Category: BLDGBLOG

[Image: A “hurricane” at Saturn’s south pole, via NASA; see also The Planetary Weather Report].

In Frédéric J. Pont’s new book Alien Skies, he describes the atmospheres of other planets: what storms are like, what the clouds are made of, how a sunset might appear through a chemical haze at high pressure on another world.

He points out, for example, that many of these “alien skies” would likely consist of wildly unfamiliar shapes and formations, as different elements would be capable of condensing to form clouds at ever-increasing heights.

As he puts it, “The type of compound likely to condense into clouds depends on the temperature, and varies from planet to planet. Earth has water clouds. Carbon dioxide clouds sometimes grace the Martian sky, and Venus is shrouded in sulphuric acid clouds. On the giant planets, successive cloud decks are made of different compounds as the temperature increases in the deeper layers.”

[Image: J.M.W. Turner, “Storm at Sea” (1824), courtesy of Tate Britain].

However, I should emphasize that all of this stuff needs to be put into the context of the Hudson River School and European Romanticism, of so-called “representational exploration art” of earlier scientific expeditions, where humans attempted to visually depict the wild worlds they’d plunged themselves into.

You shouldn’t see this stuff and think of astronomy, in other words. You should think of J.M.W. Turner or John Constable, of huge coastal storms and mountain passes lit by lightning, of ships dashed on the rocks as wrathful pillars of dark cloud spiral into the blackness of space above terrified figures for whom weather bears traces of omnipotence.

Only now the weather is even more spectacular, and it is glimpsed on planets more exotic than any continent to which artists have traveled before.

The weather on other planets should not be left only to scientists, in other words, but needs always to be considered in the context of art and landscape history.

[Image: John Constable, “Seascape Study with Rain Cloud” (c. 1824), via Wikipedia].

In any case, Pont explains that, as you move higher into some of the otherworldly atmospheres he describes, you would continually pass into entirely new elements—carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia—now frozen or condensed, billowing and moving about in the wind, capable of assuming structures unlike anything seen on Earth, vast “waves, spirals and tentacles,” or “unpredictable storm patterns” and even giant hexagons, as weird configurations unlock through a chemical sky.

[Image: The great hexagon at Saturn’s north pole, via Universe Today].

The book is less landscape poetry, however—sadly, after all, as what an incredible book of poems it would be, simply describing the skies of other worlds—than a scientific introduction to atmospheric chemistry, including here on Earth. But don’t hold that against it.

For instance, during Pont’s survey of the atmosphere of the early Earth, he makes an interesting and particularly evocative observation, one worth repeating here.

As he points out, the early Earth—for a period that lasted nearly a billion years—was quite boring, geologically speaking, “because nothing much happened to the rocks in a billion years.” But the skies were another matter.

[Image: A false-color image of the “hurricane” at Saturn’s south pole, via NASA; the eye is estimated to be 1,250 miles wide].

“The oxygen content in the atmosphere was stable,” Pont explains, “at around 0.1 percent. This was not enough to produce an ozone layer. Therefore the stratospheric lid that kept the clouds below ten miles in the present Earth did not operate.”

This had at least one spectacular side-effect:

Convection must have extended much higher into the atmosphere. This would have been called “the Great Age of Clouds” by any visitor, since the high temperatures, large oceans and lack of stratospheric lid would have produced the most magnificent cloud formations and the most awesome storms.

Imagine standing on the shore of some rocky archipelago billions of years before any other humans were born, as massive and otherworldly storms four or five times taller than anything you’d ever seen come rolling over the horizon, torqued into strange tropical towers, flashing in every crevice with lightning to reveal vast humid interiors where air roars upward in near-permanent mushroom clouds, breaking open to reveal shells of orange and red storms within storms boiling continuously for weeks at a time. The Great Age of Clouds would be in full performance.

Pont’s book is also available through SpringerLink if you have academic access.

[Image: Der Bergbau, courtesy of the British Museum; view larger].

Der Bergbau is a beautiful 19th-century German board game set in a mine, currently in the collection of the British Museum. They describe it as a “game-board showing a cross-section of a mine and the network of tunnels leading down from 6 buildings, along the tunnels, various numbers which represent ore.”

The rules are not given, unfortunately, but the board itself is a gorgeous image in its own right, worth viewing in full.

(Originally spotted via @SubBrit).

[Image: Screen-grab from The New York Times].

Peruvian archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters “has created a drone air force to map, monitor and safeguard his country’s ancient treasures,” according to the New York Times.

Researchers in Peru “struggle to protect the country’s archaeological heritage from squatters and land traffickers, who often secure property through fraud or political connections to profit from rising land values,” we read. “Experts say hundreds, perhaps thousands of ancient sites are endangered by such encroachment.”

