better - jaginsburg.com

Simply Marbleous

6/9/2018

You can get lost in a sphere of glass. Its very existence is as unlikely as it is enchanting. How can something made mostly of sand—silicate—be so brilliantly clear? How can it be neither a solid nor a liquid, but an "amorphous solid" somewhere in between? As for those swirls and pirouettes of color—physics at its most beguiling.

No wonder people were jostling for a look at Jackson Ocheltree's booth at Chicago's 57th Street Art Fair last week. Most glass spheres are small—they're marbles. By comparison, Ocheltree's were giants, the largest a few inches in diameter. In fact until he told the crowd we were looking at marbles, we didn't know.

Each sphere is a technical tour de force forged in a single day-long sitting that requires a small crew. The larger the sphere, the more complex and physically-demanding the challenge. Not only is the glass heavy—a borosilicate similar to pyrex that's virtually unbreakable—but it must be kept at 2800° F for hours on end. (The video embedded above is from a BBC television segment on how small marbles are made. Ocheltree's marbles are significantly more challenging to create.)

There aren't a lot of marble-makers in the world, much less giant marble-makers. Ocheltree was well on his way to a Ph.D. in organic chemistry when he began learning about glass a decade ago. Applied chemistry turned out to be way more fun. Five years in, he started making marbles.

"Glass is very circumstantial. What you're seeing is the result of years of practice and a lot of control," he says. For example, scallops of yellow and green are the condensed fumes of gold and silver. "The gas will travel in the flame of the torch and adhere to the surface of the glass," he explains.

Yet science doesn't quite account for the magic of time, space, movement and the metallic breath of color all captured within an impermeable, transparent sphere. In our world of constant change—not all of it welcome—it is extraordinary to find such a beautiful constant. In a marble, there is peace.

RELATED:
• Jackson Ocheltree's Contact Info | email
• Marble (toy) | Wikipedia
• Venice Glass Museum | website
• How to Play Marbles | Howcast | video
• Playing with Marbles | CBS Sunday Morning | video
• The Universe on Orion's Belt | Men In Black | video

Of Four O'Clocks and Moon Flowers...

6/1/2018

After a May that seemed more like March with a brief blaze of July, and a June that began as October, today we have that rarest of rare: a season in season. Birds are in full show-off serenade, the first crop of fledglings out and about. Perfect, pre-nibbled leaves effortlessly transform sunlight into green. Everywhere is lush and every day there's more. Winter has finally given way to the seductions of lilac and lily-of-the-valley. Moving on.

I have been around long enough to know that this isn't forever and that each one of these days is precious. Until the solstice, just a weeks away, each day stretches a little longer and I am greedy for every minute. Up before dawn most days. At the Lake to watch the sunrise whenever I can.

••••••••••

This year my mother wants four o'clocks for her small-but-jam-packed garden, so I went to Anton's, the neighborhood garden center that's actually in a neighborhood. Now in its second century (Anton took over the business 70 years ago), Anton's opened when this area was still "out in the country" and survives as a beloved zoning relic. Street parking only. If any place were to have an old-timey flower like a four o'clock, it would be Anton's. And they did, although only a few. I took two.

As the name suggests, four o'clocks bloom in late afternoon providing pollinators—who have spent the long day visiting and revisiting all the other of flowers in the garden dozens of times hoping for one last tiny sip of overlooked nectar—with a bountiful tea time snack. Hummingbirds are said to be particularly fond of them. Each plant can have flowers of different colors. Each flower can be more than one color. They smell good, too.

Mirabilis jalapa has become a global favorite. First the flowers spread from Peru throughout the Americas, then starting in the 1500s were imported into Europe and Asia. Beyond their sheer loveliness, four o'clocks are popular in folk medicine and have also shown potential for bioremediation, removoing pollutants from soil.

That last talent would have been unexpected side benefit of Project Carol Four O'Clock, a small-scale, guerilla gardening campaign to beautify the scruffy street corners of Chicago. Several years ago my friend, the eponymous Carol, would go out with a flat of plants stashed in the back her vintage VW Beetle and drive around looking for forlorn patches of weedy green in need of a little love. Since four o'clocks can be prodigious self-seeders, perhaps her long-ago acts of gardening goodness live on, a legacy of color and scent bursting into unexpected bloom at the end of a long, hot summer's day, the audacity of irrepressible color bounded by sidewalk and street.

••••••••••

Moonflowers (Ipomoea alba) are also late-day bloomers, but only come into full gardenia-scented lusciousness once the sun gives way to the moon. Each enormous, creamy white flower lasts but a single evening. As tropical natives, they wait for the hot, humid nights of July and August to unfurl their magnificent blooms to the arias of amorous katydids and cicadas high up in the trees.

For the last couple of years I have planted moonflowers from seed. These are big garbanzo bean-size seeds that spend weeks developing roots before sprouting enormous cotyledons. For quite a while that's all there is to see. Then one day some heart-shaped leaves appear and it's off to the vine-growing races. Up the lamp post! Across the railing! Onto the trellis!

All that drama is still months away. We are just at the beginning. Isn't that wonderful?

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• "The Gentleness of Summer" | Asbury Street Sessions | Dave & Al (audio)

Better Threads: Of Biomimicry, Bio-Collaboration & Fashion

5/25/2018

"Textiles is the second dirtiest industry on the planet after oil," says Dan Widmaier, CEO of Bolt Threads, a California-based* company that bio-engineers environmentally-friendly synthetic fibers. Actually, if water use and complex supply chains were factored in, it might be number one. Either way, Bolt's designer microbes could completely change the game.

