Or, to phrase it a little more politely:

Brains are calorically demanding organs. Our distant ancestors had small ones. Australopithecus afarensis, for example, who lived some three million years ago, had a cranial capacity of about four hundred cubic centimetres, which is roughly the same as a chimpanzee’s. Modern humans have a cranial capacity of about thirteen hundred cubic centimetres. How, as their brains got bigger, did our forebears keep them running? According to what’s known as the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes.

Turns out human newborns have the highest body fat of any species besides harbor seals, and on a slightly related not, “humans, unlike most other animals, have no set season of fertility. Instead, ovulation is tied to a woman’s fat stores: those who are very thin simply fail to menstruate.”  All this thinking is making me want a cheeseburger.

Here’s a post about an idea that was in the news a year ago and seems to be maturing into a viable product.  Shawn Frayne started a company called Humdinger Wind Energy to produce a new type of wind generator.  Rather than using a turbine with rotors to generate power, Shawn’s product is essentially a long rigid frame with thin band of material which can oscillate in the wind.  The band is connected at one end to a permanent magnet which induces an electrical charge as it oscillates.  The system has virtually no moving parts and can be built for far less than a typical turbine.  He claims his current models can operate at $1/watt, and he has various sizes from small models you can carry around to large arrays.  His invention is targeted at low-power applications where power is scarce; largely the developing world.

Integrating this into building could be an interesting performative element; they could be used horizontally for shading while providing power, and there’s probably no reason the oscillating piece couldn’t be 30′ wide.

This is a border crossing station on the US-Canada border by Smith-Miller & Hawkinson which has been deemed a threat to national security by Customs & Border Protection.  The threat?  The large yellow letters spelling out ‘United States’.  It seems that announcing the country people are entering is an unacceptable risk; terrorists could target the building. So they’re prying them off, less than a month after the building was completed.

People are incredibly bad at rational risk assessment.

Here’s one for the next structural engineers we work with in California: physicists in france have recently extended their work on sonic invisibility cloaks to encompass buildings and earthquakes, and have proposed a method for designing buildings which are invisible to the shock waves of earthquakes.

Guenneau said that it’s possible to shield an object, even a building, so that an incoming earthquake wave behaves as if the object weren’t there. The building in the path of the wave is like a rock in a fast-flowing river, he said.

“It’s the same picture, the wave pattern, as for a water wave that is propagating in a river, and it’s bent smoothly around the rock and will be reconstructed around the rock.” The object, or building, is “invisible” to the mechanical waves.

A series of concrete rings would surround a building or other structure, forming the shield. The shield would redirect the vibration around the object inside. “Each ring is going to wobble in such a way that the wave will bend around (the object),” Guenneau said.

Earthquake waves come in varying lengths, with many peaks and troughs in a given distance, or just a few. To effectively shield a building from short and long waves that earthquakes generate, several rings could be built around a structure, each “tuned” to a different wavelength.

A 1,000 square foot house, for example, would need a circular shield with a 33-foot radius, which could be built with commercially available concrete. Guenneau suggested that the method might be used to protect a large building like a stadium, where people could seek shelter after an earthquake and be protected by the rings from possible aftershocks.

Well this is new: it turns out that mixing fresh water and salt water releases energy, in the same way that desalinating salty water requires energy.  Apparently this has been recognized since the 70′s, but until now there hasn’t been a way to take advantage of the fact.  Well, thanks to Doriano Brogioli we can now create electricity simply by mixing water of different salinity levels in the presence of activated carbon (the stuff in your brita water filter).

Brogioli has developed a new approach to salination, a prototype cell that relies on two chunks of activated carbon, a porous carbon commonly used for water and air filtration. Once he jump starts the cell with electric power, all that is required to produce electricity are sources of fresh and salty water and a pump to keep the water flowing. When the separate streams of salty and fresh water mix, energy is released.

A typical cell would require about three dollars worth of activated carbon, and, given a steady flow of water, the cell could produce enough electricity to meet the needs of a small house. It’s the equivalent, in hydroelectric power, of running your appliances from a personal 100 meter (338 feet) high waterfall.

Salination would be an ideal technique for places where fresh and salty waters naturally mix, such as estuaries, according to Brogioli. He said that a coastal community of about a hundred houses could set up a plant with minimal damage to the ecosystem. “A salinity difference plant will be much smaller than a solar plant,” he said. The only waste product is slightly brackish water that can be poured directly into the sea or, Brogioli suggested, into ponds that support estuary-friendly flora and fauna.

How cool is that!?

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about Riversimple’s Opensource car, here’s a story on an emerging business model in the world of video games; community funded games.

One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community. So right now, what typically happens is you have this budget – it needs to be huge, it has to be $10m – $30m, and it has to be all available at the beginning of the project. There’s a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative.

What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, ‘Hey, I really like this idea you have. I’ll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I’ll also get a copy of that game.’

So move financing from something that occurs between a publisher and a developer… Instead have it be something where funding is coming out of community for games and game concepts they really like.

This is an interesting idea, it’s like micro-credit patronage.  Sort of reminds me of Radiohead releasing their most recent album online and asking people to pay whatever they felt the album was worth.  I’ve been thinking about ways in which something similar to this could be used to build architecture, but it doesn’t seem like the ‘installed user base’ would be high enough…

Riversimple has just announced they will be releasing the plans for their new fuel-cell car under a creative-commons license.  They’ve also set up a collaborative wiki so people who are interested in participating in the design process can download the CAD files, make improvements and submit them to the community for review.

