via the amazing TED Talks: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal.” Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today’s reactors as fuel. “In terms of fuel this really solves the problem.” He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky — the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

And on 60 Minutes: The Bloom Box

The Bloom box is a new kind of fuel cell that produces electricity by combining oxygen in the air with any fuel source, such as natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy. Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes – each the size of a grapefruit – could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box.

Aside from the sheer far-feched coolness that both of these represent, and the social/political/cultural ramifications that could begin to be discussed, both of these made me recall a passage of C.S. Lewis’s in The Abolition of Man:

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique…

The way I read the selection is that the path of earlier age wisdom was to attempt to live in conformity with the unyielding reality. Modernity, or applied science, has approached reality as a malleable natural world – something we can shape to fit our desires. Our current mindset seems to be generally focused on a search for new power sources, and in the case of the Bloom Box we are truly creating power out of thin air. Now I realize I’m stretching by trying to connect these three things in my mind, but in very general ways C.S. Lewis’s passage is a reminder of the possible split between a mindset of efficient creation of power (using science to coax and mine every last bit of energy from our finite resources in our search for more than we have) versus using science to help us in our efficient use of power (an example would be the extended battery life in our phones due to more efficient software programming/resource allocation).

In the topic of a more sustainable future, I would have to say that I might fall more in the camp of the ‘earlier ages:’ we have a depleting amount of unobtainium, do more with less of it. I feel that the greatest success is going to occur when our advances in efficient creation of power is met with a broader cultural shift in thought away from consuming to conserving.

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Easy things like talking, wandering around or eating is about as equally mysterious as the hard stuff like thinking, creating and career planning. Trying to figure out the mystery only leads one to making weird faces, and its become apparent to me over these last couple of years that I’m pretty poor at planning. I find that its easier on my face if I don’t focus to stringently on it.

For a while, I had had side projects that kept me pretty busy, but a long break over the holidays and the subsequent work load back at the office has proven to me that I need to be spending more time away from the screen, and also more time away from “work” and all that’s related to it.

After a few years of living here in New York, I’ve come to respect it and know it as more than those initial feelings of it being a place of thrilling experiences. There are so many amazing things happening here, all the time, that most of one’s anxiety in the city comes from the over whelming feeling of being in a perpetual state of missed opportunities. And, it takes alot of work to get by here. You need patience, humility and empathy for your neighbor, and yourself. And you have to create time for friendships and hobbies to avoid falling into a work-only lifestyle.

But too often today, I find it easy to forget to stop and breathe. Work late, multiple meetings for multiple projects that become double booked and all of a sudden you are over-organized. It becomes all too easy to forget the simple acts that have been redefined as indulgences.

They should be part of our natural routine.

So, maybe that’s the resolution for 2010. What I’ll do next is focus more on the simple acts.

These related entries might also interest you:
Five Year Plan

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And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

If you travelled back in time to 1963 and told everyone that in 2009 the President of the United States is a black man, perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr. would have believed you.

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It’s begun snowing in New York on this eve of 2010. Walking down the street, the air is crisp and the lights in the brownstones are giving off a luxurious and golden glow. The park beyond is already cast in pure whites and deep black.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
…
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep…

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost (1923)

These related entries might also interest you:
Snow Fall

For the last few years I’ve been able to sell a few of my photos and sketches here and there to various friends and acquaintences. And now, through a series of fortunate connections and events, I was selected as a White House|Black Market “White & Black Emerging Artist.”

It’s “a new series of limited-edition cards featuring work commissioned from up-and-coming artists we want to support.”

WHBM has selected a few of my sketches to place on holiday notecards, but unfortunately they are not available on-line. So if you find yourself near one of their locations, then pick some up and tell them “I know the artist.”

And in conjunction with the notecards being in stores, I’ve set up my own storefront that you can find here at brandonspecketer.com.

The printing, framing and shipping is all custom and on-demand via the ImageKind printing service. All prints are Giclée prints from high-resolution digital copies of my sketches or photographs. The reproductions are perfect if your looking for quick turnaround at the highest level of quality. The work is available on eight different paper types and two different canvas types, and printing is done using Ultra-Chrom K3 inkset from Epson. With proper UV protection, the prints will look as good in 30 years as they do today.

I’ve got a handful of photographs featuring New York City and Italy, and original sketches from various European locations. For good measure, beautiful fine art photography from my wife is also available.

If you’re inclined, or know someone else might enjoy having a sketch or photograph hanging on their wall, then please have a look at what’s available.

And that’s the end of the hard sell.

I hope you enjoy the work, and please let me know what you think either below in the comments, email or Twitter.

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*maybe

The design for the new NYC street lights stem from a competition held in 2004 and they are not intended to replace all the streetlights, but to simply provide a more modern design to be installed in areas that are newly developed or areas where it would make sense aesthetically.

The following is in response to an article I read Monday morning on the OKC Central website. That evening as I rode the bike home, I tried to pay attention to the street lights. One of the defining characteristics of the Manhattan street at night is the soft, warm yellow glow that mixes with the people and the light spilling from bodegas and clothing stores. The generalized experience of the street lamp is more about the quality of light – the rest of the street lamp blends in and disappears.