Since no animals are involved in production, the company has been embraced by vegans, including fashion designer Stella McCartney. Its "spider silk"— Microsilk™—is made using real spider DNA inserted into fungal yeast cells. The yeast, grown at scale in fermenters, extrudes silk proteins which are then collected, purified and spun.

And individual spider can create six or seven different kinds of silk (soft, stretchy, stiff, etc). All told there are a staggering 240,000+ varieties of natural silk, so the potential to create new fibers literally is endless.

Bolt's second product, which launched last month, is called Mylo™—a hat tip the mushroom mycelia from which the faux leather is made. More fungal fun!

The vegan market—no matter how passionate—isn't nearly large enough to generate the kind of investor excitement that raises hundreds of millions of dollars. Bolt's pitch transcends dietary preference: the promise of better products that can deliver healthy profits for many years to come.

It doesn't hurt that microbes are a cheap date, which helps boost margins. Yeast eat sugar, while mycelia dine on corn stalks. Likewise, microbes don't take up a lot of room. Compared to cattle ranches and CAFOs, a microbe factory has a correspondingly itty bitty footprint. That makes it possible set one up almost anywhere, which in turn simplifies supply chains and reduces costs. Also there are no veterinary bills or smelly livestock waste to manage. Finally, products made from biomaterials biodegrade in landfills.

••••••••••••

Fashion is where the science of microbe-mediated materials meets art. Bolt's fibers have been featured in two high-profile fashion exhibits over the last year: Items: Is Fashion Design? at MoMA in New York, and Fashioned from Nature, which just opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. For a company that was started less than a decade ago pitching a product no one knew could be made that is extraordinary.

Oh to be sheathed in a gown of gossamer spider silk paired with a mycelial purse! It's faerie tale and earthy and yes, yes, yes, it's me! Now I just have to wait for the fashion to filter down to UNIQLO to match my price point.

RELATED
• Is fashion modern? | HOW TO SEE the Items exhibition with MoMA curator Paola Antonelli | video
• Fashion as Design | Coursera course based on MoMA exhibit
• Bolt Threads Joins Modern Meadow in the quest to bring lab-grown leather to market | TechCrunch
• Ecovative Design: The Mycelium Biofabrication Platform | website
• You Think This Has Nothing to Do With You (The Devil Wears Prada) | video

* Bolt is located in Emeryville, a small town near Berkeley and Oakland that is also home to Pixar Animation Studios, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Jamba Juice and Clif Bar. Emeryville, here I come...

Circles of Goodness

5/24/2018

"...It is a better business model... We might not have survived that recession (2001-2003), but for the advantages of sustainability," noted Interface founder and CEO Ray C. Anderson—inventor of the carpet tile—in his 2009 TED talk.

Inspired by Paul Hawken's book The Ecology of Commerce, Anderson had spent the previous 15 years transforming his company from an oil-dependent business into one that was well on its way to being carbon-neutral. The challenge spurred innovation. Rather than adding costs, it added savings in avoided costs that tallied $400,000 million by 2009. That extra capital not only paid for the transformation, but also provided a cushion during an economic downturn. Sales in the early 2000s fell 17%, but the industry on average lost well over 30%. Indeed, the company gained market share and emerged from the recession poised for dramatic growth.

Economists are now predicting the next recession on the horizon, Anderson's message is more timely than ever: Energy savings drop to the bottom line, with significant competitive advantage. "It dispels a myth," he said, "this false choice between the environment and the economy."

••••••••

Last year strolling the showrooms at NeoCon, a massive interior design trade show held every June at Chicago's Merchandise Mart, it was hard to find a company that didn't have a green story to tell. This was a striking change from a few years earlier and it all tracked back to Anderson's epiphany. Given the immensity of the contract furnishings market—carpets, chairs, desks, lighting, wall coverings—the collective clout of manufacturers to move the dial toward sustainability is substantial.

Of course now that everybody's on the same green page, Interface is pushing the limits again. Carbon neutral is no longer enough—not when atmospheric carbon levels are higher than they have been for millions of years. If the planet is to remain habitable for humans, then carbon must be syphoned out of the air and stored elsewhere. If you are Interface, then a logical option would be to store it in the floor.

A guiding principle of the company's Climate Take Back™ campaign is to "stop seeing carbon as the enemy, and start using it as a resource." In other words, to begin to behave like a plant and use carbon as a valuable input. Expanding on the metaphor, in partnership with Janine Benyus' Biomimicry Institute, Interface is also in the midst of reimagining the manufacturing paradigm, modeling the factory of the future on a a forest.

Innovation comes in many forms. At Interface it includes everything from sourcing Nylon 6 yarn from Aquafil, a pioneer in recycled materials, to redesigning the plumbing in its factories. Making carpet requires materials heated to high temperatures that are pumped throughout the factory in an elaborate system of pipes. Switching out to fatter pipes reduces friction so that smaller motors can be used, saving energy. Reconfiguring factory layouts so that pipes can connect at softer angles rather than 90° elbow joints further reduces friction. Savings drop to the bottom line with every utility bill, reducing production costs. These savings help make it possible for Interface, in its quest to reduce its carbon footprint, to buy carbon offsets and still produce a competitively-priced product.

It is rather remarkable to think a book that Ray C. Anderson read nearly a quarter century ago could make such a difference. The power of good ideas made real could save us yet.

