how to build a tree

how to build a tree from Nathan Hodges on Vimeo.

design tourism

in thailand
regular programming to return momentarily.
in the meantime...

all the news in 1000words or less

taco flat

new squatter communities are springing up like mushrooms throughout the west. for a good rundown check out this article

and

these photos


is access to land a right? is territory the basis of action? can these places create new solutions? or are they problems?

the ability of the capitalist system to satisfy the demand for low-rent informal housing is clearly nonexistent. so thousands of people are sidestepping the dollar and squatting land that does not belong to them. new types of stories are unfolding, new policy is forming to either eradicate or metabolize these growing communities. but what if they're allowed to stay? would the security of tenure encourage squatters to make a greater investment in their homes and community? (dignity village is a good example)

flickr here

this land is our land and we've never been able to live on it without paying for that privilege. but through the courts we seem to be deciding that sometimes that's okay. recently in colorado a couple were awarded a 1/3 share in a million dollar vacant lot because they had used it continually for 20 years. They planted a garden there and stacked their firewood. They say they held parties there and walked the land so often they wore a path in the grass (latimeshere).

all it took to make the land theirs; using it.


i suggest that a new era of property rights is being phased in, where if land is not being used it can be taken by people who can use it without paying for it. We'll be joining a host of other countries where self-built squatter communities are becoming seen as solutions to homelessness and a way to build community capital. (boston globe here)

and to end, a quote

The expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The essence of a free colony... consists in this—that the bulk of the soil is still public property, and every settler on it therefore can turn part of it into his private property and individual means of production, without hindering the later settlers in the same operation.

KARL MARX AND YOU LIKE IT

from here


and finally the amazing ben peterson who is trying to imagine how it will all feel


more here (thank you to david godshall of the nurserymen for sending me this link)

Dreams Are the Sun & the Earth Speaking to Us

An still image of the earth's magnetic field, a dynamic system wiki here

A very odd study recently published in the Medical Hypotheses journal correlates the bizarreness of dreams with local fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field.

Darren Lipnicki kept meticulous records of his dreams for 8 years and then scored them on a 5-point ranking of strangeness.

On the low end were mundane dreams - "I am sitting at a table doing some maths or physics homework."

In the middle of the scale were the possible but unlikely - "A friend is in the backyard of my house, building a wooden platform atop of 7-foot high stilts."

And into the zone of being unlike Darren's waking reality - "I was stranded on a foreign coastline with a monkey that spoke English and a woman that suddenly became small, almost doll-sized. Then I was at home."

He found that it was during the times when geomagnetic activity was least that he had the strangest dreams.

An image of the sun's solar wind bombarding the earth's magnetic field. wiki here

Geomagnetic activity is caused by solar wind bombarding the earth's magnetic field with supercharged plasma. Fluctuations in the magnetic field, in turn, affect the Telluric currents. Telluric currents are the vast rivers of electrical energy that flow through the ground. They make earth batteries work and powered the telegraphs. They are used by industrial prospectors to find oil, ore, water, faults, and magma chambers. It's like the sun's energy is being sung by the earth. These giant fields of magnetic and electrical force swarm all around us and buzz, zapp, and frazzle our brains, just like a big solar storm could wipe out the electrical grid. In addition all of our electrical appliances and power infrastructure emit electro-magnetic fields, potentially further affecting our dreams.

BUT it was only when the geomagnetic activity decreased that Darren's dreams turned strange. And what are strange dreams? Many people do not consider the dreamworld any less real than our waking world. Isn't it strangest of all to dream a world just like the one you're awake in?

this is all too silly, but i would suggest not sleeping with your laptop under your pillow.

Snail Farm Cart - UPDATE

the nice folks at the Food For Thought Competition awarded the Snail Cart 6th out of 100 entries.
check out the other winners at http://www.24-7sandwichshop.org/
order yours now.

Snail Farm Cart

A recent project for the SFFlower&GardenShow Sculpture Contest & the Food For Thought Design Competition.
A mobile integral unit for growing, preparing, cooking, and selling snails.

PDF HERE

the ecosystem model of everything

(image of antiobiotc resistant Staphylococcus aureus subsp. aureus original here)


A flurry of recent news items and newly minted research consortia have drawn unprecedented attention to the nether world of microorganisms that exist within and upon us middle-of-the-universe humans. I've discussed this before. The most significant is the Human Microbiome Project, a multi-disciplinary research group with the goal of cataloging all the flora and fauna that lives in and on the human body. The research thus far makes it uncertain if this is even possible, but does open up an entirely new can of worms where the boundaries between humans and their environment are increasingly blurred.

