities could be possible. A general model in turn could be used to detect abnormalities in an individual's microbiota and create a sort of standardized probiotic regimen that could correct deviations in the profile. Making us healthier and more resistant to the bacteria that make us sick. However, a separate group of researchers that focused on an area of the forearm a few inches away from the inner-elbow study had a very different outcome...

"We swabbed the forearm skin of six people. There were 12 arms. We found 182 species of microbes representing seven different phyla,” he said. “Recently, another group studied skin from the crook of the elbow, just a few centimeters away from the site of our study, and found an entirely different microbial population. In our studies, we found 91 different genera, but only five of them were present in all six individuals. Sixty-one were present in just one individual, indicating a very high level of intrahost variability. Further, we looked at the same individuals eight to 10 months later and found that their microbial populations were no more similar to their own arms than to somebody else’s arm.” original here

in another study at University of Colorado Boulder, researchers swabbed the hands of 51 undergraduates. They detected and identified more than 4,700 different bacteria species but only five species were shared among all participants. Even more surprising, the right and left palms of the same individual shared an average of only 17 percent of the same bacteria types.

This research suggests that everybody has a unique microbiotic "signature." This signature varies both in space on our bodies and in time as we move through new environments, seasons cycle, and our diet changes. Understanding how this signature is related to health, behavior, and our evolution as a species will help us understand each human not as an isolated organism acting in space, pursuing an individual agenda, but as complex and densely populated ecosystems that are in constant flux and flow, disturbances in the community creating moods, diseases, thought patterns, rashes, glow, love, tumors etc. Known as a superorganism, our human cells are outnumbered 10 to 1 by microbiotic partners, and we are constantly exchanging these creatures with our environment.

(photo of bacteria colonies on a cell, original here)

The primary tool that has unlocked this new mode of understanding is metagenomics. A rapid DNA/RNA sequencing technique that rather than amplifying an isolated genome to identify a single species, takes a large sample of many different genomes and parses out individual genes. A sort of gene frequency map for a given scoop of earth or skin swab, where function is defined not as a single organism but as a suite of genes that blur boundaries between organism and ecosystem.

This is a new way of thinking, where the individual is superceded by the community, where function can be found in an overall ecosystem genetic profile rather than trophic webs. What are the primary genes in this system and what function do those genes carry? A way of viewing the world as a series of concentrated microbial activity nodes, each node corresponding to a function or an organism. Co-evolution seems logical, but given the incredible variation between microbial communities on/in individuals a sort of human-as-garden (bacteria being the gardeners) seems more appropriate. We evolved the capability to play host to almost anything that comes along, and the first-come-first-served concept seems to play out nicely as our friendlies circle the wagons and battle back the invaders, who of course have another host (pig, goose, rat, etc) in which they are the good guys. In this light every plant and every animal is an ecosystem maintained by microorganisms. The genus/species model based on the individual is very poor resolution, akin to viewing Earth as a single species. To give some perspective, humans have approximately 4305 square feet of surface area that is speckled with microbiota at a density of (+/- 1,000,000) one million per square inch. If you were the size of an average bacteria, that would be like living on a planet 51 times the size of earth (a finger is the area west of the Mississippi) where everyone had 135 acres of prime real estate to call home. A strange world.

The implications are clearly far reaching, and I believe that in the next 50 years this mode of thinking will be highly instrumental in forging a new kind of eco-ethic, where humans are inextricably tied to their environment through the constant flow of microorganisms. A robust ecosystem keeps us (me and my flora/fauna) healthy, clean water keeps us healthy, living food keeps us healthy, but when the environment becomes toxic, or corrupt with antibiotics, and conditions shift to favor a different suite of microorganisms, we get sick, or angry, or depressed, or greedy, and we create a world that favors those creatures that are in us, so they grow stronger, multiply and spread. Good versus evil. The future will be a time where we learn how to live in harmony with the microorganisms, gathering beneficials to combat the superbugs we've bred, washing our crops with pest fighters, clothes designed to encourage not kill, energy from algae, fungi digesting our waste, a world where we fully embrace ourselves as ecosystems, not individuals.

POLL RESULTS

2009-01-23T23:12:00.000-08:00

I have never before seen a poll on this blog where the votes were so evenly distributed. The poll received 6 votes, with four of the five answers receiving 1 vote and 1 of the answers receiving 2 votes.
given that poll sought to cut right to the pith of what it means to be alive as a human right now it's remarkable that there was no consensus. our backs are up against the same obelisk but looking out each one of us sees something different.

A.A.R.C.

2009-01-17T13:02:00.001-08:00

HODGES & CO. DESIGN
in association with
Greenishbrown Productions
and
Be Now Here Concepts

PRESENTS...

The Formation of a New Organization:

The Animals in Advertising Royalties Concern (A.A.R.C.)

AARC's mission is to ensure that when a for-profit corporation uses a photographic image or illustrated likeness of a currently extant animal (excluding Homo sapiens) for purposes of advertising, entertainment, or any other activity by which said corporation can be reasonably expected to benefit, either through financial gain or brand identification, the corporation is responsible for paying due royalties to the animal.

AARC will accomplish this mission through a four step process:
1. Identifying ad campaigns that use animals.
2. Calculating royalty rates based on total expenditures for the ad campaign and estimated increase in revenue due to the ad campaign in which the animal was used.
3. Identifying non-profit and private conservation organizations that work to restore, protect, or study the animals featured in the ad campaign.
4. Directly contacting said corporations through publicly available communiques that detail their financial obligation to the animal used in their ad campaign and an appropriate organization to whom they can remit the funds.

For example, the infamous Geico Gecko is a wildly successful ad campaign. Geico has even used the computer generated gecko to promote wildlife conservation efforts and sponsor a travelling gecko exhibit aimed at educating school children about the importance of wildlife conservation. These efforts are commendable yet are thinly veiled ad campaigns aimed at increasing the popularity and recognition of the Geico brand. Their responsibility to the gecko is greater. I suggest a yearly donation of $500,000 to Project Gecko, a non-profit organization with a proven track record of effectively protecting the world's most endangered gecko species.

Other obvious examples of corporations that will be receiving communiques include Coca-Cola for their use of the polar bear

Kellog's use of the tiger to sell breakfast cereal

and the Lunesta moth.

AARC believes in the fair and just treatment of all life and that the exploitation of animals in advertising without due compensation is ethically unjustifiable.

This is of course a large task and the AARC is currently looking for volunteers and interns to assist with the four step process outlined above. AARC does not expect or receive any financial gain from addressing this issue and we are therefore unable to pay our assistants. We are also currently investigating the feasibility of developing a sister organization, PARC (Plants in Advertising Royalty Concern).

If you have noticed any ad campaigns using an animal please contact n.hodges@gmail.com immediately.

short circuit

2009-01-17T12:15:00.000-08:00

back from the yearly migration to portland and back with stops along the way.

met dakota who pulls a 6000lb wagon with three horses all across the western US. he's been doing it for 20 years. he has a magic about him that draws people in. he's living proof that you can live any way you want to.

(photo by Chuck Edwards)

for lots more information and a newly minted online presence for dakotah visit his myspace page (!) what follows is an excerpt from the myspace blog by Chuck Edward's, who was drawn into Dakotah's world and is keeping an ongoing chronicle of Dakotah's passage through Northern California.

"The rain gauge on the side of Dakotah's wagon read three inches since he set up camp. The combination of rain, sleet and snow, set the wheels of his 6,000lbs wagon to a depth of five inches.

The three horses of Dakotah's team pulled gallantly to free the wagon; but, to no avail. I received a call from Mr. Nathan Hodges Sunday afternoon. Dakotah's satellite phone was unable to connect to the network as he sat alongside Highway 101, and without the ability to reach the outside world, Dakotah sent a request for help via Mr. Hodges. Mr. Hodges was traveling from the Bay Area on his way to Oregon for Christmas when saw Dakotah and stopped after he saw the wagon and horses."

so that's that. stay tuned for non-stop blogging action and a big sense x2 FUN GUN POLL.

Photo Copyright. a disaster of precise proportions. 2008. HODGES & CO. all rights revealed

seasonal searching

2008-11-08T09:02:00.001-08:00

I spent some time last night with google trends, if you haven't played with it go check it out, there's a lot of data to mine.
I was interested in the seasonality of searches, here's the graph for "planting"

and here's the result 5 months later.... "canning"

some are less clear, for example "trees" had an obvious spike around christmas, but a more mysterious bump around may, perhaps arbor day?