RELATED:
• Manufacturing Goes Carbon Negative | Strategy + Business
• Interface's Key Sustainability Manufacturing Innovations in Europe | video
• A Creative Brief: How Designers & Branding Experts Can Help Save Us All (Really, Truly) | J. A. Ginsburg

Of Harpsichords & Hybrids

5/22/2018

For years I have been curious about Chicago's Dock 6 Collective and for years I have regularly missed the annual Open House. This year I was determined, so on yet another in a series of cold, overcast March-in-May days, I slowly navigated south on Cicero Avenue, dodging manhole covers for miles of partially resurfaced road. It is always a little bit of a tangle to find places like Dock 6, an old, two-story factory building shoehorned into a mostly residential neighborhood laced with one-way streets. The gentrification tsunami that has turned the once-gritty West Loop into a foodies' paradise is nowhere to be seen (big hat tip, though, to Duck Duck Goat where I was lucky enough to be taken out to dinner last week. My taste-buds savor the memories). At the Dock 6 party, there was a food truck and a portable brick pizza oven out back. Cheap rent heaven.

That's good news for the mostly furniture-makers and artists who have carved out a warren of studio spaces throughout the building. The joy of wandering a place like Dock 6 is the potential to come across someone truly extraordinary. I found two, both musical.

Mark Shuldiner lives and breathes harpsichords. The 16th century is alive and well and making beautiful music on city's Northwest side. Who knew? Not only is Shuldiner a well-respected musician (one of a handful of professional harpsichordists in the US), but he also builds and restores instruments. It is a rarefied field, but the laws of supply and demand are on his side. With two-years worth of work on the docket, that's job security, no coding skills required.

His wife, trained as a medical illustrator, paints the interiors of his harpsichords so that when the top is opened for performance, there is something lovely to see. This is an old tradition. Would that when I opened my computer, the keyboard was a work of art.

Around the corner from Shuldiner, I found Joe Rauen, a one-man band of his own invention who also paints instruments. Rauen's studio is in Munster, Indiana, so he was special guest for the Open House. First he played something that looked like a cartoon cello, then strummed a pink ukulele-banjo with atomic accents. From tennis rackets to forks, Rauen sees musical potential everywhere. Add a looping machine and it's hours of fun.

As marvelously wacky as Rauen's instruments are, they really do make serious music. Will an atomic ukulele-banjo become the next harpsichord? Maybe not. But the harpsichord, like every instrument, was invented by someone.

Encore!

RELATED:
• Rook | Early Music Ensemble | website
• Harpsichord | Wikipedia
• Modern Harpsichord | WFMT | podcast

"Don't Boo. Vote" — Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic Convention

5/20/2018

Democracy can be gamed, but only to a point. Gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics, Russian hackers, special interests, dark money and, of course, the unholy high-tech union of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook may have combined to swing the 2016 Presidential election, but if everybody registered to vote had actually voted, the outcome could have been very different.

"Who you vote for is secret, but whether you vote or not is public information," notes Nathanial Stinnett, a veteran campaign strategist and founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project (EVP). "There actually is a silent majority of environmentalists out there." According to a recent EVP study, nearly 16 million environmentalists skipped voting during the 2014 mid-terms. Quite literally, the 2018 elections are ours to lose.

Once you get past the shock and indignation, the non-voters represent a giant opportunity, according to Stinnett. For the last three years EVP has methodically tested various ways to get registered non-voters to the polls. The early results are promising in terms of swinging tight elections, but Swinnett is playing a long game. The act of voting itself—it doesn't matter for whom—tells campaigns that you are worth their effort, he explains. There is simply no point to spend money on habitual non-voters.

Voting starts a virtuous feedback loop. Noting that you voted (public records), campaigns send out information for the next election cycle. These constant reminders to vote actually work, flipping registered-but-occasional voters into reliably regular voters.

"Our political life is besieged by anti-democratic distortions—big money, gerrymandering, nihilistically partisan right-wing media—that threaten to swallow the system whole. But they haven’t yet, quite. On climate change, as with so many other issues that bedevil us, votes are still the most powerful weapon we’ve got," writes Washington Monthly journalist Gilad Edelman.

So let's vote.

RELATED:
• 2017 Impact Report | Environmental Voter Project
• 'Wag the Dog' Director Barry Levinson Sees Those Trump-Era Comparisons (Q&A) | Hollywood Reporter

The Road To Where Exactly?

5/16/2018

To quote David Byrne, "How did we get here?" Bumper to bumper traffic. Crumbling roads and bridges. Tens of millions of people going nowhere in a hurry. Mile after mile of sooty concrete-and-asphalt ugly.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Sixty-plus years ago when President Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act authorizing construction of 41,000 miles of expressway and upgrades for hundreds of thousands of miles of secondary roads, it was about building a road to a much better, more prosperous, more connected, more modern future. These were the glorious ribbons of highway connecting sea to shining sea.

For the General-turned-President, the Interstate system was also a matter of national security. WWII had ended a little over a decade earlier so the idea that the US could find itself under attack wasn't completely far-fetched. If needed, the Interstate system could be used to speed up deployment of troops and supplies across the country.

Despite its "Andy of Mayberry" meets "The Twilight Zone" aesthetic, the industry video at the top—"We'll Take the High Road"—commissioned by the American Road Builders Association, provides riveting insights into the thinking and the engineering that went into an enormously complex project. This was a technological tour de force. In order to map out the topography of vast areas quickly, for example, aerial photographs were taken with giant stereo cameras, then measurements from the 3D pictures were fed into computers—via punchcard—for analysis.