One of the first papers to come out of this collaboration details the unique tribes of bacteria that dwell on the skin of your inner elbow (nytimes article here). The skin, in general is loaded with microorganisms, even after you wash there are approximately 1 million of these tiny creatures on every square centimeter of your body. For the most part these hitchhikers are commensulate, feasting on our dead skin cells in return for keeping us clean and moist. On the inner elbow a team of researchers sampled five people and found that everyone had 6 major tribes of bacteria in common, with a few specific tribes depending on the individual. This was good news for the researchers; it meant that developing a general model of human microorganism communities could be possible. A general model in turn could be used to detect abnormalities in an individual's microbiota and create a sort of standardized probiotic regimen that could correct deviations in the profile. Making us healthier and more resistant to the bacteria that make us sick. However, a separate group of researchers that focused on an area of the forearm a few inches away from the inner-elbow study had a very different outcome...

"We swabbed the forearm skin of six people. There were 12 arms. We found 182 species of microbes representing seven different phyla,” he said. “Recently, another group studied skin from the crook of the elbow, just a few centimeters away from the site of our study, and found an entirely different microbial population. In our studies, we found 91 different genera, but only five of them were present in all six individuals. Sixty-one were present in just one individual, indicating a very high level of intrahost variability. Further, we looked at the same individuals eight to 10 months later and found that their microbial populations were no more similar to their own arms than to somebody else’s arm.” original here

in another study at University of Colorado Boulder, researchers swabbed the hands of 51 undergraduates. They detected and identified more than 4,700 different bacteria species but only five species were shared among all participants. Even more surprising, the right and left palms of the same individual shared an average of only 17 percent of the same bacteria types.

This research suggests that everybody has a unique microbiotic "signature." This signature varies both in space on our bodies and in time as we move through new environments, seasons cycle, and our diet changes. Understanding how this signature is related to health, behavior, and our evolution as a species will help us understand each human not as an isolated organism acting in space, pursuing an individual agenda, but as complex and densely populated ecosystems that are in constant flux and flow, disturbances in the community creating moods, diseases, thought patterns, rashes, glow, love, tumors etc. Known as a superorganism, our human cells are outnumbered 10 to 1 by microbiotic partners, and we are constantly exchanging these creatures with our environment.


(photo of bacteria colonies on a cell, original here)

The primary tool that has unlocked this new mode of understanding is metagenomics. A rapid DNA/RNA sequencing technique that rather than amplifying an isolated genome to identify a single species, takes a large sample of many different genomes and parses out individual genes. A sort of gene frequency map for a given scoop of earth or skin swab, where function is defined not as a single organism but as a suite of genes that blur boundaries between organism and ecosystem.

This is a new way of thinking, where the individual is superceded by the community, where function can be found in an overall ecosystem genetic profile rather than trophic webs. What are the primary genes in this system and what function do those genes carry? A way of viewing the world as a series of concentrated microbial activity nodes, each node corresponding to a function or an organism. Co-evolution seems logical, but given the incredible variation between microbial communities on/in individuals a sort of human-as-garden (bacteria being the gardeners) seems more appropriate. We evolved the capability to play host to almost anything that comes along, and the first-come-first-served concept seems to play out nicely as our friendlies circle the wagons and battle back the invaders, who of course have another host (pig, goose, rat, etc) in which they are the good guys. In this light every plant and every animal is an ecosystem maintained by microorganisms. The genus/species model based on the individual is very poor resolution, akin to viewing Earth as a single species. To give some perspective, humans have approximately 4305 square feet of surface area that is speckled with microbiota at a density of (+/- 1,000,000) one million per square inch. If you were the size of an average bacteria, that would be like living on a planet 51 times the size of earth (a finger is the area west of the Mississippi) where everyone had 135 acres of prime real estate to call home. A strange world.

The implications are clearly far reaching, and I believe that in the next 50 years this mode of thinking will be highly instrumental in forging a new kind of eco-ethic, where humans are inextricably tied to their environment through the constant flow of microorganisms. A robust ecosystem keeps us (me and my flora/fauna) healthy, clean water keeps us healthy, living food keeps us healthy, but when the environment becomes toxic, or corrupt with antibiotics, and conditions shift to favor a different suite of microorganisms, we get sick, or angry, or depressed, or greedy, and we create a world that favors those creatures that are in us, so they grow stronger, multiply and spread. Good versus evil. The future will be a time where we learn how to live in harmony with the microorganisms, gathering beneficials to combat the superbugs we've bred, washing our crops with pest fighters, clothes designed to encourage not kill, energy from algae, fungi digesting our waste, a world where we fully embrace ourselves as ecosystems, not individuals.