The predictability of internet search terms is sort of astounding and i like how the massiveness of the data creates a sort of cultural consciousness repository. sometimes i bemoan how our modern culture is disconnected from the cycles & seasons of our planet, but in reality those connections are still there as revealed by trends. i think more than anything the source of seasonal information has changed. rather than ask my neighbor how to make pickles, i google it. the other piece of valuable information here is the news volume graph which may point to longer term trends and the popularization of concepts. if you notice on the above canning graphs, news volume has steadily increased for four years. is this a sign of a renewed cultural interest in reviving the domestic skillset so helpful for sustainable living?

others are just beautiful, here's "snow"

and of course more people than ever are searching for happiness on the web

iGoogle Stickynote Gadget Current Contents

2008-11-06T21:28:00.000-08:00

"Thank Heaven for the open space of the Presidio and for Golden Gate
Park!" was the unspoken thank-offering of many hearts. The great park,
with its thousand and more acres of area, extending from the thinly
populated part of the city across the sand dunes to the Pacific, seemed
in that awful hour a God-given place of refuge. Near it and extending to
the Golden Gate channel is the Presidio military reservation, containing
1,480 acres, and with only a few houses on its broad extent. Here also
was a place of safety, provided that the forests which form a part of
its area did not burn.

THE GOLDEN GATE CAMP

LUCI

weed seeds paint by numbers
real camping in traffic islands, freeway median strips, etc.

joe knowles -naked in the woods
amish
biospheres
houseplants

the way certain plants switch growth patterns immature/mature leaves

balloon seeding
weed matrix to spell a word
filter pitcher
backpack
vroomba landscaping
landscape IBI
man on the street web audio stream
line project at blake garden
music videos

arboretum america
past tents
paths/trails
albany bulb
film in landscape design
james rose
gardens of 1920's berlin
modern russian work
hunters point set up camera let people know they could say something if they wanted
take a video, play it on my camera, install "TV" in the hill for chip

video of the ecosystem that used to be on that spot. swamp?

is a natural form necessary for ecological function?

landfill parks

camping in the redwoods (develop site plan & renderings)

www.calflora.org

Synergistics: the place is derived from the environmental forces on site

synaesthetics: place is sa psychological perception of environment.

email mom about avast

24hr Serpentine Gallery Interviews

The "terrifying" the "dynamic" and the "serene & sublime"

FORMAL WEED PATCHES

Truffaut garden store

Las Palmas Parasite

MATERIAL LIST: gabions, logs, timbers, rocks, boulders, stumps, vines, cattails, willows,

eschew machinery in construction. what limitations does that place on the site?

Declaration of Delos, journal Ekistics, ed Doxiadis

IVAN SHALMIN

ICED ARCHITECTS

BRODSKY

ATRIUM ARCHITECTS

MEGANOM

SAVINKIN/ KUZ MIN

TIMUR BASHKAEV

ideas: soft stone, eroded by water. eroded by footsteps. reveal patterns underneath. houses made of wood. quickly decomposed by fungus, plants, termites... to reveal hidden stone structure underneath.
pollinator - plant webs... two parallel axis with lines connecting points of interaction.

floating garden, designed to detach and become a floating community when seawater rises

two rocks ground against one another

algae/bacteria growth tank

balance with stones/sticks/etc. but the objects are trickily weighted to create unnatural relationships. smaller rocks

LIbrary search terms:
architect*
duchamp
marcel
intentional
randomized
supergraphic

Think about the sound these indentations will make.
site sound map.

eskimo fjord map

ant farm

dolphin embassy

Photo. a space time continuum 2008 . HODGES & CO. all rights revealed.

air traffic controlling

2008-10-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

i couldn't find any music stored on my computer that i wanted to listen to so i turned to the web...

radiolab -
is a great program, i listened to the episode they have in the 3rd season all about zoos. i like the story about the zoo in spokane washington that was the first to put captive born gorillas in an outdoor cage with grass & trees & rocks. it's great and reminded me of the enigma of kausper hauser by werner herzog which is about a man who was raised in a small room with no human contact and then is suddenly left in the middle of the town, naked. the head gorilla came out into the enclosure and walked around, sat down, stared up at the sky where crows were flying, looked in a small pool made in the artificial creek, and then noticed the humans, standing just on the otherside of a large glass window. The gorilla dug his hand deep into the sandy soil and pulled out the one piece of concrete rubble that somehow escaped the construction crew who had specific instructions to remove anything a gorilla might be able to pick up and throw and held it aloft. then he set it down, walked over to the creek and his family joined him in the sunshine.

air traffic control
this is a fantastic site that streams live feeds from air traffic control towers all across the world. there are long stretches of silence but sure enough someone always wants to land or ask about the weather. check it out!

Photo copyright . everything is white if you wait long enough . 2008 . HODGES & CO. all rights revealed.

on weeds

2008-10-09T09:09:00.000-07:00

working as much as possible with, and as little as possible against the natural forces already present there.

a weed, like wilderness, nature, beauty, evil, and a perfectly clean shirt are all cultural constructs, a second order sign used to corral an ever changing set of beliefs, like herding cats. generally, a weed is a plant that grows better than the plants you would prefer to see growing in a particular area at a particular time. weeds are a constant ecological pressure exerted on the order & human usefulness of a given garden, pasture, or lawn. we want the system to grow like we imagined it would, and weeds often disrupt that idealized vision. so we pull them out, poison them, and curse the curse that kicked us out of the garden where apparently the noxious weeds were nil. of course sometimes weeds actually do some damage. they get stuck in our livestock's feet, poison the ground, smother the fruit trees, and grow through cracks in walls like they just don't care. billions of dollars in damage & lost revenue, a worldwide epidemic of virulent invasive species literally bringing down our homes around our heads. yet you don't hear the candidates talking about this problem do you?

well i have a solution to all your weed struggles. it's called reframing the weed debate and it's simple; instead of dividing up all the plants into two categories, weeds & non-weeds, just use one category, plants. as far as evolution goes, plants have been at it for much longer than we have and really have some pretty powerful tricks up their sleeves to avoid eradication. various government & private agencies spend millions of dollars each year attempting to remove targeted plant invaders from the landscape; arundo reed, knotweed, scotch broom, star thistle, english ivy, and as it turns out it doesn't work. the plants come back, or they will soon enough.

reframing weeds is championed by one of my favorite landscape architects, a frenchman by the name of Gilles Clement. this is a quote from the book enviro(ne)ment

This approach assumes that the garden and the gardener are totally interdependent, with the gardener keeping an attentive eye on the wanderings of the plants and animals and insects that enter into the garden. He follows the 'movement' of 'traveling' plants like Digitalis, the Mulleins, Spurges, and Hogweed, instead of confining them to "beds," which are traditionally employed to highlight flowering. This approach relativizes the notions of plants and weeds, allowing everything present in the garden to play an equal role in producing a dense and richly overlapping whole in which each development is treated as an evolutionary event

this reframing of weeds isn't just fun & games. if we were to recontextualize our notions of beauty in a designed landscape to include the wooliness of weeds & the process by which a bare patch of land becomes a forest we could save billions of dollars a year & untold consumption of resources.

This project by Clement included a large elevated island of bare dirt surrounded by a 30ft concrete wall. over time weeds & trees colonized the bare dirt and now there is a young forest floating above the rest of the ground plane, untouched & unmaintained.

another of my favorite projects is by Hans Hollein, a Pritzker Prize winning Austrian architect, where he took a good number of colored buckets, filled them with dirt from an industrial site outside town, put them in front of the local government buildings and let the weeds banked in the soil just grow.

but for the most part weeds are eschewed in landscape design, have been for 4000 years, and i doubt it's going to change anytime soon. but i believe in a guided evolution of a site where product, process, and design form three sides of a triangle, and if any side changes length the other two must shift in response.

this creates a dense pattern of ecological form & function, overlapping and changing in time. something i call ecological bricolage. François Jacob uses the term bricolage to describe the apparently cobbled-together character of much biological structure, and views it as a consequence of the evolutionary history of the organism.

i think this is applicable to site design.