The film provides all sorts of other revealing insights as well. At a time when air-conditioning was a rare luxury, men wore suits and tie-clipped ties every day. Women were portrayed either as decorative or Aunt Bea-eccentric. As for people of color, there was only one in the film and he shined shoes.

Two of the supporting characters were farmers. In the mid-1950s, more than 25 million Americans lived on farms. Today the tally is closer to four million, maybe.

The obliviousness to cultural bias was matched only by the obliviousness to potential environmental impacts. To be fair, it wasn't until 1958 that Charles David Keeling started tracking atmospheric CO2 levels for what would become known as the Keeling Curve. There was no way to know all those those gas-guzzling, two-toned visions of the future driving off into the sunset were instead driving us all off a climate cliff.

Over the last sixty years atmospheric carbon levels have increased—and at an accelerating rate—by nearly a third, from 315 ppm to 412 ppm. In terms of climate change, 350 ppm is considered the top limit of safe. Above 400 ppm and all bets are off. Ironically extreme weather linked to climate change accelerates the deterioration of roads and bridges. Meanwhile the US population of cars and trucks now numbers in the hundreds of millions and expressways are anything but.

Of course, if we're all stuck in traffic on a crumbly roads, then we might as well burst into song.

All the road's a stage.

RELATED:
• La La Land's Choreographer Explains the Freeway Dance Scene | Vanity Fair
• 2017 Infrastructure Report Card | American Society of Civil Engineers
• The Ray on the Side of the Road | better

Old Road, Slow News

5/10/2018

There are journalists and then there is Paul Salopek. While he has done many things are are courageous, daring and also dangerous (see charged as spy in Sudan), it is his clear-eyed interest and elegant writing that set him apart. He is a journalist at a cellular level. It's just who he is.

I was lucky enough to live in Chicago when Salopek was on staff at the Tribune (back when it was a newspaper and not the shell that it is today). Even then the rules didn't apply to him. His editors seemed to understand that when somebody with that kind of crazy talent comes along, your job is to get out of the way and be incredibly grateful when he delivers another in a series of book-length, prize-fodder masterpieces—he has two Pulitzers among his stash. Notably, Salopek studied biology and not journalism. He is keen observer both of nature and by nature. He a writer by practice.

I remember sitting transfixed at the kitchen table one morning reading his series on the oil business (later published as a book, "Oil Safari: In Search of the Source of America's Fuel"). His reporting took him from Nigeria, Venezuela and Gulf of Mexico oil rigs to a suburban gas station, where he took a job for a while. A dozen years later, it is still riveting read, although in part to what's happened off the page in the interim.

Salopek continues to chart his own course, practicing journalism beyond the fray of fake news, click-bait and the mind-diminishing chatter of social media. A few years ago he set out on an epic journey to follow in the footsteps—literally— of the first human migrants out of Africa thousands of years ago. It is a 21,000 mile trek that will eventually take him to the tip of South America.

Recently he was in Pakistan walking 190 miles on the side the Grand Trunk Road—for millennia the preferred route to get from India-hither to Afghanistan-yon.

"...It howls with the din of mixed traffic: colorfully painted trucks, motorized rickshaws, donkey carts, motorcycles, cars, bicycles, horsemen, tractors, and thousands of dazed pedestrians. Each of these humans, animals, and conveyances jockey, in no discernable pattern, for every inch of space on the road’s narrow belt of asphalt. Life on the Grand Trunk, which ribbons away for thousands of miles east into India, hasn’t changed appreciably in the century since Kipling described it in Kim:

'All castes and kinds of men move here. Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters—all the world going and coming. It is to me as a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood.

This is why mere car commuters—as opposed to genuine travelers—avoid it today..."

The media buzz around Salopek's "slow news" journey faded away some time ago. The headline-friendly story of a bold and romantic quest has been replaced by gritty realities of the day-to-day. Yet each and every one his dispatches from the field is a detail-filled gem.

RELATED:
• Out Of Eden Project | website
• Paul Salopek | Wikipedia bio
• Paul Salopek discussing the upcoming Out o Eden project at the University of Chicago in 2012

The Truth about Fakery

5/8/2018

"...Both a liar and an honest person are interested in the truth – they’re playing on opposite sides in the same game. A bullshitter, however, has no such constraint." — Tom Chatfield

Perhaps the most disconcerting truth to come out in the Age of Fake News is that roughly a third of Americans are content troglodytes—self-righteous, apparently permanent residents of Plato's cave. They thrive on lies—big, little, shadowy, distorted—and will defend them with passion. It is no small task. According to the Washington Post, the President racked up an impressive 3001 lies-and-counting in his first 15 months in office. That doesn't include all the campaign-trail lies, the Obama "birther" fiasco or the decades of lying that led to five bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits.

In a brilliant essay published last fall in New Philosopher magazine Tom Chatfield writes, "Truth may be forceful against lies, but it bothers bullshit about as much as paper darts do a tank." In short, the truth doesn't always set you free, or at least truth alone may not be enough. Maybe it's a matter of a tipping point—a Howard Beale-style mass epiphany loud enough to shake the shadows off the cave walls and unshackle even the most willingly shackled.