The opensource design approach has had great success in the domain of software design, due mostly to the low cost of implementing software designs and transferring the code base.  There’s been discussion about applying the basic system of production to other fields, but this seems to be the first viable example.  The most interesting aspect of Riversimple’s announcement is that the design was released in a fully-formed state; the collaborative process is starting after a commercial company spent the time engineering the design and making the difficult decisions about what the goals and tactics of the project (this is most often where ‘open-source’ projects break down when the cost of implementing a design is substantial).

This speaks to an argument I’ve made a couple times; designers are paid for their ability to solve problems, not for the end-result of the design process.  Aside from legal issues, there doesn’t seem to be a strong argument against releasing designs after they’ve been completed.  This also ties into my argument earlier that building a system for exchanging architectural details could vastly accelerate the evolutionary process of architectural details.

I posted earlier about the development process, trying to express some ideas that have been floating around the office regarding how buildings are financed, designed, and built.  What was lacking from that post was any consideration of what happens once the building has been built.  As builders, architects tend to think of buildings as artifacts, objects to be photographed and admired.  This approach ignores the reality that architecture is an element in the dynamic process of human society.

Stepping back to consider architecture as a process allows us to consider a much wider variety of concerns; the lifetime cost of building maintenance, the environmental impact of powering the building, the cultural flows that the building mediates, etc.  Let me touch on a couple such topics before getting into any ideas about how things might be improved.

Tom Wiscombe’s office, Emergent, has proposed a Photobioreactor for Perth:

This project is an attempt to avoid the trappings of conventional public art which is often associated with large, often modern, expressions of form. The design does not signify, it performs. The Perth Photobioreactors gather energy by way of several interwoven high- and low-tech systems. These include a luminous, artificial photosynthetic system invented by Origin Oil in Los Angeles, and thin-film solar transistors woven into ornamental electronic tracery. Now, one could argue that artwork shouldn’t actually do work, that art is by definition excessive. Of course there were also those who argued in the 20th century that multimedia art was not true art like painting. If this decade in human civilization has presented us with any resonant knowledge about our world, it is that energy is culturally precious, that it is possibly the ultimate medium. Energy may indeed be one of the most timely mediums for art.

We have been discussing similar things in the office, so hopefully B-rad’s algae classes at UT bear fruit (or algae).

Bruce Schneier (my favorite cryptanalyst) has a great post about the psychological bases and effects of group size on organizations:

Primatologist Robin Dunbar derived this number by comparing neocortex — the “thinking” part of the mammalian brain — volume with the size of primate social groups. By analyzing data from 38 primate genera and extrapolating to the human neocortex size, he predicted a human “mean group size” of roughly 150.

This number appears regularly in human society; it’s the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at which Hittite settlements split, and the basic unit in professional armies from Roman times to the present day. Larger group sizes aren’t as stable because their members don’t know each other well enough. Instead of thinking of the members as people, we think of them as groups of people. For such groups to function well, they need externally imposed structure, such as name badges.

…

More generally, there are several layers of natural human group size that increase with a ratio of approximately three: 5, 15, 50, 150, 500, and 1500 — although, really, the numbers aren’t as precise as all that, and groups that are less focused on survival tend to be smaller. The layers relate to both the intensity and intimacy of relationship and the frequency of contact.

The smallest, three to five, is a “clique”: the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress. The twelve to 20 group is the “sympathy group”: people with which you have special ties. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from the same pool of 150 people. No matter what size company you work for, there are only about 150 people you consider to be “co-workers.” (In small companies, Alice and Bob handle accounting. In larger companies, it’s the accounting department — and maybe you know someone there personally.) The 500-person group is the “megaband,” and the 1,500-person group is the “tribe.” Fifteen hundred is roughly the number of faces we can put names to, and the typical size of a hunter-gatherer society.

These numbers are reflected in military organization throughout history: squads of 10 to 15 organized into platoons of three to four squads, organized into companies of three to four platoons, organized into battalions of three to four companies, organized into regiments of three to four batallions, organized into divisions of two to three regiments, and organized into corps of two to three divisions.

Coherence can become a real problem once organizations get above about 150 in size. So as group sizes grow across these boundaries, they have more externally imposed infrastructure — and more formalized security systems. In intimate groups, pretty much all security is ad hoc. Companies smaller than 150 don’t bother with name badges; companies greater than 500 hire a guard to sit in the lobby and check badges. The military have had centuries of experience with this under rather trying circumstances, but even there the real commitment and bonding invariably occurs at the company level. Above that you need to have rank imposed by discipline.

Aside from being an interesting piece of neuro-psych trivia, this seems like something worth considering in the context of our discussions of shared space and community.  If an apartment complex with 300 people has no chance of developing a coherent community identity, how can we go about providing the structure to allow localized community identity to develop within portions of the complex?  What is a ‘good’ size for such a community?  It would seem that aside from the capacity of the brain to maintain relations with other individuals, other matters would come into play: having enough neighbors you can ignore the ones you don’t like, but not so many you never feel encouraged to speak to any of them, providing a good mix of privacy and shared space, etc.  It would be interesting to look into research along these lines, I’m sure it’s been done…