Political Landscape

2008-09-25T21:23:00.001-07:00

not sure who the genius is but hooray!
this is down by the calabash on adeline.

tree power

2008-09-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

MIT has figured out a way to plug a remote environmental sensor directly into a tree using the very small amount of electrical power every tree generates to recharge the sensor's battery and transmit the signal over the network of sensors and eventually back to a data collection station. this is amazing

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080922095435.htm

trouble in paradise

2008-09-23T09:11:00.000-07:00

the garden continues to grow and challenge. it's producing a steady harvest right now, we just got three enormous heads of broccoli and two cauliflowers off the plants in the front, lettuce, cucumbers, carrots, chard, kale, tomatoes, and radishes are all in full swing. ripening are the winter squash, pumpkin, butternut, melons, beets, bok choy, corn. i just put in turnips, radishes, golden beets, more chard, a bunch of lettuce, chives. in the next few weeks potatoes, garlic, and onions, maybe leeks will all be planted. this is all good news and overall garden health is okay, but we're facing some pest & disease problems.

aphids: we have aphids, no ifs ands or buts. on the corn, the carrot bases, the broccoli leaves (but not the heads!). aphids, the most widespread crop pest in the world, puncture soft plant tissue with their sucking mouthparts and siphon out the sugary plant waters. in return they secrete a "honeydew" which brings us to the real crux of the aphid problem in the garden, ants. berkeley has an amazing amount of small Argentinian ants, an exotic that has quickly become ubuiquitous throughout the uban landscape. they're in our kitchen, our garbage, our compost, our freezer, our bed, our laundry, our flowerbeds, our mailbox. sometimes i'll leave the house and a few hours later find a hitchhiker.

these ants not only spread scale (a houseplant pest) and aphids but they carefully tend them, harvesting the honeydew as a food source and carrying aphids to opening frontiers of plant stems & leaves. this is a mutualistic relationship in all its glory but i happen to be on the short end. so i fight the battle on several fronts.

1 is direct control, washing or wiping off the aphids. this works surprisingly well and in some cases keeps them from coming back. ants are also adverse to mint, so i've been encouraging mint to grow in the edges of the pathways between beds. and if things are really bad (like in the compost bin) i'll spread some diotomaceous earth on the ground which is a mechanical means of killing ants, versus a chemical. all of these control methods require work and continual watchfulness. but the aphid problem is essentially one of unchecked population growth, both the ants (as exotics) and the aphids lack a sufficiently robust predator to keep their numbers down. enter the beneficials!

we have a lot of vegetables growing in our garden, but what we don't have is a lot of flowers. one rosemary bush is in bloom, and the dill has just started opening but that's really it. this lack of nectar resources has created a lack of the insects that naturally prey on garden pests.

perhaps most well known of these is the ladybug, a voracious aphid eater that is attracted by nectar rich small flowers like dill, yarrow, and other members of the carrot family. in fact, i didn't see a single ladybug in the garden until the dill started blooming, but now they are everywhere munching on the aphids.

this was a powerful reminder that just planting a few vegetable starts is only half the game, concurrent with that there needs to be a lot of good herbs and flowers planted to attract not only beneficial insects but pollinators as well. we lost about half of our sweet dumpling squash this year due to incomplete pollination. so i've started a campaign to fill the edges of the garden and in between the vegetables with attractive herbs and blooms. diversity is key to system stability.

the other problem? powdery mildew. the land we're on is sort of damp, arundo reed grows in the corner, and when i dug the new bed a foot down was damp earth even though i hadn't watered there. this low-lyingness makes for prime fungal breeding grounds and as a result we get a fair amount of powdery mildew and other fungal infections on our vegetables, especially the squash and melons. now, theoretically, good rich soil with beneficial fungus and the full array of macro and micro nutrients should grow a plant that is resistant to these sort of infections. but we're a new garden, just converted from hardpacked clay lawn, and i don't think the soil community is quite up to snuff, yet. so we have mildew.

most of the pest control books recommend sulfur or copper to combat this, but we have a small garden with lot of dogs. copper is toxic, and sulfur is an irritant, so what to do? i've heard milk or baking soda spray, but haven't tried them. then i read in the ever-helpful "carrots love tomatoes" that a tea made of equisetum (horsetail) is an excellent way to not only prevent but combat powdery mildew and at the same time increase overall tissue health.

i knew where there was a nice patch of horsetail a few blocks from my house so i gathered a big handful, chopped them up, let them sit in water for two days then simmered them for a few hours. the resulting liquid was a watery-greenish and sort of stank. i put it in a spray bottle and have been religiously spraying the leaves of the squash with it for the past four days. it appears to be working! there still is mildew but it's not spreading and some of the leaves with small amounts have cleared up completely. i feel good about this and would recommend it to anyone with mildew problems, and best of all... it's free!

dealing with these problems i was surprised at how little easily countenanced information there was on how to deal with these problems sans chemicals... even "organic" ones. why didn't any of the books i read explicity say that i needed to plant plenty of herbs and flowers with my vegetables? why are the powers of horsetail only mentioned in one place? this got me thinking and i'm currently compiling an online searchable database for all would-be gardeners that allows you to easily understand which plants attract which beneficial insect and when they are in bloom which will be cross-referenced with companion planting and disease control methods. stay tuned.

AND if anyone reading this has insights into the process of growing pest free vegetables please share the wisdom.

poll results finally analyzed

2008-09-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

well well well (john lennon plastic ono band)
after a long night of number crunching i have confirmed the poll analysis outcome.

1 person seems to think that they have already beat the system. hip hooray

1 person thinks that "beating is the system" which makes sense to me. so there we go.

hopefully more people will vote next time so i can back up my specious claims with hard data.

and i can't figure out how to embed these videos but they're awesome...

cornell photo lab

fake rocks

2008-09-17T22:55:00.000-07:00

i've been interested in this idea of copying rocks for some time. making a mold of a rock, then cast a fake rock, then making a mold of the fake rock, and casting another rock and on and on. copies of copies, feedback loops, and idealized site elements. two projects have been popping up lately:
1. the work of steven siegel, who forms garbage into new geology
2. these mirror boulders in france, just can't even describe how beautiful they are

planting templates

2008-09-12T21:40:00.000-07:00

how to effectively restore native vegetation is something of an open ended question at this point. it is difficult to measure success, especially when the initial goal is unclear. when you add the complexity of volunteer planting, native stock availability, and both micro and mega fauna, what does it mean to plant a native dune riparian community? my professor Joe McBride has suggested the idea of a "planting template." this is the smallest structural and species-ratio balanced unit that can be repeated (flipping and rotating are key) to achieve the highest likelihood of a long-term native plant community in the targeted area.

Mushrom Log Cultivation

2008-08-22T21:14:00.000-07:00

so a month ago my friend Alex and i got together and hammered some innoculated plug spawn into some oak limbs that I had picked up from Blake Garden. she had oyster, shitake, and reishi mushrooms, and we inoculated about four lengths of oak with each variety by drilling holes (up to 50/log) and then gently pounding in the myceliated dowels.

we melted some wax and sealed the holes and then divided the spoils. i've been watering them every week or so and they're in a very shady part of the yard. in 7-9mos I'll take the logs and soak them for a few days in a tub of water, initiating a flush. hopefully. so check back in 9mos.

maybe this?

The Garden Grows

2008-08-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

so growing a garden in the city is nowadays a sort of defacto undertaking for the young and restless, worried about food production systems, pining for the good life, bored at work, and afraid of wasting a life working for something we're not sure we even want. I always had some sort of vegetable crop at all the houses i lived, usually just a few tomato plants in whatever sunniest spot was handy and maybe some basil or cooking greens. But I usually found myself spending way more cash than I expected on getting the little garden into the ground and then reaping way fewer fruits of my labor than expected. So this year due to a set of unfortunate financial circumstances I decided I could grow a garden on the cheap.

here's a few tips and tricks i've got thus far and if you've got any i'd love to know them.

1. Get Free Compost. in Berkeley they actually give away as much free compost as you can haul the last friday of every month. it's the municipal waste stream so I end up using digested-berkeley to nourish the plants. if you live elsewhere look around, i bet there's compost just waiting to be had.
1a. make your own compost! this is a bit harder, but stay tuned for a non-stop sort of action blog post on the ins & outs of the compost heap.

2. Don't Buy Starts Buy a Packet of Seeds, unless I find a really good deal on starts like City Slicker Farms that runs a little nursery where the starts are priced by donation, I buy seed. look here for a list of awesome seed companies that you can get mouth watering catalogues from.

3. Mulch to save water, and shape the beds to save water. in super hot desert areas they actually farm in depressions they've dug out of the caliche and filled in with compost in order to capture every drop of water for the vegetables.

5. I borrow everything I can. tool lending library here in berkeley, neighbors elsewhere, share a chipper, share a shovel.

6. Alameda County offer free lead testing & consultation, growing backyard vegetables is only a win win when the soil is non-toxic. go here

7. Freecycle Giveth and Me Giveth Freecycle

8. rather than thinning baby beets and throwing out half the crop, separate the clumps and replant the ones taken out, it can double the patch size. same for anything really.

9. I collect any free materials I can such as lumber, glass, brick, stone, buckets, hoses, and wire. a good garden has a good infrastructure and the cost of these things can add up very quickly if you go down to home depot and whip out the visa.

things that i'm planting now from seed:

turnip (soon as i find some seeds, they're not the most popular vegetable apparently)
cabbage
radish
lucinato kale
golden beet
pak choy
borage
spinach
lettuce

remember what it used to look like?