Related:
• On Bullshit | Harry G. Frankfurt | book
• How can Trump lie so much and be 'authentic' at the same time? | CNN
• An Interview with Zan Boag, editor, New Philosopher | KIN conference | video

Mushrooms, Molecules, Microbiomes, Bees and Everything

5/6/2018

Mycologist Paul Stamets first got onto my radar—and that of millions of others—ten years ago with a TED talk on "6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World." A decade later the need for mycelial intervention is off the charts urgent. The question isn't whether mushrooms can save the world, but rather whether they can save the world for us. As giants, mushrooms ruled the land more than 400 million years ago, then again after the dinosaurs disappeared in a planet-enveloping cloud of dust stirred up by a space rock.

Stamets' gift is an ability to see—and to explain—the micro in the macro, simplicity in complexity and the intelligence that courses through and connects everything in the universe. He also has the curiosity and patience to gather clues long before it is clear what they are clues to.

For example, his pioneering work to combat Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) began with a casual observation of bees in his garden that spent a summer making literal beelines for a raised bed of mushrooms. The insects would at great effort meticulously move dirt in order to sip mycelial dew. The dew, it turns out, was full of chemical compounds essential for bee health. In fact access to mycelia may be why some bees build their hives in tree hollows (mycelia feeds on dead wood) or nest in the ground (the majority of the world's 200,000 bee species live in the dirt).

Even if Stamets' mycelial mixtures help commercial honeybees—the second video is about a massive field study—80% of pollination for crops and wild plants is done by wild bees. No one knows how many wild bees have been lost to CCD, but any remedy will require an environmental-level fix. This includes the banning of neonicotinoid pesticides that have been implicated in the crisis. While EU has done just that, the US EPA is still mulling.

The TED talk was headlines while Stamets' lecture at the Chicago Botanic Garden three years ago was a master class. I was lucky enough to be in SRO overflow room watching a live feed. CBG cut the video into six sections (which you can find embedded with annotations here). I posted the fourth segment above, which begins a fascinating discourse on mycelial compounds for human health.

The phylogenetic kingdoms of Animalia (animals) and Fungi share a common ancestor. We are actually more closely related to mushrooms than plants are. In a sense, then, it shouldn't be that surprising that mushrooms have developed anti-viral, anti-bacterial, anti-cancer compounds and pro-microbiome compounds that have value for us. Scratch that. It is completely remarkable and damn lucky, too, considering the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs and a spate of new pathogens.

Beyond all the practical applications, mushrooms are simply beautiful. For the last several years Stamets has been working with filmmaker Louie Schwarzberg on a documentary. The trailer—the top video—is a wonder. Enjoy!

Related:

Fungi.com | website

The Great Lakes Are...My Heart

5/5/2018

"...When children memorize a song or a poem, they say they have memorized it by heart. I am trying to learn this land, my home, by heart, but I don't know if my heart is big enough. And I don't know if I am writing a love song or a lament. Both probably..." — Jerry Dennis, author, "The Living Great Lakes"

I think I fell in love with Lake Michigan before I was born. My family used to spend summers at my grandparents' cottage on the western shore, so my first trimester—when I probably looked liked a fish or maybe a tadpole—was spent at the beach, listening with proto-ears to the waves and the laughter.

Even in winter, when the water can be frozen to the horizon and beyond, I try to see the Lake every day. In the summer, I get up when it's still dark, put some coffee in a thermos and head out to a beach or sometimes a bench on the southeastern-most point of a lakefront park at Northwestern to sit and watch the sun rise. It never ever gets old. Its not just the sun, but the birds—geese, gulls, cormorants, swallows—on their first flights of the day. Also carp that always seem to come up for...what exactly?...then disappear in in a splash at the far edges of peripheral vision. The line between Big City and Big Nature is a measured in sand.

The Lakes, have been on an even-ish keel for the last few decades, recovering and getting cleaner in general, but also under chronic threat from invasive species and, of course, plastic. Now they are facing a siege. In Michigan, it's the Nestle company that wants to deepen its watershed straw so it can syphon off aquifer water to package and ship in plastic bottles, privatizing a public resource in the process. I first wrote about this for BusinessWeek a fifteen years ago and everything people were worried about came true—and worse. In Wisconsin‚ which lost its political soul along with a lot frac sand to the Koch Brothers—manufacturing multinational Foxconn has secured a permit to to use 7 million gallons of water a day and also to pollute the air pretty much as they please. What may be good for one politically-connected, swamp-dwelling corporation will be a disaster for everybody else, including Wisconsin taxpayers. Meanwhile dodgy oil pipelines threaten the water security of millions.

The Great Lakes will survive us. Nature always bats last, even if in the meantime there are wildlife die-offs, perhaps some extinctions and also threats to human health. If we want to Make the Lakes Great Again and Keep the Lakes Great for us, we're going to have to fight for them.

Related:

• Alliance for the Great Lakes
• Great Lakes Coastal Resilience Planning Guide
• Environmental Law and Policy Center
• Trump Budget vs. the Great Lakes / NRDC post
• Tapping the Great Lakes / Detroit Public Television documentary
• Shedd Scientists, Volunteers Track Migrations of Great Lakes Fish | WTTW

Just Breathe

5/4/2018

Most of Earth is covered in water. This is where life began, most life still resides and to which a few species have returned. A couple of years ago British artist John Collver created a brilliant animation charting 50 million years of whale evolution for a college course at UWE-Bristol. Watch as feet turn into paddles, then fins, the tail becomes a fluke and the nose becomes a blow-hole on the top of the head. It seems implausible and yet there's plenty of evidence if know how to read fossils.