In New York City, we have roughly 330,000 streetlights and about a dozen different designs. Right by my office I can count three: Twin acorn-shaped bulbs hang from a Y-shaped green mast near Madison Square Park. On 6^th Ave, ornate “Shepherd’s Crook” lamps stand in line with standard city issue “Cobra Heads” that crane their necks and stoplights over the roadways below. Every once in a while, you notice the more decorative lights, but in general, the lights are strangely invisible.

So to paraphrase the quote in Steve’s article, it sounds like the city asking for a little black dress to help us blend in with the rest of the party, rather than the DVF version of the little black dress that lets others know you are the party.

“Classy, elegant and timeless.” Those three words are Pandora’s box in terms of the design of a street lamp. And something I’ll skip right now.

The more important issue is implementation. I personally believe that the lamps should ‘elegantly’ disappear into the urban fabric and not become an aesthetic signifier of where you are (leave that to the architecture and street life.) With that being said, the implementation of the lamps is more important than the lamps themselves. I seem to recall images of streetlamps in the middle of midtown sidewalks…that’s bad. Pulling off a cheap knockoff of Thomas Kincaid-esque street lamp under 20’ high would be bad. Trying to make the streetlamp overtly “designed” would also be bad. I don’t think the city is off base when they are asking for a “Little Black Dress,” I would just put more emphasis on the elegant and drop the connotations most people associate with classy and timeless.

The radically short time frame? Remember that the NYC streetlamps quoted as an example started their process with a competition in 2004. It took at least a year before that for the idea of modern street lamps and the City to organize the competition. It’s the fall of 2009 and the street lamps are still waiting for the green light.

Are we rushing into this? Either people have been sitting on their hands while other issues have been dealt with, or, this is indeed just coming up to the surface as an item that needs to be addressed. I don’t know enough about the requirements the city is looking for or even why there might be a “radically short timeframe,” so I won’t try to comment on any of that. But, if I understand the TIF deal correctly, it was set up +- a year ago. Using the above example, I think anyone can do the math that if we are going to design a new streetlight for a 21^st century downtown OKC, we are going to need an appropriate amount of time and we’re already a year into knowing we need improved streetlights. Can Oklahoma City match what NYC produced? Yes, and this shouldn’t be a question. If it is, there are bigger issues at stake regarding talent retention, creative knowledge base, etc.

But, there is one thing that keeps pulling at me. The job of the street lamp is to illuminate the activity on the sidewalks and roadways below. The streetlamps are very important, but I believe the bigger question is the one Steve posed at the very start:

Will OKC be innovative with its downtown streets?

When I read that question, it has more to do with what is being illuminated on and in the streets than what is happening above it.

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It basically evolved because I got tired of hearing about “remember when” regarding downtown Oklahoma City. While Oklahoma City didn’t have a chance to develop a historical core prior to the explosion of automobile usage (in the east coast NYC/Boston/Philly sense), Oklahoma City’s development history was uniquely shaped by intersections of a river and national rail lines. This infrastructure shaped our past growth and the sketch is a result of wondering why couldn’t our rails and right-of-ways still be utilized to shape our future and program the way the city would continue to develop?

I plan on writing more about this specific idea, but right now there were a few other micro examples of modes of transit programming cities that have been recently floating around in my head. What follows is by no means an encyclopedic examination. It’s just rambling.

Previously, I wrote about Park Avenue, Oklahoma City, and the fact that infrastructure needs to encourage people to experience their city in a way different than the suburban dashboard experience. If you’re interested in more  information, along with some wicked pictures and old drawings, definitely check out Joseph Brennan’s page on the Fourth Avenue Improvement.

Since then, I have been thinking about ways in which infrastructure and transportation have changed the way our cities and architecture works. One of the first examples that come to mind is something that I see everyday outside of my office on 6th Avenue.

After the Civil War, new retailing advancements called “department stores” began appearing on Broadway, which had developed into the primary shopping street for New York City. But as the elevated train line was built on 6th Avenue in 1878, the entire shopping district soon shifted to this area.

Buildings like the B. Altman Dry Goods Store and the Hugh O’Neill Dry Goods Store opened shop and had a very unique feature specific to 6th Avenue architecture at the the time – the large department stores had highly ornamented, distinctive second floor facades that were intended to be seen by passengers on the elevated train lines. It’s a characteristic that has been retained in new construction projects like the Caroline building.

In older cities like New York and Boston, transportation influences reach even farther back than rail’s influence – countless urban facades, spaces, and even the nature and program of the streets were predicated by the use and the ability to be seen by elevated riders on horseback. One of the more picturesque and unique examples of equestrian oriented urban space is the beautiful Sniffen Court. Every time I pass by this court, I have to wonder what our suburban neighborhoods would look like if the most prominent visual feature of our homes wasn’t the drive way and carriage/garage door.

