Rice paddy art in Japan

Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear in fields in the town of Yonezawa , Japan.

Closer to the image, the careful placement of thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen.

Here’s a link to a story about this in The Japan Times.

Word associations

I find word associations to be fascinating.  As a phenomenon and as a tool for brainstorming ideas.

The Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus (EAT) is a very easy to use interactive word association database derived from counts of associations given by test subjects.  The sample base is not large.  And the whole enterprise is based in the United Kingdom, so there is a cultural bias.

Nevertheless you might find it to be fun and even useful.

Some of the results are quite interesting.  For example, using “me” as the stimulus word yielded the expected responses such as “you”, “us” and “them” and also many negative associations, including:

• alone
• bad
• confused
• fat
• lost
• mad
• no
• ugh

…and Derek.

Scale

Jellyfish in Little Lagoon

Originally uploaded by nola-shiva.

Sitting in the garden in the sun on a clear February day with a chilly air temperature. The radiant heat from the sun, some 290 million miles away, is palpable. You can feel it pressing on the bare skin. And you think about how hot the sun must be, how large it must be and about the distance and you realize that we and the sun exist and have being on incomparably different scales.

Life on earth appears to exist within a very narrow temperature range, from about -30 C to about 120 C. The known temperature range in the universe is from -269 C to about 40 million C (interior of a star). Our little biological range here on earth represents only 0.0004% of the known range. And it is at the very cold end of the known range.

On the universal temperature scale with units of say 500,000 C the earth’s bio-range is completely invisible.

What’s amazing is the sheer complexity of material life within out infinitesimal temperature range, such as the behavior of water. Water is liquid at such a micro range that it is incredible that life seems to depend almost entirely upon that property of the molecule.

New Year’s day

We took a walk on the abandoned golf course in City Park.  Overcast sky, not cold.  Lots of birds.  I went with Cathy and Dorree.  

They had recently mown the fairways.  I like them better when they are left alone, wild.  Let it go wild.  

 

We saw pelicans. Egrets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fire-breathing green dragons.

SNOLA: 2 Mexicans and a snowman

SNOLA: 2 Mexicans and a snowman

Originally uploaded by nola-shiva.

I snowed in New Orleans last Thursday, Dec. 11. A very rare event–especially if there is enough snow for accumulation. In this case we got about an inch in a couple of hours. Enough to jazz everyone up. I went out as it was ending to a couple of parks. Here, on the Audubon Park golf course, I ran into two Mexican guys who were also out enjoying the event. I took their picture with their disposable camera, and then one with mine. View my Flickr page to see more SNOLA pics.

Bubbles are a natural aspect of capitalism

Speculative bubbles have been around as long as capitalism has existed.  We look back at things like Tulip Mania of the 17th century with wonder.  But bubbles have continued to emerge in diferent forms ever since.  Each tie the prevailing feeling among speculators is, “this time it’s diferent”.

Two recent articles in The Atlantic explore the reasons for bubbles in some detail.   Exercises in “experimental economics” have shown that even under carefully controlled conditions, traders will behave in a way that creates speculative bubbles.  It rather comes down to a game in which the players place bets based on what they know and what they think the others in the game know (or don’t know).  It seems a little like poker.  See Virginia Postrel in the December 2008 issue.

In the same issue Henry Blodget discusses how the financial bubble grew and what lessons can be learned from it.  He feels that bubbles are to be expected as a natural partof a system as dynamic as capitalism.  A web of relationships, fears and expectations connecting Wall Street banks and you and me created and fed the financial bubble.  Although bubbles destroy a lot of wealth they also create it, and allow for the financing of new technological innovations, such as the rapid growth of the Internet.

New Japanese tea house imaginings

The image shows three examples from the “Nirvana Mini” show recently at the Japanese Embassy in Washington DC.  Each is new version of the Japanese tea house by a contemporary Japanese architect.  The one on the left is a model made from a single sheet of paper by  Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama.  The one on the right is also a model, this time of a tea house made entirely of glass and intended for a garden or forest setting.  It is by Norihiko Dan.  The center image is a full-sized “structureless” tea house by Kengo Kuma named “fu-an”, which translates as “floating hermitage”.  The gossamer “walls” of super-organdy (an exceptionally light cloth weighing only 11grams/square meter) are held up by a large helium-filled balloon.