Now scientists reading DNA have discovered in a period of only a thousand years the "sea nomads" of Indonesia--the Bajau, who live their lives almost entirely on the water—have developed hardwired adaptations to the life aquatic. Several genes have been identified that give the Bajau spleens that 50% larger than average. This allows them to use oxygen more efficiently so they can dive for several minutes on a single breath.

Although not part of the study, they also have developed a very effective style of kicking to swim to down to the seafloor, which you can see in the video. As sea levels rise due to climate change--atmospheric carbon levels are now at a record 410 ppm—the Bajau may find themselves at an advantage. Waterworld anyone?

Into the Deep

5/3/2018

Julie Gautier is a dancer. A marvelous dancer. A dancer who dances in water that lifts her hair, slows her movements and allows her to leap and fly and spin. Her newest, mesmerizing work, AMA, was filmed on a stage in the deepest diving pool in the world, called Y-40, in Italy (nearly 140 feet to the very bottom). It is timeless, yet also very much of its time. The performance required the pool, which opened in 2014, high-quality underwater cameras and also the internet. Since March, more than a half million people all over the world have seen the video on Vimeo and YouTube. Art can happen anywhere—even in a diving pool—and connect everywhere.

The original "bathing beauty," of course, was 1940s aquatic film siren Esther Williams. The interview includes a visit to the film set pool where all the magic happened, including a routine with cartoon characters (Tom & Jerry) and a dive off of an 80' platform that emerged from the water disguised as a fountain.

Williams' movies helped spark interest in synchronized swimming, a sport that for most fades from memory between Olympics. It is hard to get into a sport where all you see are legs quickly thrust into the air and a lot of splashing.The artistry is underwater so that's where the cameras should be, too.

Related:
• Les Films Engloutus | website
• Why can't men be Olympic synchronised swimmers? | BBC
• Hat tip re AMA to the marvelous design blog Colossal

Chasing Carbon, Chasing Coral, chasing Kelp...

5/2/2018

It is all about balance. It is always about balance. Carbon spread out in the right amounts between air, ground and water not only is ok, it's great—absolutely essential to life. Yet it took just a couple centuries to knock everything out of whack with the prodigious burning of long buried "fossil" carbon—oil and coal.

Too much carbon in the atmosphere and temperatures rise and the climate gets weird. Too much carbon in the water causes acidification, which dissolves the shells of anything that depends on a shell. Warmer air also raises water temperature, which in turn contributes to the melting of polar ice caps and to sea-level rise (seawater expands as it heats up). If that weren't enough, warmer water also means less dissolved oxygen for fish and other critters of the deep to breathe.

Meanwhile back on land deforestation and fertilizer-intense agricultural practices have dramatically reduced the amount of carbon stored in soil. Where did it go? Into the air, of course, with some of it eventually being taken up by the sea. Carbon-poor soil is also less fertile, so bad gets worse. In short, everything carbon-wise that could go wrong actually is going wrong.

With all that in mind, I watched a special screening of "Chasing Coral," a film about a band of intrepid scientists who managed to document coral bleaching in real time. It is heartbreaking. First you see life in all its extravagant technicolor glory and then boom, it turns into a monochromatic wasteland for as far as the eye can see. When the water gets a little too warm and/or a little too acidic, corals—complex animals made up of identical polyps that live in balance with symbiont photosynthensizing plankton—depart this world in a neon flash of fluorescence. This is what a tipping point looks like.

••••••••••••••

Farming kelp won't be nearly enough to save the coral, but it is an interesting move in the right direction. Kelp, also known as seaweed—and to the trendy as "seagreens"—is kind of the ocean's answer to trees. In a single growing season, a plant can grow from a couple of centimeters to 18 feet, absorbing vast amounts of carbon in the process.

Kelp farming, which has long been a staple in Asia, is coming to the US. The 60 Minutes segment focuses on Bren Smith, a fisherman-turned-farmer & kelp evangelist with a 20-acre spread off the coast of Connecticut. He actually grows three crops: kelp on top of scallops on top of oysters. It's the marine counterpart to the "three sisters"—beans, corn and squash—a polyculture of foodie goodness.

Related:
• Damaged coral reefs are going quiet and young fish can't find their way home | ABC
• Hat Tip to DIRTT, Humanscale and Interface for hosting the "Chasing Coral" screening
• Greenwave | website
• Meet the new US entrepreneurs farming seaweed for food and fuel | The Guardian
• Superfood Seagreens: A Guide to Cooking with Power-packed Seaweed | book
• Seaweed Soup - a MathStart story about matching sets by my friend Stuart J. Murphy!
• Lessons of the Lamp Post Garden: How a Healthy Soil Microbiome Can Slow Climate Change, Fix Agriculture & Make Just About Everything Better | J. A. Ginsburg

Take Me to the River

5/1/2018

The renaissance of the Chicago River over the last few years has been nothing short of astonishing. What was once a polluted canal where fish tended to float has become a place of connection in every sense of the word. I never miss a chance to sit and watch the world go by from a perch on the Riverwalk--one tour boat, one kayak, one industrial barge at a time.

Some stretches of the river have become a little too popular, especially on summer weekends—a kind of Rush-Street-on-the-water vibe—but mostly it's a like a shared, joyous secret. Every single time I walk down to the Riverwalk off Wacker Drive*, I am amazed at how quickly everything changes. The hustle and bustle above fade away and my focus shifts to the fish nursery hidden beneath floating prairie gardens. I can't see it, but I know it's there. Fish swimming. Not floating. Better.