The Bigfoot Abides

2008-08-19T10:10:00.000-07:00

It's official, the georgia bigfoot body is indeed a hoax. Steven Kulls was granted permission by Tom Biscardi to perform an examination of the body and the results were clear. As the ice melted first the hair was exposed, which melted rather than burned, then the face, which felt hollow, then the feet... "I began examining this area near the feet, I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot."
and the bell tolls.
the following text is from www.searchingforbigfoot.com

"Later that day, Tom Biscardi informed us that both Matthew Whitton and Ricky Dyer admitted it was a costume. They reportedly agreed to sign a promissory note and admission of what they had done, and set a meeting in their hotel room in California for 8AM on August 17th, 2008.

At that time I drew up the documents for Mr. Biscardi. On August 17th, 2008 Tom Biscardi went to the hotel where Dyer and Whitton were staying and found that they had left. At this time action is being instigated against the perpetrators of this fraud. Tom Biscardi asked us to contact you, the press, and share all that we have discovered."

this is not a surprising outcome.

I think what interests me about sasquatch is that it is a phenomenon that challenges our notion of the nature of reality. A side effect of this hoax story was a mild rash of "debunking the bigfoot myth" slideshows and articles that cropped up in the popular science press. Science has this amazing ability to be simultaneously engaged in discovering new things about the universe while denying that it could in any way be different from what they have already discovered. Ultimately I think that the methods of science are only adept at describing a particular facet of the universe, as in the types of questions you ask will always effect the answers you get. So when these skeptics attempt to use the scientific method to address something as mercurial as bigfoot there's this heuristic dissonance that immediately becomes clear, it's like saying god doesn't exist because we haven't found his body and there's no positive control for the DNA samples. maybe we just lack the right telescope? Here's a quote from the previously linked slideshow...

"For Radford and other skeptics, the only acceptable standard of proof is the scientific one. Why, when there are countless researchers probing the far corners of every continent, is there no rigorous, documented, peer-reviewed evidence for Bigfoot? Only one answer makes sense, says Radford: Bigfoot isn't real."

as in it's only through the process of collecting, analyzing, and publishing observations that reality can be created. The world is literally born through the womb of science, forged in the bowels of the lab, crafted by the rigorous protocols of the scientist cum creator, as though there existed only a nameless gray void prior to the catalog and order of science.

and while I have no proof that sasquatch exists, and I really never expect a body to be found or these sort of godawful bigfoot hunters to turn up anything but a few easily duped humans, I still believe in the oddness and rugosity of the universe and that there is a great well of unknown that exists as a sort of anathema to the human fear of total knowledge, white cubes, and finiteness. I think that these unknowns periodically poke through into our perceived and well-ordered world, a continual disruption to encourage growth, a reagent in the mass consciousness.
I guess I don't believe that asking whether bigfoot is real is the right question, instead i think we should ask why we won't let bigfoot be real?

this concludes the 2008 Georgia Gorilla Bigfoot Hoax Investigation and Discussion on Be Now Here. I will return with posts on gardening, compost, mushroom cultivation, and all that stuff.

new photos & dna evidence hot off the press

2008-08-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

so i made it down to palo alto to the lovely cabana hotel. got in a little late thanks to traffic but breezed right through the press credentials check thanks to the Berkeleyan newspaper who gave me a letter certifying that I was indeed tracking down a story for them. The room was packed, probably 100 members of the press in attendance, CBS, wired, newsweek, college newspapers galore, bloggers by the dozen, and of course a hearty contingent of cryptozoologist bigfoot hunter types. Tom Biscardi and the two gentlement from Georgia who claim to have found the body were there answering questions. Questions ranged from the obvious and briskly no-ed "is this a hoax?" to more pointed questions, such as "when will we get to see the body?" (seems to be no definite answer on that one). My impression of the three bigfoot-body possessing guys was that if this is indeed a hoax (which i believe it is) they're sticking to their guns, staying calm, and plan on riding this one until it throws them off. When asked "how much money do you want to make off of this?" by a clearly jealous bigwig in the bigfoot community, Tom replied "as much as i can."

after a bit of hollering Tom agreed to discuss the DNA results.

they go something like this...

3 unidentified tissue samples were delivered to Curt Nelson at the University of Minnesota. He then used three human tissue controls and amplified all six samples. One pair failed due to a technical glitch. the other two human tissue samples came back 100% human. the two tissue samples sent in by Tom were identified as being 100% human and an apparent mix of DNA sequences which was interepreted by the computer algorithm to be Didelphis virginiana... the opossum.

the fact that the DNA was human & opossum didn't seem to bother anyone too much, especially Tom who claimed that the opossum sample was taken from the intestines so may have been a snack that the bigfoot had ingested just prior to his demise.

the whole thing just stinks if you ask me, but there's this weird sense of drop-dead seriousness to the Georgia boys & Tom. When i went up to the front to get the photos & DNA results an older bearded gentlemen leaned over Tom and said "So do you have it? do you really have a body" Tom looks at him & nods. "I sure do, it's the real deal"

The first pic they gave us was a super blurry classic bigfoot-in-the-buff kind of shot of a fuzz hairy thing in the distant spectral woods. nothing conclusive to be sure, and without a useful scale it's impossible to tell just how tall this creature is. could be one of those georgia fellas in the suit.

The second pic is a purported close up of the specimen's mouth. the tongue has distended due to decomposition and the teeth protrude out, apparently the lips have contracted. what's odd about this to me is the fact that all six teeth that are visible seem to be incisors, those flat cutters we have in front. no canines or bicuspids visible. and i'm not sure but i don't think any mammal has six incisors. one interesting note about this picture. on the table where Tom was sitting as he handed these out was two master copies of the pics in plastic sleeves. both of those pictures were clearer, not so overexposed, and much easier to identify what it is I was looking at. Why Tom & the boys chose to release this much more ambiguous image is not clear, but would suggest that they do not want people to look too closely.

and here's the DNA report.

Sasquatch Body Update

2008-08-14T21:48:00.000-07:00

The consensus on the internet seems to be that the photographs of this bigfoot's body are, in fact, nothing more than fuzzy shots of a high-end costume wetted down with sheep intestines thrown in for dramatic effect. I sort of am starting to get that sinking feeling like when it stops snowing, the temperature rises, and it all starts melting.

i'm a believer in sasquatch, although i somehow doubt that we'll ever find a body. here's a list of native american words with translations where possible (original thread) all these words are thought to refer to the same thing. i think the most appropriate for this situation is the Lenape people's name: Mesingw Lenni when translates as "the mask being."

Yi' dyi'tay Nehalem Tillamook Indian "Wild Man"
Sasahevas Halkomelem Language Salish Indian "Sasquatch", "Wild Man of the Woods" Xi'lgo Nehalem Tillamook Indian "Wild Woman"
Sc'wen'ey'ti Spokane Indian "Tall Burnt Hair""
Skanicum Colville Indians "Stick Indians"
Choanito Wenatchee Indian "Night People"
Ste ye mah Yakama Indian "Spirit hidden by woods"
Seatco Yakama/Klickitat/Puyallup "Stick Indian"
Seat ka Yakama Indian Not Available
See'atco Coast Salish Indian "One who runs and hides"
Tsiatko Puyallup/Nisqually Indian "Wild Indians"
Steta'l Puyallup/Nisqually Indian "Spirit Spear"
Seeahtkch Clallam Indian Not Available
Qui yihahs Yakama/Klickitat Indian "The Five Brothers"
Skookum Chinook Indian "Evil God of the Woods"
At'at'ahila Chinookan Indian Not Available
Omah Yurok Indian Not Available
Oh Mah Hoopa Indian "Boss of the Woods"
Bukwas Kwakwaka'wakw Indian "Wildman of the Woods"
Tsonaqua Kwakwaka'wakw Indian "Wild Woman of the Woods"
Tah tah kle' ah Yakama/Shasta Indian "Owl Woman Monster"
Sne nah Okanogan Indian "Owl Woman"
Rugaru Turtle Mt Ojibway Not Available
Qah lin me Yakama/Klickitat Indian Not Available
Windago Eastern Athabascan Indian "Wicked Cannibal"
Wetiko Cree Indian Not Available
Chiye tanka Lakota (West)/Sioux Indian "Big Elder Brother"
Chiha tanka Dakota (East)/Sioux Indian "Big Elder Brother"
Matlose Nootka Indian Not Available
Neginla eh Alutiiq/Yukon Indian "Wood Man"
Nantiinaq Kenai Peninsula Indian Not Available
Nant'ina Dena'ina Indian Not Available
Urayuli SW Alaskan Eskimo Not Available
Get'qun Lake Lliamna Indian Not Available
Kushtaka Tlingit Indian "Otter Man"
A hoo la huk Yup'ik Indian Not Available
Gilyuk Nelchina Plateau Indian "Big Man with little hat"
lariyin Hare Indian "Bushman"
So'yoko Hopi Indian Not Available
Ot ne yar heh Iroquois Indian "Stonish Giant"
Ge no sqwa Iroquois/Seneca Indian "Stone Giants"
Ge no'sgwa Seneca Indian "Stone Coats"
Miitiipi Kawaiisu Indian "Bad luck or disaster"
Yahyahaas Modoc Indian Not Available
Tso apittse Shoshone Indian "Cannibal Giant"
Toylona Taos Indian "Big Person"
Atahsaia Zuni Indian "The Cannibal Demon"
Boqs Bella Coola Indian "Bush Man"
Goo tee khl Chilkat Indian Not Available
Loo poo oi'yes Miwuk Indian Not Available
Kala'litabiqw Skagit Valley Indian Not Available
Madukarahat Karok Indian "Giant"
Nun Yunu Wi Cherokee Indian "The Stone Man"
Kecleh-Kudleh Cherokee Indian "Hairy Savage"
Esti Capcaki Seminole Indian "Tall Man"
Mesingw Lenni Lenape Indian "The Mask Being"
Misinghalikun Lenni Lenape Indian "Living Solid Face"
Wsinkhoalican Lenni Lenape Indian "The Game Keeper"
Saskets Salishan/Sahaptin Indian "The Giant"
Yayaya-ash Klamath Indian "The Frightener"
Manabai'wok Menomini Indian "The Giants"
Nu'numic Owens Valley Paiute "The Giant"
Tse'nahaha Mono Lake Paiute "Giant"
Gogit Haida Indians "Not Available"
Tsadjatko Quinault Indians "Giants"
Hecaitomixw Quinault Indians "Dangerous Being"
Skukum Quinault Indians "Devil of the Forest"
Slalakums Upper Stalo Indians "The Unknown"
Na'in Gwich'in Indians "Brushman"
El-Ish-kas Makah Indians "Not Available"