What’s needed, it seems, is a kind of standing army or reserve corps of mechanical eyes, ready to take flight at a moment’s notice and document abuses or vandalism at historic sites, and this, the article implies, is at least one of the ultimate goals. Indeed, “drones can address the problem, quickly and cheaply, by providing bird’s-eye views of ruins that can be converted into 3-D images and highly detailed maps.”

At least that’s the goal. Actually watching the “drone air force” at work, however, doesn’t quite live up to rhetorical expectations. Instead, sand grains cause mechanical failure, batteries need to be checked and replaced, the geometrically skewed images coming back from the camera are difficult to reconcile with one another, and the small team of archaeological operators only manages to perform a short flight over the targeted valley before calling their DJI Phantom back to base.

Having said that, though, aerial landscape data culled not just from UAVs but from cameras and scanning equipment carried by kites, helium balloons, satellites, light aircraft, and even helicopter patrols has had a transformative effect on archaeological fieldwork.

[Image: A glimpse of the balloon rig, from Mozas-Calvache et al., Journal of Archaeological Science].

Just one example of this—and there are literally hundreds, as any search through publications such as the Journal of Archaeological Science or World Archaeology will reveal—was an exploration of how the images produced by balloon-based “light aerial platforms” could be made more useful.

Of course, the possible uses for this technique in contemporary architectural or urban documentation and analysis should not be overlooked.

[Image: The balloon rig diagrammed, from Mozas-Calvache et al., Journal of Archaeological Science].

As authors A.T. Mozas-Calvache et al., from the University of Jaen in Spain, explain in a paper for the Journal of Archaeological Science, they have developed “a complete methodology for performing photogrammetric surveying of archaeological sites using light aerial platforms or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. Traditionally, the main problem with using these platforms is the irregular geometry of the photographs obtained.”

This can make combining the resulting images into a comprehensible map or visual survey fantastically time-consuming, if not sometimes impossible; by comparison, think of a badly stitched panorama on your smartphone, now multiple that times a hundred and you can imagine some of the difficulty involved.

Instead, Mozas-Calvache and Co. built a helium-balloon-based “light aerial platform” whose “spatial coordinates are incorporated in the memory card of a robotized total station for automatic tracking of a 360 º mini reflector prism installed in the camera platform”—all of which is just a more precise way of saying that the location of the camera or scanner is precisely known at every step of its passage over the site, and the resulting, well-gridded images can thus be more easily reconciled.

[Image: Some resulting images, from Mozas-Calvache et al., Journal of Archaeological Science].

But now we’re getting off-topic. For more about the “drone air force” of Peru, check out The New York Times.

[Image: The SkySaver backpack in action via Kit Up!].

The SkySaver is a kind of emergency exit in a bag: a controlled-descent backpack loaded with hundreds of feet of fire-resistant cable. Just hook the line onto some fixed point in the structure behind you and lower yourself, two meters per second, to safety.

Marketed as a tool for urban warfare with—wouldn’t you know it—handy civilian uses on the side, the SkySaver system’s goal is to let you escape from, say, a building siege or a hotel fire. But, of course, it would also allow you to don your night-vision goggles and raid a high-rise from above, not escaping from but breaking into a building.

It’s not cheap—retailing for $499 and $849, depending on how much cable you need—but its possible use in urban exploration or even burglary seems to be a market the company is not (yet) aiming to cultivate.

[Image: The TBD Catalog from the Near Future Laboratory].

The TBD Catalog soon to be published by the Near Future Laboratory is a fictional catalog of possible products, all described and illustrated like mail-order props in some unrealized everyday life of tomorrow.

Part satire, part industrial brainstorm, it’s a mix of impractical ideas and thought-provoking future goods, whether that means the absurd weather-sensing hair extensions or (entirely plausible) DIY home-bioluminescence kits.

[Image: The TBD Catalog from the Near Future Laboratory].

The New Future Lab’s goal was to “take the things that seemed liminal, the things in the laboratories, in the public media, in science-fiction films, in economic projections and then extrapolate these ideas and prototypes and make them into ‘things’ in the near future.” They sought “to design-develop prototypes and shape embryonic concepts in order to discard them, make them better, reconsider what we may take for granted.” To come up with tomorrow’s products today.

It is the catalog as speculative literature, or the inventor’s notebook as a mode of critical inquiry. Call it counter-production: something that creatively mocks and toys with the idea that we can only experience futurity through the cyclical release and ritual consumption of new commodities.

[Image: The TBD Catalog from the Near Future Laboratory].

The resulting objects, services, home goods, and even new forms of food are not just “hyperbolic perfections,” as the authors write, or sleek and empty new corporate products, but “things as they would exist as part of normal, ordinary, everyday life. If you stopped today and [were] transported to the near future, what would the world look like?”

What products would you buy? What services would you rely on? What would sit at home on your shelves?

The group’s hope was that, in answering these questions, they might discover—even if only in parody—the outline of the world to come and reveal many of the false assumptions built into a market-based vision of tomorrow.