* Wacker Drive not only goes east and west AND north and south, but is two and sometimes three levels deep. What it lacks in length (2.2. miles) it more than makes up for in sheer originality—thank you Daniel Burnham. There's even a song: Wack Wack Wacker Drive!

Related:
• Ross Barney Architects
• River Edge Ideas Lab | Chicago Architecture Biennial

Everything New is Old Again

4/29/2018

With just forty-four years on the atomic clock to go until 2062—the apex of the Jetsonian Era—it is remarkable how quickly real world fact has caught up to cartoon fiction. Who can remember before there were flat screen TVs, smart phones and talking alarm clocks? Now Amazon is reportedly developing a house robot, which means Rosie's great great great great grandbot could be rolling into homes—perhaps your home—within a few years.

Yet for all the tech gee whiz, the Jetsonsonian future is also infused with circa 1962 social bias: everybody is white and for women the options begin with "boy-crazy" and end with home-maker. In fact, Jane Jetson went directly from boy-crazy to home-maker. According to character bios posted on Wikipedia, she is 33 while daughter Judy is 16. That means Jane was a teen-age mom and George, seven years her senior, was playing with fire.

Cultural diversity and equal rights were simply not on the radar when the show premiered, at least not in prime time. However, within a matter of months both The March on Washington so central to the Civil Rights movement, and the release of Betty Friedan's bombshell book "The Feminist Mistique," would begin to change everything.

Despite the Jetsons' eerily prescient track record on the gadget front, the future is always ours to make (just ask Jaron Lanier). We can do better.

Let's do better.

* And let's not waste time. George is 40 in 2062, which means he was born in 2022, which means we are just four years away from baby Jetson. Ok, fictitious baby Jetson. Still, how weird is that? The future is scary close.

"Design is Hope Made Visible"

4/28/2018

I first saw / heard / experienced designer Brian Collins about a year ago when he took the stage at a business conference at Northwestern University. His peacock blue blazer was a tip-off. In a room full of the reasoned and reasonable outfitted in muted business-casual attire, Collins stood out as a full-palette challenge. He was the only one to coordinate with the conference logo and indeed the stage lighting. Before he had said a word his point was made: The answer is logic and...

Even the smartest of the smart cannot spreadsheet their way to success or chart a straight path to the future. Data points without context and understanding only get you so far. To navigate to the next takes curiosity, daring, an appreciation of the past, boatloads of imagination and all of our senses—the ones we know about and others operating on the periphery of awareness.

That's what good designers bring to the table whether, as with Collins, they work with commercial brands and exhibit design (the Muppets fergoshsakes!), or in architecture, product development or urban planning. Taken together the videos provide a sort of mini-masterclass on the disciplined alchemy of the design process and also on how design can make a tangible difference—not just in terms of corporate bottom lines but in our experience of the world at large.

"You can look at your life as being the result of the past or as a cause of the future," notes Collins sitting in the time capsule of the book-and-stuff-filled library at the heart of his Greenwich Village studio. The past isn't prologue. It's raw material.

Related:
• COLLINS studio
• Design Matters interview with Debbie Millman
• Hat Tip to Rob Wolcott and 3 Billion Seconds.

The Delight and Dismay of "WTF?"

4/28/2018

Tim O'Reilly of the eponymous O'Reilly Media company is known for his work as a pioneering tech publisher (starting with the "animal" series of coding books and evolving into Safari, a digital learning platform) and also as the driving force behind a remarkable series of tech conferences.

His background, however, isn't in computer science, but in Greek and Latin classic literature, which is at once surprising and makes perfect sense. A deep knowledge of history and an understanding of philosophy have sharpened his ability to consistently spot significant trends (open source, Web 2.0, augmented intelligence) and also the insight to consider their implications .

"Technology is our superpower...Inequality is our kryptonite," he notes. O'Reilly's latest book "What's the Future and Why It is Up to Us" is basically a call to action."If there is a (hostile AI), then we already training it. We are already teaching it," he observes.

We have to do better. We can do better, he insists. In the age of fake news and twitter-bots, I sure hope so. (Related: WTF? Economy website)

Play and the Path Forward

4/28/2018

The first time I walked into the Media Lab building at MIT I was filled with as sense of awe, but also an unexpected feeling of somehow coming home. I sat for quite a long while in an interior courtyard on the second floor gazing up at the glass windows of labs. Many of the them were two stories, stacked together like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle: The first floor of one lab connecting via spiral staircase to the second floor of another. The architecture encouraged peripheral vision—my favorite! Then some students rolled out a samovar for afternoon tea with a side of junk food and I seriously considered missing my flight home to begin a new life as a Media Lab stowaway.

Media Lab was founded in the 1980s as a place for the university's misfits to pursue the kinds of ideas and projects that simply couldn't be shoe-horned into departmental missions. With some key funding by Steve Jobs when he was between jobs, the Lab gained a foothold and went on to become a legend. Perhaps even more remarkable is that it has managed to maintain a perch on the cutting edge. Famously "anti-disciplinary," it is also in a sense anti-institutional. Just when you think you know what Media Lab does, it goes and does something else.

Media Lab "looks for spaces between and beyond disciplines," explains Joi Ito, the director for the last half dozen years. "Can we fund those crazy ideas that in retrospect seem obvious?"

