On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 10:54 PM Wes Turner <wes.tur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I grew up in Omaha, NE and the suburbs of St Louis, MO. I don't remember > when I leaned about the "Old Man River" proposal to build a dome over all > of East St Louis in 1971 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project > > Yes, I still weave OMR into my writings and videos as a good example of a mega-project and a "city from scratch" (a giant stadium in shape, terraced on the inside, bleacher seats more like apartment sized), centered around a central "field" big enough to contain several Olympic-sized sports facilities, amusement parks, you name it). It's a design for many cities. I'd focus on making it easy to disassemble, as we might want to take it down and recycle. What would life be like in such a place? Would they use Python or graphing calculators? As a science fiction backdrop, we could create it sooner for the movies than for real, but why not do both? We need places to prototype new lifestyles (e.g. "autonomous vehicles"). Exactly what EPCOT was designed to do (it being a first prototype of such a place, self booting the whole idea of an experimental prototype community of tomorrow (what EPCOT stands for)). I've launched the meme :Asylum City: (a kind of EPCOT) which suggests "a place of refuge" although there's a bit of a "mental hospital" vibe (very Oregon). That's OK. My own neighborhood in Portland is unofficially / informally referred to as the "Asylum District" by many. [Dr.] Hawthorne Blvd, the main street, is named for the doctor who indeed created and ran the first state mental hospital here in Oregon, under contract from Salem. Oregon was later famous for Ken Kesey and 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' -- all good marketing AFAIC (as far as I'm concerned). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey Another famous dome in the STL area, BTW, is of course the Climatron in the STL botanical gardens. I've actually visited that one. I enjoy STL (St. Louis). I don't think I've been to Omaha, only Lincoln. Nebraska was the home state for a planning firm that Libya had contracted with that my dad worked for when we lived in Italy, and I seem to recall driving around Europe with "Cornhusker State" license plates, which everyone would puzzle over. Was it because we got a tax break for being tourists? I don't remember. > > The world's largest glazed geodesic dome protects the year-round desert > environment through hot windy summers and cold snowy winters at the Henry > Doorly Zoo in Omaha > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Doorly_Zoo_and_Aquarium#Desert_Dome > > Maybe easier to clean a geodesic dome than a fully-spherical structure. > Are geodesic domes as or more resilient than regular domes? > https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/geodesic-domes > The most famous geodesic full sphere, to my knowledge, is that one in Disney World's EPCOT, dubbed Spaceship Earth. I see Zurich Zoo has a new geodesic dome elephant house: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/zurich-zoo-elephant-house.html One tends to go spherical when doing a restaurant or lookout "ball in the sky" type design, wherein people want to look down. I'd think floating an aquarium ball on the ocean (tethered, not tippy) over relatively shallow tide pools, might be another application, but I haven't searched yet to see if anyone's doing that. On ordinary land, there's the "sphere as house-wall boundary" and the "sphere as greenhouse boundary with other structures inside" model. The design less tried is the latter, but is closer to Bucky's vision for a mass-produced environmental bubble. The idea is to have your free-standing structures inside the dome, leaving the dome optionally transparent, more like a greenhouse. Privacy and organization is established with theater prop grade internals, meaning you can rearrange the floor plan without serious deconstruction, add steps and remove them. http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/martianmath/mm4.html (Bucky holding container shipping size deliverable as dome home internals e.g. kitchen, media room, loft) http://www.solardome.co.uk/gallery/solardome-pro/ (some models in this direction) As the dome gets bigger, one thinks of small communities, even apartments, scaling up to the "dome over Manhattan" meme. I never took that meme seriously as an actual proposal (more science fiction). The OMR dome, on the other hand, seemed believable, given it's a city from scratch to begin with. With Manhattan, we're talking retrofit. Why not start with a smaller city, like in Simpsons? The accompanying chatter around the NYC poster, was about the relatively big surface:volume ratio of radiator-like high rises, versus what it might cost to keep the whole dome warm, with that more minimalist inside-outside atmospheric interface. Even though the dome is huge, it's exposing less surface area to the outside. We might use a Python Jupyter Notebook, to work it out. When it comes to what's actually practical: these are so many open questions in engineering to some extent, even where they pencil out on paper. That few engineers appear to be testing tomorrow's technologies today is to me another sign of a civilization waiting to happen, that we got to preview. But then we decided we liked the dark ages a lot more for some reason. Nostalgia perhaps, for when Planet Earth seemed more flat. Among those doing the boldest pioneering: the Eden Project has some of the biggest pillow domes (greenhouse concept), which is the design J. Baldwin was working on at the New Alchemy Institute. https://www.edenproject.com/ Here's me talking about dome designs on a Youtube some years ago, at the Linus Pauling House here in Portland: https://youtu.be/QV4m76Om7bk (only about 3 mins, low resolution 240p) > However I do make use of the "share and mix" features, similar to MIT >> Scratch. >> >> We create a private "swimming pool" wherein any student can toss (share) >> project they're working on, not visible to general public, and other >> students can grab a copy. I can bring up student code on the big screen >> and discuss it in front of the class, or let them do it. >> > > Like a pastebin app or more of a wiki? If codesters creates a screenshot > (and links to them with og:image or schema:image metadata) that'd be cool. > > Codesters does create a screenshot thumbnail of what's on the canvas, when you share. The idea of a private classroom is built right in. When students are registered for an account, they're somehow associated with one of these classrooms, by my company (a process I don't see -- never visited the headquarters). > >> Scratch is on the whole enjoying a bigger budget and support team is my >> impression, and is especially capable around sound (writing programs that >> make music for example). Codesters is not non-auditory. >> > > I tried to lay down a track with concurrent beats with Scratch one day. It > sort of worked. I'll have to try out the Codesters sound support in a lab > someday. > > My bad. Typo. "Codesters is not non-auditory." should have been "Codesters is non-auditory." I.E. It has no ability to use sound (yet?). Graphing calculators aren't good at music either. Great links for computer music, thank you. I've dabbled but maybe barked up the wrong tree in terms of software, I now see. Recombining music with math ala the ancient Greek model, via computer music, seems a rich area we could do a lot with. There'd need to be lots of dancing to go with the music too. Great exercise for kids. We don't allow math-music, math-dancing (rhythm, looping, scheduling, scripting) nearly enough in our sit-still regimented graphing calculator schools. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)#Game_designer > might have some ideas about this presumably reinforcement-learning based > game (with MathTeX, I'm sure) that you speak of. One word: Nbgrader. > Great link. I think about SimCity a lot. My daughter grew up playing Sims quite a bit. The simulations I imagine are designed to be much more about actual real systems, like the water reservoirs around LA. Did you know the main reservoir is coated with a layer of black plastic balls (called "shade balls"), less to prevent evaporation than to prevent the formation of bromate from chlorine? https://youtu.be/uxPdPpi5W4o (yay sphere packing as a topic! -- I use Python to explore sphere packing: 1, 12, 42, 92...). The open source ethic applies to sharing about public infrastructure with those destined to depend on it. All of us in other words. > > https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2013/03/25/moores-law-vs-wrights-law/ > Both laws examples of what Fuller called "ephemeralization" (doing more with less materials as a function of experience / understanding). Toynbee (historian): "etherealization" (same thing). As one (a person, humanity, whatever) gains mastery over the principles, the physical component tends to shrink. Who gets the benefit of the added leisure time (slack) is the question, i.e. time for elective versus mandatory activities. That benefit doesn't seem to spread to all Global U student-faculty very evenly. More to simulate! Get out your Jupyter Notebooks and search for relevant data! Curate. Analyze. Visualize. Kirby
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