tingilinde

a concept car for city driving

It's too big for a much of what a dedicated city/town car needs to be, but some of the ideas are interesting.  Given the limited top speed, most people (at least Americans) would suffer from use-case anxiety.

A tip of the hat to Horace.

good indoor light

We have a natural affinity for it.

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Over the course of our reporting, we came to think about this light — distinct from the blaze of a fluorescent light bulb — as the warm glow in a Vermeer painting. Dan Kaplan, a New York architect, put this idea in our heads.

When thinking about what an apartment wants that a modern office building often lacks, he wrote in an email:

“The ideal interior condition that you are getting at is perhaps best represented by those beautiful Vermeer paintings (‘The Music Lesson,’ ‘The Milkmaid,’ ‘The Geographer,’ etc.): tall windows (open!), letting soft light fall deeply into tall-ceilinged but relatively shallow rooms.”

Truly the man loved his window light:

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more on the 15 minute city

It's bizarre that the notion has been politicized..  David Levinson offers some comments.

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Part of the problems is that we should be talking about 15-Minute Neighbourhoods and not 15-Minute Cities, because (a) that’s what we mean, and (b), the only reason to live in larger metropolitan areas is to can interact between neighbourhoods — otherwise, everyone should live in a small town and save on real estate costs.

This article (in news.com.au, i.e. Murdoch papers) discusses the controversy but conflates 15-minute city with “Smart Cities”, which I had really hoped we had buried. The adjective “Smart” before anything (smart roads, smart cars, smart cities) is a red flag. This article by Oliver Deed argues the 15-minute city is about improving lives, not controlling them.

So what is a `15-Minute Neighbourhood’? It’s one where all your daily needs (food, doctor, library, schools, etc.) can be met within a 15-minute walk from your home. This does not necessarily include your workplace, although it may.

The conspiracists have replaced “can” with “must”, changing opportunity into a constraint. Charitably, they have difficulty reading. Uncharitably, they choose to misinterpret and mislead.

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building a compressed air lego engine

but it has elves

A very elaborate $500 Lego set.

 

quiet propellers

Greg noted this bit on toroidal propellers - very nice.. it's particularly interesting seeing potential use on drones.

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By decreasing and even eliminating tip cavitation and vortices, the Sharrow models also dramatically reduce noise and energy loss when a boat cruises through open waters. Additional benefits include 50% more reverse thrust, 30% more range, less vibration, and doubled speed at mid-range RPMs.

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flexibility

Electric cars free designers from several constraints.  Here's a piece on what's happening at the high end... where ideas of usually first tired.

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Ultra-expensive EVs can open up designs that would otherwise be impossible. "I can distribute the mass of this car in other places to have a different look and feel," Reichman said. "I'm not constrained by an inline four-cylinder, six cylinder, V6, V8, or V12 engine. I could have a flat battery pack. I could have a box that looks like a battery pack. I can distribute the batteries all over."

"Ultimately, the cars are pieces of architecture that have to fit human beings," he said. "The biggest constraint is the human being. We have a certain volume, and you have to package that volume within the car, so the more you can give that volume freedom because the engine is smaller, the battery is smaller, the motor is smaller, the more you can give the architecture to the occupant."

Many designers believe that the constraints of current EVs will be resolved through product planning mandates that make electric cars blend in with the SUVs that dominate the roads. "I think that there's a strong trend at the moment of what people believe electric cars should be like, and I question that," said Bentley Director of Design Andreas Mindt.

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on building houses

Is 3d printing a solution?  

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So far, 3-D-printed construction has generated more headlines than buildings. In the past few years, companies have announced the first 3-D-printed house in Florida, “the first two story house printed on site in Europe,” and the first market-rate 3-D-printed house sold in the United States. Until last year, Icon, one of the biggest and best-funded companies in the field, had printed fewer than two dozen houses, most of them essentially test cases. But, when I met Ballard, the company had recently announced a partnership with Lennar, the second-largest home-builder in the United States, to print a hundred houses in a development outside Austin. A lot was riding on the project, which would be a test of whether the technology was ready for the mainstream. “We almost won’t get out of bed for less than a hundred homes anymore,” Ballard told me. “This is a problem at scale, and so we need to be working at scale.”

In Austin, where the median rent has risen forty-five per cent in the past year, the tech industry is usually considered a driver of the housing crisis, rather than its solution. “In short order, like Silicon Valley, it could result in people having to make career decisions and say, ‘I can’t live there, I can’t afford it,’ ” Henry Cisneros, a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and mayor of San Antonio, said at a panel on housing affordability at South by Southwest last year. The next day, Ballard, one of the conference’s featured speakers, made a more techno-utopian pitch. “What if we could build houses that work twice as good in half the time at half the price? What kind of problems could we solve? What kind of opportunities would open up before us?” he asked. “Humans are amazing, life is a miracle, and we can do this.”

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It could help a but, but building affordable homes is a deeper problem than the time and cost of construction.

 

 

when charts mislead

 

 

 

the symbol of a new agency

 

the eagle is in Dirac notation