The short answer is Yes! For details, watch the video. (Related: Joi Ito's book, co-authored with Jeff Howe, "Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future")

New Food, Next food

4/25/2018

Mike Lee is a food futurist who spends his days thinking about the grocery store of tomorrow. It is not just about shopping (in-store, online, delivered by driver, drone or bot), but also what's on the shelves. To make it more real, he created a trade show-ready, pop-up store—with companion website—called The Future Market to demo products, displays and test customer experience. Customers begin by answering a series of questions (e.g, "Are you looking for products that reduce global warming or reduce weight?") to prep an algorithm to pre-select choices. "The way to navigate a wealth of information is through customization," says Lee. Or, if you're like me and you have come to loathe the many incremental options in the orange juice aisle, you simply turn on blinders and never ever consider anything but what you once discovered as good. Too much choice = no choice.

Of course, Trader Joe's has figured a work-around. They have seen me coming and know I will try almost anything with the word "medley" on the package. I like my food musical and the choice in literally contained in whatever it is. Yes, please!

Lee's genius is in prototyping products just this side of plausible that deftly braid the values of "people, profit and planet." For example, "Aqua Cull: Killer Fish Sticks" made from invasive species, "Trim Snack" made from food scraps and "Alga Marine" seaweed pasta. My favorite may be "Three Sisters Polenta," which supports and raises awareness about polyculture agriculture. It's made from the "three sisters": corn, squash and beans. (Big hat tip to NEO.Life - fabulous blog / newsletter.)

Farms in the City

4/25/2018

Spring, especially this year, can take forever to arrive. Then one day the birds are singing, the air is soft, green is everywhere and all those miracle-fiber winter coats, sweaters and boots crammed into my closets and drawers look silly. The winter of last week is as hard to imagine as the mile-high Pleistocene ice sheet that flattened the landscape for millennia, finally melting 10,000 years ago leaving behind a lacework of rivers and Great Lakes-size puddles. It also created some of the most fertile soils to be found anywhere.

The legacy of this black gold has proved a saving grace for Detroit, a city long in decline. The combination of cheap land, abandoned buildings and a young population with nothing to lose has sparked the reinvention of a city neighborhood as an "agrihood." The largely volunteer Michigan Urban Farming Initiative has in a few short years transformed a down-at-the-heels neighborhood into resilient community centered around a two-acre working farm. The biggest challenge will be making sure that the people who made the magic happen can afford to stay. (Read more here.)

Closer to home, the Peterson Garden Project (PGP) is gearing up for another season in Chicago. Spearheaded by the well-named LaManda Joy, PGP is a collection of community gardens inspired by and modeled after the Victory Gardens of WWII. My Aunt Sue (Suzie!) had a Victory Garden—one of 14,000 children's gardens in the city. I can picture my grandmother helping her baby girl plant vegetables on a fine spring day—a day, perhaps, just like today.

Because Everything is made of Something

4/24/2018

A few years ago I came across a book called Stuff Matters by British materials scientist Mark Miodownik. It quickly became a favorite and also a default present: If you were on my birthday / holiday gift list that year, that's what you got. It went on to win several awards, so I was far from alone in being mesmerized by Miodownik's storytelling. Now he's starring in BBC documentaries. "Super Elements" are magical. Neodymium. Rhenium. Lithium. Helium. Yumium. Ok, I made up the last one. But they really are all rather delicious, if not in culinary sense than in the fact that we live on a planet that has them. How cool is that?

Graphene: the 2D Difference

4/24/2018

Graphene makes material scientists weak in the knees. If it's not the answer to everything, it's the answer to almost everything. Graphene's hexagonal honeycomb structure is elegantly sturdy, but the magic is in its astonishing one-atom thickness (thinness?). At two atoms, it becomes graphite--the "lead" that actually isn't lead in pencils. The latest "make it better with graphene!" story involves concrete and the implications for the climate are significant. Graphenated concrete is "twice as strong and four times more water-resistant than existing concretes." Blimey! That means less is needed and it will do a better job., too. Given that 6% of global CO2 emissions are from cement production—the main ingredient in concrete—this is a very big deal.

More good graphene news: Researchers at MIT have come up with an industrial-scale production process for graphene membranes that can be used for desalinization and other processes that require high-quality filters.

The Trashbot of all Trashbots: The One & Only WALL-E!

4/21/2018

Pixar's classic WALL-E is a weird movie. Earth has become so polluted that the human population abandoned the planet for a centuries-long space cruise while an army of trashbots clean up the mess they left behind. How this ever got past a pitch is anyone's guess, but the bots (and a cockroach) have undeniable charm. WALL-E, the last of his kind, is resourceful, good-natured, curious, industrious, considerate and thoughtful. Meanwhile, the humans are fat, lazy and none-too-bright. The odds that they will make it as farmers upon their return—a move predicated on the germination of a single plant—are rather slim. Still, as long as there's a bot with that loves toe-tapping show tunes (Hello Dolly's Put on your Sunday Clothes), there's hope, right?

Splashdown!

4/21/2018

What goes up, come down. If it's a satellite or a spaceship then you hope it comes down in the South Pacific in a place as far away from inhabited land as possible. Someday someone (some alien?) is going to across all the space junk currently sitting at the bottom of the sea—only by then it will be embedded in a rock atop a mountain—and wonder what the heck happened here. It's a PhD thesis in the making. Fascinating read via How Stuff Works.

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