but rest assured I will be in attendance tomorrow for the press conference ... here:

Bigfoot UPDATE... pictures of specimen released!

2008-08-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

okay, so the first leaked images are out on the web.
all these images are from www.searchingforbigfoot.com and www.cryptomundo.com

This is completely fascinating. There are of course two possible explanations:
1. that this is indeed a large humanoid primate that has been living in the swamps of georgia.
or
2. that this is a hoax, an elaborate prop constructed using the same technologies & attention to detail that is seen in the movie industry. If that's the case it will be quickly verified as such as soon as anyone outside the immediate associates of the men who discovered it is able to examine the physical specimen. Given the considerable sums of money involved (there is a $1,000,000 reward for the first bigfoot specimen) this body is bound to undergo careful examination by impartial third parties. If it is determined to be a fake then the men involved will have had 15 seconds of fame and nothing more, perhaps some vestigal t-shirt sales and of course one whollop up side the head of the cryptozoology community. this, in my mind, makes me wonder why they would go through the trouble time and expense of such an elaborate hoax... what is the payoff?

if the body is indeed real, then it raises some interesting questions...
for example, what level of protection should be given the habitat of this creature? what level of intelligence does it possess? how can we keep millions of enthusiastic bigfoot hunters from swarming the swamp of Georgia to get a look at this beast's kin?

in some ways, keeping the sasquatch mythical has protected it from the greed & meddling that involvement in human affairs always brings. once it is known that they do exist, and they're flesh and blood, there's the real possibility of a storm of hunters descending on the forests to flush out the last remaining sasquatch, burn their habitat and chase them into the city where they'll beg for handouts on the street corner, smelling bad, hairy, dirty, and avoided like the rest by the upstanding citizens of U.S.A.
I suggest if this is indeed real, we immediately cordon off the largest tracts of forest left remaining in the U.S. and Canada, declaring it off limits under penalty of law, and give them the land they need to survive. Could it be possible that the first human-like intelligent life we find won't have extrasolar origins but come creeping from the woods out back?

tomorrow morning on fox news the man who is in possession of this body will be interviewed, then on Friday there's a press conference in Palo Alto where additional evidence will be released. Stay tuned for updates.

The Body of Sasquatch Has Been Found

2008-08-12T13:46:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Omnicollective for this incredible lead!

In what may be the most important discovery in our lifetime, a group of bigfoot researchers reportedly have found the body of a large humanoid apelike creature in the wilds of southern Georgia. The specimen is being called the "Georgia Gorilla" and this Friday there will be a news conference in Palo Alto California where the full details of the investigation will be released including DNA & photographic evidence. The presence of a sasquatch population in Georgia has been well documented and there are multiple sightings over the years. Perhaps at one point sasquatch lived throughout the continental U.S. and were pushed slowly westward by the advance of European settlers. The Georgia group may be a vestigal pocket of these creatures that managed to hide in the extensive swamps.

Here is the information that has been released thus far:

*The creature is seven feet seven inches tall.
*It weighs over five hundred pounds.
*The creature looks like it is part human and part ape-like.
*It is male.
*It has reddish hair and blackish-grey eyes.
*It has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and
five toes on each foot.
*The feet are flat and similar to human feet.
*Its footprint is sixteen and three-quarters inches long and five and three-quarters inches wide at the heel.
*From the palm of the hand to the tip of the middle finger, its hands are
eleven and three-quarters inches long and six and one-quarter inches wide.
*The creatures walk upright. (Several of them were sighted on the same day that the body was found.)
*The teeth are more human-like than ape-like.
*DNA tests are currently being done and the current DNA and photo evidence will be presented at the press conference on Friday, August 15th.

This is very exciting. I plan on driving down to Palo Alto friday afternoon and seeing if I can't gather some more information. I'll be sure to keep you all updated.

NOTE: This could very well be nothing more than a not so elaborate internet hoax. I'll post updates as soon as I get them

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/ga-gorilla/

selecting an album

2008-07-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

one of my consistent toys during the earliest foggy years of my infanthood was the lunchbox sized portable yellow & red bumpy plastic disk player. i had a pretty good selection of records; blue, yellow, red. i forget exactly how it made sound come from those hard bologna-slice-sized platters. but it did. they were fairly jammin tunes if i remember correctly, not your standard nursery rhyme fare or waltzes, just plain old simple two four beats. plunk... pluank... plunk.

this all started thanks to taree, a sweet woman who lives in south berkeley with a bandsaw, a lathe, fruit trees, a winter garden, shaggy bamboo, mounds of wood shavings, rotting apples on the ground from an ornery apple tree that had sprouted up from its rootstock with feral fruit, and until recently a Yamaha C-2 Pre-Amplifier that she was giving away for free via the freecycle alternaconomy.

it's a pretty nice unit. so i hooked it up to my system tonight.
the speakers are an older pair of 8" oak cabinet infinitys. there's a yamaha natural sound stereo amplifier ca-1000 II with a finnicky mode but a nice silent volume knob. Into aux1 of the ca-1000 i run the new Yamaha C-2 Pre-amp (Cycle on terry), and into that i've got two signals; one from my laptop via a gold plated heavy duty triple core RCA cord (into the AUX input) and the other from Sage's parents' turntable, a delidded Technics SL-D2 that was recently cleaned, oiled, balanced, and leveled (into the Phono 1.)

while my audio gear is by no means jaw-dropping, i have to admit that with the new pre-amp it just sounded significantly better. all the audiophiliacs always drone on & on about the complete necessity of a really good preamp and, i'll admit, i've always just shushed them under the carpet with the guys who buy the new computer chips for their car to get a gain of like .5HP. in any case, it sounded so good that I couldn't even choose a record record to play, so i just I decided to play all the records straight through from left to right, one at a time, one side at a time.

1. The Beatles - A Hard Days Night Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Un. Art. UAL 3366. (Click HERE for back)

a pretty good album, much better than i expected. a few real knockout gems on here. three hazy instrumentals: and i love her, ringo's theme (this boy) and the classic; a hard day's night. such nice high contrast portraits of them on the back, hamming it up like they really wanted to make it big but weren't quite sure that they would.

NEXT UP...

roy buchanan

yee hah

Photo copyright . some other needle's record . 2008 . HODGES & CO. all rights revealed.

garden, two weeks ago

2008-07-17T23:14:00.000-07:00

urban homesteading

2008-07-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

as food prices continue their steady slog to the upper stratosphere, we as a household decided it was high time we skipped capital accruing middle-people, put our own seeds in the ground and transformed (bit by bit) our rental oasis into a productive urban homestead. self-reliance in the city is a new battle-cry being hollered back and forth in blogs, magazines, and workshops. a steady & disheartening wash of internet research has made us suspicious of what we see in the supermarket, each product label the source of debate and moral tussling. living in the citycore fosters a disconnected & sallow engagement with our food production, and while farmer's markets bring us closer it just seems wasteful to not break up the hardpacked backyard clay and let seeds do what they do best. grow.

moreover, we are interested in quantifying this process, seeing just how it all pans out. measuring the yields, monitoring the air, soil, and water. biological diversity in the garden edges, temperatures in the middle of the pile, money saved, money spent. we are interested in the process the product and the documentation.
soil=garden=food=data=art=sharing=learning
so stay tuned we'll need all the help we can get.

class is out!