Along those lines, for example, they posit something called algoriture, or an emergent library of algorithmically-written literature, AI-generated on the fly.

[Image: The TBD Catalog from the Near Future Laboratory].

These are like little machine folktales produced through some narrative averaging of other written works, priced by genre and archetype.

Each text is thus “a guaranteed unique, custom book for you based on books you’ve read and enjoyed—and a matrix of genre specifications you provide. Each book is guaranteed unique and guaranteed enjoyable—or your money back. Only works of fiction. Genres: romance, technothriller, science-fiction, fantasy, thriller, young adult (incl. fairy tale), mystery and more.”

[Image: The TBD Catalog from the Near Future Laboratory].

The actual catalog—which begins shipping on September 1, 2014—is “not your near future of superlative Silicon Valley exuberance,” they write, “where you happily 3D-print a perfect set of lease-licensed Opinel steak knives or blissfully commute to work in your fascistically sleek Google-powered, chem-battery fueled autonomous vehicles. Nor is this the abysmal near future where you huddle in the smoldering foxholes of apocalyptic ruin. TBD Catalog runs through the middle. It is neither extreme. It is a design fiction about a normal, ordinary everyday near future.”

[Images: The TBD Catalog from the Near Future Laboratory].

In the end, the authors write, “A report (or catalog, such as TBD) offers a way to normalize those extraordinary ideas and represent them as entirely ordinary. We imagined it to be a catalog of some sort, as might appear in a street vending box in any neighborhood, or in a pile next to the neighborhood real estate guides or advertising-based classified newspapers near the entrance to your local convenience store.”

Consider ordering a copy to see if it has the desired effect.

[Image: Random image of street lights].

Parts of Copenhagen are being turned into an outdoor night-lighting experiment, aiming to determine exactly how—even to what extent—cities should be illuminated at night, not only to use resources most efficiently but to increase urban security.

A mix of context-sensitive and remotely controlled lighting systems will be deployed, and each light will have its own IP address for outside monitoring. “Sensors that track traffic density, air quality, noise, weather conditions and UV radiation will also be fitted throughout the site to see what sort of environment the lights are operating in,” New Scientist explains. “All this will help work out which lights are making the biggest difference in terms of lowering costs and emissions.”

The visual results will be not unlike an outdoor museum of experiential light art, a kind of an “Urban Light” sculpture blown up to the scale of a neighborhood, and the Danish Outdoor Lighting Lab—or DOLL as it’s known—is even meant to be toured as such. While “engineers will have freedom to toy with the different products,” we also read that “foreign officials who are curious about the technology can comparison-shop for their hometown.”

[Image: Another random image of a street light].

But these networked and responsive urban lighting systems also come with political implications, including an effect on how the city can be monitored by authorities.

Indeed, “Fitting street lamps with complex sensors—and hooking them up to a larger network that controls the city—will have implications far outside of lighting,” the article explains. “If a street lamp senses a sudden rush of people in an area that’s usually deserted at night, police could be tipped off to go check the area out.” And, by extension, those streets could be dramatically flooded with blazing incandescence, transforming the city’s infrastructure into a kind of giant police spotlight.

It’s not hard to imagine life in one of these smart-lit neighborhoods of the future where, one evening, a suspect—perhaps you—has been chased by police; whole streets light up strategically, one by one, tracking the suspect—guilty or not—as he or she attempts to flee, small emergency lights even turning on in spots where they had previously been invisible. Other streets and alleys dim to help hide police in the darkness. Infrastructure becomes not just civic but tactical.

Recall Evgeny Morozov’s look at the smart city as a kind of urban police state. Writing for The Guardian earlier this summer, Morozov suggested that, “As both cars and roads get ‘smart,’ they promise nearly perfect, real-time law enforcement. Instead of waiting for drivers to break the law, authorities can simply prevent the crime.” They can simply darken entire neighborhoods—or flood them with the brilliance of a thousand LED suns.

[Image: One more random street light image].

Police-enabled pieces of urban infrastructure are, for Morozov, “emblematic of transformations in many other domains, from smart environments for ‘ambient assisted living’ where carpets and walls detect that someone has fallen, to various masterplans for the smart city, where municipal services dispatch resources only to those areas that need them.”

Thanks to sensors and internet connectivity, the most banal everyday objects have acquired tremendous power to regulate behavior. Even public toilets are ripe for sensor-based optimisation: the Safeguard Germ Alarm, a smart soap dispenser developed by Procter & Gamble and used in some public WCs in the Philippines, has sensors monitoring the doors of each stall. Once you leave the stall, the alarm starts ringing—and can only be stopped by a push of the soap-dispensing button.

Perhaps the DOLL experiment reveals that we can now add street lights to that list: smart targeting systems that make decisions in real-time as to which residents and neighborhoods have a right to light and who shall be punished by the induced darkness of an infrastructure that no longer wants to turn on for them.