There is a very interesting article in Harvard Design Magazine 30 by John Stilgoe that I wanted to pull some pieces from. It focuses on the growing enthusiasm for bicycles and their effect on urban change and infrastructure at the end of the 19th century. Stigloe makes a comment about this elevated, equestrian like viewpoint:

“Ordinary riders sat so high that they faced equestrians and buggy drivers almost equally: They looked down on pedestrians. Bicyclists looked ahead in urban traffic, sprinted through gaps, and sped along cobbled and brick streets…the tires riding easily over gaps between cobblestones. At first quintessentially urban, the ordinary proved capable of moving over even poorly paved roads…and into the countryside.”

The bicycle seems to be the first suburban vehicle. Maybe the first sport utility vehicle?

The image above, from the New York Public Library Digital Collection, is a great illustration of the bicycle path from Prospect Park, Brooklyn, to Coney Island in 1896.

Bicyclists, young men and boys were able to expanded their “theaters of operations,” especially when they brought their bikes aboard trolleys and trains … “even girls rode far from home and shrank city and town distances in hitherto male ways.” Those words make me recall a point by Steve Jones…”a consequence of increasing mobility is that the world’s populations are beginning to merge genetically…suggesting that the most important even in recent human evolution has been the invention of the bicycle.”

There were also a few other parts in the article worth mentioning:

“Few design historians understand period apartment-house bicycle parking garaging when they prowl dusty basement laundry facilities that long ago crowded out cycles.” Doing laundry in my own apartment building’s basement looks immensely more interesting when I try to see it in this light. And while that was the late 1800’s, the 21st Century seems to be copying a few lines from the past. NYC building code is beginning to require bicycle parking facilities in all new construction for commercial and residential projects. Why does a measure like this matter? Because parking helps make commuters (99% of car trips in the United States terminate in a free parking space) — a lesson we’ve learned long ago with cars.

Also, by the mid 1890’s, Albert Pope (among other bicycle related endeavors, owned the largest bicycle-manufacturing firm in the world in 1883) “funded a new department of road engineering at MIT and repaved a section of Columbus Avenue in Boston to demonstrate the usefulness of asphalt, but it was the massive petitions of the League of American Wheelman, bicycle retailers, resort owners, and other businessmen profiting from the new craze submitted to President Benjamin Harrison and Congress that galvanized road-paving efforts.” The bicycle craze helped to stir the imagination with dreams of individual travel and created a road construction boom, something I had only associated with the automotive movement. It turned out to be a construction boom that would ensure the bicycle’s own demise.

The 1898 photograph above, from the New York Public Library Digital Collection, is taken near Grant’ tomb on the edge of the cycling path built for the benefit of the “wheelmen and their admirers.”

Stigloe writes that “after 1882, electric trolley cars caused a precipitous drop in pedestrian and vehicular congestion as they supplanted far slower horse cars. Quick-accelerating trolleys filled with voters soon forced municipal governments to channel delivery wagons and other slow-moving vehicles to the edges of streets, freeing center-street trolley routes and inadvertently making avenues for [bicycle] riders.”

In describing the history of the expansion of bicycle usage, Stigloe’s article raises one question that could be interesting as cities try to develop multi-modal transportation options – can right of ways serve dual purposes?

Aside from the image of cyclists rapidly filling in behind the wake of trolleys as they moved up and down the streets, I’m thinking about the dedicated bus lanes in the highway medians of Curtiba; the horse paths being the precursor to rail right of ways in boulevards like the Kansas City Trolley Trail in Brookside and Waldo; and what could become a well planned transit/park/pedestrian connection down the new boulevard in Oklahoma City.

In OKC, it appears that they are earnestly looking at transit as a MAPS ballot issue, but the problem of density and suburbia is a very big hurdle that needs to be seriously addressed for anything to work. It’s a chicken/egg, cart before the horse kind of question. But if you look at the example of 6th Avenue in 1878, I would argue that you “do the hard things first.” Or a more cinematic phrase, “If you build it, they will come.”

I am certain that answers that work for New York City quite possibly won’t work for Oklahoma City. It’s a unique place, with unique attributes, that needs an equally unique solution. But in order to find a solution that works, it can’t be arrived at by utilizing individual parts. A solution should involve thinking about transportation initiatives as multi-modal and multi-scale: a whole that encompasses walk-ability, sharing roadways with bicycles and cars, and mass-transit connections of the city center to surrounding neighborhoods and bedroom communities.

For lack of a more elegant closing, I want to reference an excellent post from a colleague of mine over at Intercon. Our buildings shape the public spaces, but the public spaces of sidewalks, roadways and transit corridors in turn shape our density and how our cities and buildings are designed and used.

These related entries might also interest you:
A Park Avenue
Life Without Cars
High Line

So un-enjoyable that urban legend tells of a smart fellow in New Zealand who had a “Monday Room” created in his office. A place to retreat to on Monday nights and ease into the week by drinking wine, possibly – or not – thinking about the week ahead.

I wish I was that fellow from New Zealand. I’ll just have to use Monday Room as my substitute.

And I guess that would make Tuesdays the new Mondays.

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Better than Monday Mornings
Better than Monday Mornings