2008-05-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

welcome back everybody, it's been a while, but it sure is good to see all your friendly faces smiling around our little campfire. ah. smell that sagebrush? hear that coyote? what a world friends! what a world!
a few updates:

they got the raccoon!

"RE: Dead Raccoon
Thanks, we'll get it. "

jacob perkins & the nobody are on tour
i'd recommend the takilma show if you can make it

i rode through the posey tube today. (following excerpt from a gchat conversation)

"the bike path was exactly as wide as one bicycle. on the left was a rusty handrail, then a 6ft drop to the crowded busy freeway. on the right was a dirty white tile wall that curved up over me to form the top of the tube. if i deviated just the slightest fraction i would hit either the wall or the handrail. the tube is 3545ft long. dark & dirty. the fumes were so thick and acrid that my eyes were burning the whole way and i choked as i pedaled up the slight slope. the sound in the tunnel was a huge roar with intermittent honks. big trucks passed just feet from me, but i was oddly above the cars, looking down on them. there was a pedestrian walking in the opposite direction and he literally had to climb up on the handrail and i had to brush against the white tile to make it past each other. i almost had a panic attack."

they also found out that 1km below the ocean floor there are organisms that may be 111million years old. and that 85% of snowflakes form around bacteria.

here's an idea...
some bracket fungus species exhibit nondeterministic growth, i.e. they're able to alter their growth habits, size, and form in response to environmental variables. these conk fungi have hard, wood-like fruiting bodies that are tough and durable. i suggest that bio-engineered fungus of this type may be able to provide shelter, furniture, and entire houses. a hybridized, gen-mod spore could be cultured on any bio-waste stream and assume the programmed form. grow a wall, a roof, a chair, a table. when the useful lifespan of that object had come to and end, the mushroom would produce spores, which could be harvested and taken to the next domicile or homesite, where the process could begin again. the old conk would simple decompose.

Fungus... making uranium safe again and eating radiation

2008-05-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

I know this is sort of getting ridiculous but here's yet ANOTHER story about the amazing abilities of fungi to bioremediate. This time it's depleted uranium. A product of the military-industrial complex and its unending wars this heavy metal is found in the soil of a battlefield where armor piercing bullets were fired. But long after the killing has stopped, this heavy metal remains, leaching into groundwater, getting taken up into plants and animals, and making its way into people where it poses a serious threat of toxicity.

Along come mushrooms whose filamentous network of mycelium can colonize the uranium and via oxidation convert it into a stable mineral form, uranyl phosphate. While still hazardous (just as uranium ore is hazardous) this new chemical configuration is not bio-active, making it much more difficult for the uranium to get into humans or the groundwater.

This is great news and really underscores just how important microorganisms are in effecting soil composition and ecosystem health.

This story has some pretty interesting overlap with a report published last year that found fungus can actually convert radiation energy into biomass. It does this through the chemical melanin (found in your skin) that can capture ionizing radiation into chemical energy, much as a green plant uses chlorophyll to accomplish the same thing but with a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

So maybe the fungus that can take uranium out of the bio-cycle are actually using the metal as an energy source, a sort of mini nuclear reactor that it can tap into and at the same time process the waste. Genius!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070522210932.htm

http://www.physorg.com/news129181478.html

Dead Raccoon

2008-05-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

I found a dead raccoon lying face down in Strawberry Creek (the one that flows through the middle of the UC campus) I fished it out and decided I'd alert the authorities. But how to tell them where the raccoon was? No address or street name could help me. The answer? a little GIS to the rescue!

thewallgrows

2008-04-30T16:54:00.001-07:00

Mushrooms to clean up dioxin in Fort Bragg California

2008-04-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

I am a huge proponent of myco-remediation and I often incorporate a bio-remediation stage in site development proposals. That's why I was just tickled pink to read this article in the NYTIMES today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/us/27bragg.html

The legacy of the large timber industry that once owned northern California is large tracts of contaminated land where their mills once stood. In the case of Fort Bragg the municipality was given rights to a 420 acre strip of seashore land that came with a typical toxic-soils caveat... they could have the land only if they dealt with the contamination, specifically five hot-spots that had high levels of dioxin. the options tabled to deal with the soil were either to haul the dirt away, or bury it in a lined landfill on site.

but then they contacted Paul Stamets, mushroom-guru cum-savvy eco-business warrior, and he suggested turkey tail & oyster mushrooms (medicinal tea & stir-frys, respectively). Dioxin (C₄H₄O₂) is an organic molecule with no heavy metals or radioactive isotopes, and as such it's ripe fodder for the tenacious mushroom mycelium that can break apart the chemical bonds and convert the basic atomic building blocks of carbon and hydrogen into rich mushroom proteins & sugars.

The Fort Bragg community voiced their support and were given a few yards of dioxin contaminated soil & facilities to conduct a myco-remediation experiment. It might be some years before we know for sure how well this works, but it's hopeful to see otherwise dangerous contaminants being turned not only into benign substances but straight into medicine and food.

For those who missed it, the recent San Francisco oil spill, resulting from an inebriated bar pilot slamming a tanker into the footing of the Bay Bridge, was cleaned up using mats made of human hair donated by the city's stylists and barbers. The mats were then hauled off and DIGESTED... oil & all, by oyster mushrooms, also provided by Paul Stamets.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/14/MNPQTBLE4.DTL

and finally here's the first board from my final project last year where I proposed deconstructing the 101 Freeway in the Presidio and digesting the asphalt using mushrooms.

saturday afternoon.

2008-04-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

working in studio on a rhino model of a wall.
listening to the Shu Show... www.takilmafm.com most saturdays 4ish-8ish best show on the net.
or your money back
this wall is crashing my computer.

The Portland Bike Ensemble - Live at Riverside Art Museum 04-18-2008

2008-04-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

thank you to everyone who made this reality.

poll analysis

2008-04-21T14:52:00.000-07:00

wow wow wow
what an exciting poll we had. and as it turns out...

40% of you believe that there is more good in the world. weird.
60% of you believe that it's a circle, duh. whatever that means.
and none of you believe that there is more bad in the world. good.
so thanks to everyone for providing me with yet more data i can sell to advertisers.
and remember... NEW POLL SOON!
and here is a full blown simulation of how a neandrathal would have pronounced the letter e in a glorious wave format for all of us to hear and ponder the deep time out of which this voice comes floating, echoing in the heart of our language cortex. computers connecting us to our ancestors by one simple vowel... provided courtesy of Dr. Robert McCarthy, an assistant professor of anthropology in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

site plan oak to 9th tentative

2008-04-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

some old work

2008-04-10T13:51:00.000-07:00

concert event coming up!

2008-04-09T20:07:00.001-07:00

big news
i'll be playing my electric log april 18th at this event as part of the portland bicycle ensemble. it's in riverside california which i hear from my friend david is a pretty weird place! come if you can.
love nathan

this blog is now officially HUGE

2008-04-09T16:38:00.001-07:00

new poll... WHAT!
new post... WHAT!
all with MORE TOOTH

fungus among us

2008-04-01T11:43:00.000-07:00

As the planet continues to experience rapid climate change due to human actions, the potential impact on the microbiotic community is little understood. Despite the overwhelming diversity, biomass, and ecological importance of bacteria, archaebacteria, and fungus we spend very little time worrying about their long-term stability... except when they start killing bigger things.

two cases in particular. the frogs of central & south america, and the oaks of northern california. both are being laid low by a fungus. in the case of the frogs it is a chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, the oaks Phytothphora ramorum, an oomycete.

P. ramorum (oak killer) was first reported in 1995 along the hills of the northern California coast, where it rapidly began infecting large populations of the coastal live oak and black oak, once infected mortality is assured. Oozing black cankerous sores, wilting leaves, beetle infestations, and then death mark the disease. In Europe a similar afflication was identified as being P. ramorum shortly after it was found in the U.S. The fungus also infects many different host tree species, such as rhododendrons, but does not cause mortality, using the host instead as a spore factory that can spread the fungus via water or wind to new oaks. The origin of P. ramorum is not understood.

