tingilinde

la's housing crisis

Before the fire Los Angeles lacked affordable housing and new housing of any kind has been slow to install given a lack of home builders.  Perhaps the fires  will provide the shock to make radical changes to the building codes.  Some countries, including those in earthquake zones, have nice manufactured modular housing that can be insulated by very small crews in a few days Attempts to do this in the US have largely failed due to building codes.  There's going to be enormous pressure for change.

 

korean housebuilding

average home sizes

For US states and European countries..  there are reference links.

Utah homes are huge

 

 

sanborn fire insurance maps

I'd never heard of them, but this is fascinating. 

snip

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The Sanborn fire insurance maps (wikipedia) were created by Daniel Alfred Sanborn, a civil engineer and surveyor. In 1866, he was contracted by the Aetna Insurance Company to prepare maps of areas in Tennessee. About the same time, he developed similar maps of Boston, published as Insurance Map of Boston, Volume 1, 1867. Seeing a lucrative market for this type of map, he established the D. A. Sanborn National Insurance Diagram Bureau in New York City to publish the Boston atlas and develop and sell maps of additional areas. Within several decades, the company became the largest and most successful American map company.

Sanborn maps were designed to help insurance companies assess the fire risk of individual properties. They were highly detailed, showing the size, shape, and construction of buildings, as well as the materials used in their construction. This information was used by insurance companies to calculate the premium that a property owner would have to pay for fire insurance.

The Sanborn map company flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As cities grew and became more densely populated, the need for accurate fire insurance maps became even more important. Sanborn maps were used by insurance companies all over the United States, and the company had offices in major cities across the country. The use of Sanborn maps began to decline in the 1960s. As building codes became more stringent, and as fire suppression technology improved, the need for such detailed maps became less important. The Sanborn map company continued to publish maps until 1977, but the company filed for bankruptcy in 1980. The rights to the Sanborn maps were acquired by a number of different companies over the years, and they are now available for purchase online and in libraries.

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a tip of the hat to John

 

dealing with half-dirty clothes

Simone is on the job - a tip of the hat to Greg

making zoom lenses in japan

weighted blackets

Something I was unaware of..  my guess is a large dog is even more effective.

Also note there's very little objective testing.

 

 

sweater antennas

Knitting techniques to make lightweight/foldable antennas

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The intersection of ancient craft and cutting-edge technology rarely produces practical solutions for modern problems. Yet in the laboratories of Columbia Engineering, a team led by Dr. Nanfang Yu, associate professor of applied physics and applied mathematics, has achieved exactly that. Using the same knitting technique found in traditional Fair Isle sweaters, they’ve created sophisticated radio-frequency antennas that could transform how we communicate across vast distances.

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a ux conversion

Using LEGO interface pieces.

snip

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What could cause 400 WWII pilots to raise the landing gear on their B-17 bomber just before touchdown? Catastrophic pilot error, or something more fundamental?

It was the psychologist Alphonse Chapanis who first suggested that the high rate of crash landings might be the fault of poor interface design. The adjacent landing gear and flap control knobs were identically shaped. The pilots never stood a chance.

His temporary solution was to glue differently shaped strips of rubber to each switch, enabling blind operation by touch alone. This gave rise to the idea of shape coding and a system of differentiation still being followed in aircraft cockpits today.

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precision aerobatics at a walking pace

air is, indeed, a fluid