The Nirvana Mini concept has been developed by Japanese author Masahiko Shimada, who has written stories, essays, poems and opera librettos.  (The English translation of one called Junior Butterfly can be found on his website.  It is a sequel to Madame Butterfly.)  I haven’t found a translation of the Nirvana Mini writings yet.

According to Susan Laszewski, writing on the Japanese Embassy’s newsletter Japan Now,

“Nirvana Mini” is a concept of design built upon the idea that all human habitats are fundamentally alike and can be extracted to an ideal space. As Mr. Shimada writes, this is because the basic structure of our homes is “prescribed beforehand by the structure of the human brain and body.”

How long will New Orleans last?

We came close to losing it all with Katrina.  How much longer do we have?  Life is precarious here, with all kinds of threats, such as hurricanes, rising sea levels, Nagin, crime, rampant and uncontrolled demolitions, city government and so on.

But life has always been precarious here–we’ve faced more or less the same kinds of threats, and others, since the city was founded way back in 1718.  Yet we’ve managed to last 290 years, making New Orleans one of the oldest large cities in the United States.  

Assuming that we are now, in 2008, at a random point in the city’s history, neither close to the beginning of it nor near the end of it, we can use an application of the Copernican Principal to predict how long the city will endure, with a 95% chance of being correct.  This method has been described by the astronomer J. Richard Gott, III, in a series of papers and in an interview in The New Yorker.

To cut to the chase, the Copernican method begins with the notion that there is a 95% chance that New Orleans is now somewhere within 95% of its total lifetime.  The “extra 5%” lies partly at the beginning and partly at the end of the city’s life.  We have either just finished the first 2.5% of the history of New Orleans or the first 97.5% (allocating the 5% equally to the beginning and the end.)

Doing the math, we can say with 95% certainty that New Orleans will last at least another 7.4 years.  We’ll survive Nagin, plus another mayor’s term and the beginning the the one after that.

At the other extreme, if we are at the very beginning, the prediction is that NOLA will endure for, sit down, 11,310 more years. NOLA Forever! Hooray!  We will have been rebuilt several times on top of a mountain of Mardi gras beads.  (Hey-maybe that’s the solution to flooding?!)

Far-fetched, of course. But that’s statistics–there is a 95% certainty that New Orleans will last for between 7.4 and 11,310 years.  Doesn’t really say much, does it?

If we lower the level of certainty the predicted life-span narrows.  For example, there is a 50% certainty that the city will last another 96 to 870 years.  There is a 25% certainty it will last for between 174 and 483 more years.

So I can now say that I’m almost 100% sure we’ll be around for another seven or eight years and 50% sure the city (not me) will be around for almost 100 more years.  Not sure how this makes me feel.

Socratic method to teach 3rd graders binary arithmetic

I recently learned that UBS, the large Swiss bank, has something called the Q-Series that is inspired by the Socratic method of using questions to probe the depths of “truth”, or at least knowledge, in their case about investment-related things.  (You must be a client to see the Q-Series reports.)

Of course this made me curious about the Socratic method, which led me to a fascinating description of one man’s use of the method with a typical 3rd grade class to lead them into understanding the binary, or base-two, system of math.  No one thought it would be possible, but by simply asking the right questions, in the right order, he got almost the whole class to a point of actually seeing this different system of counting and arithmetic.  Read Rick Garlikov’s description here.

More on small houses

I remember way back when I lived in Seattle, in the early 1980s, someone I knew lived in a small detached homes in a cluster of 6 to 8 small homes nestled between Lake Washington and a hillside.  They were all rentals, I think, old and not in the best of shape.  But the whole thing, the community of small homes, seemed wonderful to me.

Well, an architect in Washington has been creating similar communities, dense clusters of small cottages, in the Puget Sound area.  It was written up in Metropolis.  Here is the site plan for one of the newest communities, Spring Valley Cottages, located in Port Townsend.  

The homes range from 600 to 1,200 square feet and the parking is in an open lot.  Prices range from the low $200,000s to the low $400,000s.  The architect is Ross Chapin Architects.