B. dendrobatidis (frog killer), on the other hand is a well known disease of amphibians but usually only effects a small percentage of any given community. However, during the 1980's and 1990's two thirds of the 110 harlequin frog species vanished, even those in remote mountainous areas, driven extinct by the fungus. The scientists were stumped until long-term climate data was analyzed for the cloudy rainforests where the frogs live. They realized that due to global warming the forests weren't getting as cold during the night, but were getting cooler during the day, constricting the temperature range. Without the extreme temperatures to limit it, B. dendrobatidis flourished, the infection rates in the frogs bounded upward, and species began dying off.

I believe that a similar process is at work in the oak death, a climate threshold was crossed and the California coast became a more suitable habitat for P. ramorum, perhaps latent in host species it proliferated and began attacking the oaks. As global climate changes we would expect to see corresponding shifts in the microbiota as the new conditions favor a different set of species that come into the population forefront while others step back or go extinct.

Temperatures continue to creep higher, and there is no telling what kind of organism may begin multiplying into the warm, moist air or water. The frogs and the oaks are obvious examples, but other inexplicable die-offs may be related. the Colony Collapse Disorder afflicted honeybees were full of fungus, bacteria, and viruses. More recently the sudden decimation of the bat populations in the eastern U.S. was marked by a white fungus that grew on the bat's noses just before death.

Two points make a line, three a plane, and a pattern emerges. While the polar bears stuck on ice flows get the press the real consequences of climate change may be more subtle, yet much deadlier. if you're interested in purchasing a fungal spore-proof respirator visit the merchandise area of my blog-world. best of luck buddies!

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8569

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0112_060112_frog_climate.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_oak_death

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/science/25bats.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder

latest poll analysis

2008-03-31T22:08:00.000-07:00

well, due to a crummy turnout at the polls the results are pretty much worthless, not enough data to produce statistically significant conclusions. so go fly a kite. look at this, it's more russian stuff, can't get enough really, from a festival called "Arch stoyanie" that I first read about in PROJEKT magazine.
but you have to look at this slideshow it's beautiful.

http://www.arch.stoyanie.ru/eng/project/11/pr.html

CLICK ON IMAGE TO GET CLOSER

SPACE ANGELS

2008-03-22T20:44:00.001-07:00

there's a part 3/4 of the way through this odd video where, you see....

"Just as sound bounces off walls of a canyon, so too can light waves create an echo by bouncing off dust clouds in space. The light from these echoes travels a longer path than the light that travels straight toward us, and so can be seen hundreds of years after the supernova itself."

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/snr0509/E509_lg_web.mpg

!!LLOP WEN GNIGAGNE

2008-03-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

THANK YOU MEGANOM!!!!!

i have a lot to blog about

2008-03-20T17:34:00.000-07:00

things:

the russians:

self sustained backpack vegetable garden
enclosed = source of oxygen in polluted atmospheres
outputs = inputs
calories/square inch

drawings soon

Bring Quantum Reality

Time established for transfer

Questions Paths to More

Mars a new place to hunt

Mantis shrimp vision reveals new way that animals can see

Scientists say early Americans arrived earlier

Ancient reptile rises from Alberta oil sands

Children with healthier diets do better in school

Death of massive star creates brightest burst ever seen

Good Marriage Equals Good Blood Pressure

Mars, Earth, Moon Grew Up In Unique Planetary Nursery

"mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year" - EMOTIV INC.

2008-03-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

READING DREAMS

meteorite impact... or something else?

2008-03-14T11:06:00.001-07:00

last year in a dry riverbed in peru an object struck the surface of the earth, gouging out a crater 15m in diameter. People up to 20 kilometers from the crater reported hearing an explosion – presumably the impact. Windows were shattered at the local health center a kilometer from the site. Locals who visited the hole complained of headaches, nausea, and a foul sulphuric smell. a cloud of dust and vapor released by the impact drifted downwind and was blamed for the death of livestock.

the news media speculated wildly until a seemingly unsubstantiated consensus was reached that the back-woods Peruvians were afflicted only with mass hysteria. the story was shuffled off the front pages. but it turns out that the mystery goes deeper.

most meteorites that actually make it to the surface of the earth are metallic objects that are able to deform into more aerodynamic shapes as they plummet through the atmosphere. however, a team of researches who were dispatched to the site found evidence that this crater was not caused by a metallic meteorite but a stony meteorite.

essentially big space rocks, stony meteors always break up in the atmosphere, and if a small piece makes it through it has usually been slowed down by the thick air. the impact has the force of a bowling ball dropped from an airplane. a divet, not a crater results. based on how far dirt was thrown and the shape of the crater, this object was traveling at approximately 15,000mph when it hit. at those speeds any stony meteor would have fragmented and incinerated as it passed through the atmosphere.

Peter Schultz a geologist from Brown University investigated the site. “This just isn’t what we expected,” Schultz said. “It was to the point that many thought this was fake. It was completely inconsistent with our understanding how stony meteorites act... this meteorite kept on going at a speed about 40 to 50 times faster than it should have been going.”

So what was this object? too fast and too big to be a stony meteor, not enough iron to be a metallic meteor, and apparently the cause of illness and animal death. a scuttled spy satellite? an errant missile? the first volley of attack from an alien force unleashing a new strain of microbe?

we don't know

kwiki poll results

2008-03-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

well the waiting is finally over, and the results of the new poll have been analyzed.

it turns out that the majority of the world, a full 60%, is NOT SURE if they are in a band, however, a healthy 40% answer a definitive yes, they are playing soon AND have a CD for sale, and a whopping 40% insist that they are affiliated with a band of merry thieves... so hold on to those wallets you capitalistic pigs! and.... interestingly enough, only 20% of the world are not in a band but play guitar.

this has been really informative, thank you

NEWS ALERT!!! UPDATE!! WE MADE A BRAND NEW POLL FOR YOU TO VOTE ON!

2008-03-10T20:50:00.000-07:00

hello everybody!
To begin, thanks for making the first few weeks of blogging a BIG HIT! just to recap, in the first two weeks we:

-made content bigger
-zeroed all waiting time for polls

YES!

and now we have a new "KWIKI-POLL"(C)(TR)(R)(PCR)

only two days left to vote! click all the good looking boxes you want!

“they suddenly noticed each other, synchronized their motions, and danced together indefinitely,”

2008-03-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

Microbiota, the bacteria, archeae, and yeasts that cohabit with us in a commensal union around a shared table. there are 10 times as many bacterial cells in our bodies than human cells.

We know so little about them that the estimated number of bacteria species in the body ranges from 500 to 100,000. every square inch of our skin, mouth, stomach, and digestive tract are slicked with another scale of life.

while we can survive without their assistance it would not be pleasant; 30% of our useful calories come from carbohydrates bacteria have broken into simple blocks our pedigreed cells can stomach, the hormones they secrete direct our cells where and when to store fat, bactera synthesize vitamin k, folic acid, and B7.

we can be considered obligatory mutualists with this zoo. yet there are hordes of microorganisms that can make us ill or perhaps just change our behavior (Taxoplasma gondii may makes men insecure while giving a warmheart to the women... HERE)

one of the most important functions of our native flora is to keep the pathogenic types from setting up shop and giving us health troubles. we are large vessels that maintain optimal conditions for bacteria, fungus, and archaea, three of the oldest organisms on the planet. we are their habitat and just as we depend on them they depend on us. the wars they wage on our behalf, the mental clarity of health they give us, go unnoticed and we shovel in sugars and they prosper. like automatons programmed to spread & multiply, providing innumerable guts & hands that share beds, have sex, exchange money, stay warm, and continually engulf food. the perfect shell.

SURVERY RESULTS ARE INN!

2008-03-08T16:22:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to everyone who voted in the last survey, your IP address has been entered to win a brand new 1-P0D. sorry for the delay, i know the poll closed over a day ago, but i had some statistics i wanted to run on the data.

based on the data, it looks like the overall attitude of Americans is positive, despite the coming hard times. so that's good news. and let's hope that the yes's win.

it turns out that moths remember being caterpillars

2008-03-06T19:22:00.000-08:00

plastic recycling appliance

2008-03-05T21:37:00.000-08:00

Everything should either be a technical or biological nutrient.

Think about all the plastic items we may be using every day. Some of it we recycle, some of it we donate when we’re done, and some we just throw away where it’s buried in the ground or thrown in the ocean and never goes away. But what if we kept all the plastic we got, and reused it in our own home?

In any household there are large appliances. I think there should be another appliance to buy. A recycling bin, an oven, and a 3-D printer in one. All the plastic items we’re done using can be fed into this machine, where they’re melted down and used as the raw material to print out new objects. Programmed presets would satisfy most needs. Coat hangers, bowls, cups, planters, boothbrushes, bottles, buckets... you could print out pieces of a chair and bolt them together. Enough bricks to make a house. When you were done with an object, feed it back into the appliance and make a brand new thing

The technology is there, currently looking for investors.

plants moving

2008-03-05T21:33:00.001-08:00

plants moving with the sun from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

SEEDS JUST GROW.

2008-03-04T22:16:00.001-08:00

THE BASIL CONTINUES ITS AMAZING JOURNEY OF LIFE from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

ant trap

2008-03-04T11:15:00.000-08:00

Untitled from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

SURVEY UPDATE!

2008-03-03T22:53:00.001-08:00

Hello everybody,
thanks so much for making the survey so far a GREAT success, we have had FIVE votes, which is way more than I expected so THANKS! We still have three days to vote so please vote again.

THE MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY OF TRAFFIC FLOW

2008-03-03T22:35:00.000-08:00

"If they had set up an experiment with robots driving in a perfect circle, flow breakdown would not have occurred.

electricity EVERYWHERE

2008-03-01T19:59:00.000-08:00

this is a corn root growing in a gel medium under the influence of a very weak DC electromagnetic field. normally the root would grow straight down. A is taken 3hr after the field started being applied, and B was taken 24hr after the field stopped being applied. note how the B root has just started growing downwards again. FROM:

Influence of a Weak DC Electric Field on Root Meristem Architecture
Wojciech Wawrecki and Beata Zagórska-Marek
annals of botany, august 2007.

phototropism!

2008-02-29T21:21:00.001-08:00

sprouting basil phototropism from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

WE HAVE A POLL. PLEASE RESPOND BEFORE POLLS CLOSE. ON MARCH 6TH 11:30PM. YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO WAIT.

2008-02-28T23:36:00.000-08:00

i've got a feelin

2008-02-28T22:52:00.000-08:00

dog walking in the light from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

work hard and live a long time

2008-02-28T22:19:00.001-08:00

the 3rd dimension

2007-08-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

i remember when i first moved to the city i was blown away at how flat it was. it just goes on and on, like a crusting lichen. i think, however, that most of that impression comes from the face that the city is predominately a 2D space. we move on the plane and only rarely are able to break the surface tension and venture upwards or downwards and if we do it is at great cost of machinery, ropes, engines, that take us to very specific destinations. the 3rd dimension in cities is ruled by design. now imagine if we could move upwards along surfaces with the same ease as we can move horizontally down the sidewalk. imagine the incredible dimensions that would open up in the urban surface, the security implications alone are staggering not to mention entire new tracts of space for vendors, graffiti artists, homeless people, signature gatherers, advertisers, and gardeners. well... this reality is very close. a team of researchers in italy have just published technical plans for building a "spiderman suit" utilizing a system of branching nanotubes to duplicate the adhesive vanDerWahl forces found in the extraordinary sticky feet of the gecko. such branching nanotubes have already been made, and indeed can be made easily. thus... only a few years until we see a suit covered with these tubes that can literally stick us to any surface, wall or ceiling. next we can affix temporary shelters, hammocks, tents, nanotube nets, to freeway pylons, bridge supports, skyscraper facades, and really start using all this space.

sense of normalcy

2007-08-28T22:07:00.000-07:00

second day into it. saw the eclipse last night, you used to be able to rule a whole empire with an eclipse. the immediate and vast capacity of specialized knowledge to impart priesthood. now nobody even notices. i was reading about light pollution and apparently there are not a single place left in the world where there is historical darkness, nowhere. all those twinklers gone until we turn off all the lights. imagine a global blackout and the sudden burst of stars we would see. we need darkness, security lighting is a farce, we're unhealthy because of the street lights, i plan on investing in a set of thick curtains stat. what a knife blade we walk, trying to get to our dream-self. so many tiny distractions that can shunt us off into something we never expected to get caught in. species in overdrive, no time to lose what's not useful, no time for our genes to adapt. bumble on!

lithops, light, and land-folks

2007-08-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

have spent a few scattered days here, trying to develop some sort of routine to keep my mind and body occupied. i forget how much time school leaves free, especially this fuzzy limbo before classes commence properly. the room is now set up, or at least the important bits. behold the new digs.

getting used to living with strangers is definitely a shift in the old social transmission, but i'm doing my best to avoid annoying them right off the bat. we'll see.

as it turns out there's a xeric plant shop right up the street from my house which sells all sorts of amazing little cacti, succulents, and LITHOPS! here's the new one i picked up (lesliei albinica) along with three aloe vera plants that someday i hope to expand into a full fledged aloe vera farm and produce only the richest, freshest, most select aloe vera juice there is. aloe will cure what ails you!

in other news my landscape architecture departmental orientation was today. i got to meet all of my professors and all 13 of my cohorts in the 3 year MLA program. the professors are all a crack up. ranging from 'chip' sullivan who appeared grumbling in the corner, wearing a faded military jacket and black beret scribbling madly with a fountain pen and who is producing the first ever graphic history of landscape architecture in comic book format... to Dr. Bosselmann, a severely, sharply disheveled older gentlemen with an impressively vague European accent who travels throughout the world discoursing with academic ambivalence about all the "-bilities"... liva, walka, memora, etc.

my fellow students and i were all nervous as could be, but everyone got along nicely and we found those small world connections that make new acquaintances feel like an extension of our old life-web. i think we all recognize that chance has put us together and now we're to spend the next three year working closely together... so may as well make the best of it. politics will undoubtedly come into play sooner or later and who wants the crummy studio desk?

ooo... the fog is rolling in over the east hills. wild redwood canyons up there full of ferns and waterfalls. scrubby mediterranean plain down here; jade hedges, aloe trees, and eucalyptus groves. strange scents and new pollen making my nose run.

golden moments

2007-08-20T23:11:00.000-07:00

arrived in berkeley tonight. a few hours later than planned due to a nearly explosive car situation. the dear 84 tercel wagon, affectionately known as "the gold nugget" was nearing the destination, when hesitation and bucking began to occur at high RPMs. the car was already loaded to the gills with a clampett-esque precarious pile tied exhaustively onto the roof and the newly hatched engine troubles threatened to make the hills coming into berkeley impassable. uncertain if i should pull over or not, i figured that maybe i could eke out the last few miles at ridiculously slow speeds, dirty looks from speed demon californians be damned. but then, the bucking reached bronco levels, i heard a pop, and the car suddenly sounded like the muffler fell off... i calmly pulled into the emergency lane and the car died. red dash warning lights galore. i coasted to a stop in the grassy, glassy freeway shoulder. ugh.

i get out, crouch down on the side of the car as semis and aforementioned speed demons whip past me mere feet away. i look into the dim underbelly of my car, and i see the catalytic converter... a bulbous protrusion in the exhaust pipe that looks like a wimpy anaconda swallowed a wiener dog... and it's glowing red hot!

i back nervously away. uncertain if something is about to explode. grit and exhaust clinging to my throat, a mental tally of tow charges and mechanic fees ringing in my head. then i settle down, take another look, and see where a 15" silicon hose, melted by the extreme heat, has disconnected from the catalytic converter. after a few minutes of squirming under the car, duct tape and wire in hand (praying that an errant driver doesn't swerve into the emergency lane and clip my extended and vulnerable legs) the hose is reconnected. i get in, turn the key, and i'm off! i limp at 45mph 30 minutes down the freeway to my blessed ashby st. exit. those were very long miles.

moving into the new room. pictures and videos soon.

miss portland and sage and albert, but sense big possibilities here.

good buys

2007-08-15T20:23:00.001-07:00

today is thursday and on saturday morning i leave for berkeley california to attend graduate school. i'll be studying landscape architecture. not lawns, not hedges, but ways we interact with or ignore the layers of information embedded in our environment. patches of meadows, the channel water cuts, animal trails in the woods, city streets, weeds in a vacant lot, they are all manifestations of profoundly vast flows of energy and memory buried in and imprinted upon the landscape. we live and die on the surface of the most fragile, microscopically thin shell, universe-distances below our feet and above our heads. we explore these questions: what happens at that interface? what role do we play as moderators of scale and form? how can we know if we're doing the right thing? how can it matter if we do the wrong thing? can we achieve balance if we think we're creating balance? where is reality created? i hope that investigation into and with the landscape will help me understand the next step with some of these questions. it is one tool of thought. finding the layers, finding the forms, glimpsing the weave.

this entry marks the true beginning of my acceptance that soon i am leaving town and seeking out new adventures in the south. i will miss all of my friends terribly. they have sustained and guided me for 6 years in portland and i have changed and grown with their friendship. i will also miss my best friend and partner, sage. we have grown together in a seamless way these past years, and to have those patterns interrupted is like losing a limb. but loss creates ragged edges and frayed ends that are fertile territory for new growth and new grafts. let the packing commence!

test

2007-08-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

belg belc calm clam