Yellow Submarine (1968) and The Assyrian Winged God

Reviewing the movie Yellow Submarine and I came across this famous image.  But wait, I thought, is this not a homage to the ancient Assyrian Winged God?  The original did not have an ice cream cone, of course.

 

Design Your House to Accommodate the Slaves

I have always wanted to be able to design and build my own house. Well thats not quite true. Of course what I really want to do is to specify the big ideas and have an architect and various craftsmen build the house. How else am I going to get a minimum required number of secret passages? If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, it seems.

It is a common film school aphorism that everyone's first film is about sex. I think that everyone's first house is about themselves. The house reveals something about who they are, their values, their beliefs, their interests all brought into physical reality in some form. It is a statement about how they want to live their lives and what they believe is important.

Houses are often designed to be very boring in order to maintain resell value. What a terrible idea that is! I would hope that all my readers would strive against this horrible constraint on their creativity and not worry too much about resale value. You must have faith. It also helps to have money, of course.

A friend of mine is able to build her own house in a very nice part of Santa Barbara and in the hope that some of these ideas might be in any way useful or interesting, I have compiled here some notes collected over the years, ideas I would consider if I ever built my house. None of these ideas are particularly original, in general they are ideas I have seen and liked, or read about, etc. 

But what is appealing to one person is not at all interesting to another. And this is not my house, it is the house she is building for herself and presumably her partner who I have not even met.   So this list may not be at all valuable to her.  But maybe, I mean, who knows.

This particular list is oriented towards ideas that have been around since about the 4^th century BC through the mid 19^th century or so.

Everything old may yet be new again.

The following is in no particular order.

1. All upper class Roman houses were built around one of several water collection designs, that would automatically collect the rainwater from the room in an underground space, or impluvium. We would probably call such a thing a cistern. In drought stricken California, this would be an excellent way to get water for your landscaping, for example.

This is a modern architects's interpretation of an impluvium.  Although a pool is nice, I was thinking more about just storing the water underground in a cistern.  

2. The Romans built their homes to have layers of public and private space. Any upper class Roman was a patron and would greet clients every day in their home. So a big part of the Roman home was designed to admit the clients into an outer part of the house where they were formally greeted and often received a gift.  This might be the first atrium of the house, a rather large space.    Then there would be other social spaces further in the house for those few admitted within. Beyond that would be private places for the house where the owners and family slept. Then above or below would be cubicles for the servants and slaves. The idea I want to emphasize was that even the public spaces had a hierarchy to them.  

3. My father used to struggle heating a home in Virginia that was designed to be wasteful of energy.   We put in insulation in the attic and a heat barrier (basically a door) to the basement and reduced our heating bill by half.  This is a well understood topic in America today, that there are much better ways to heat and/or cool our homes. I spent one winter at 8000 feet in Colorado in a large house that was entirely heated by one freestanding wood fireplace with an exhaust chimney made of metal that extended through the air for 10 feet on its way to the outside. There are particulate (e.g. smog) issues if everyone burns wood, but there are ways to mitigate this problem if one wants to. Am I suggesting that you heat your house with wood? I dont know, I am just pointing out how well it worked in a really cold environment and how economical it was.

On another occasion, I spent some time in the traditional adobe house of a friend of mine in Taos, NM. It was about 1/3 underground and the walls were very thick and made of some sort of compressed earth and straw, I think, and then covered with plaster. It was completely astonishing how well it kept the house cool during the very hot days and warm during the very cold nights.

The point here is not that one should heat ones house with a wooden stove or build an adobe or even that one might build the main level of the house such that 1/3 of it is below the ground, although one might do any of these things.  The point is that these ideas have real merit and are not hard to implement if one wanted to and designed it in from the beginning.

4. Not only is building underground a good use of the available space, it is especially well suited for things that should remain relatively cool and with a stable temperature.   Which is why most older American homes in the east coast and the midwest would have a basement for storage.   We would expect to use the basement for food storage, wine storage, but also computer media, storage of film, and possibly also the location of other types of house infrastructure that does not have to be upstairs in the main living, entertainment or working spaces, such as computer servers.

5.  I have always tried to keep a spare bedroom or at least a couch and made it available to friends from out of town. In Manhattan, I was very well set up for that, which is very unusual there and I wish more friends had taken advantage of it.  One of the lessons of that space is that one can accommodate guests in a way that is completely unintrusive into the rest of one's life.     When one reads novels or sees plays set in England, one often reads about families that extended  hospitality to friends and family for long periods of time, years at a time.   You might have a distant cousin or the son or nephew of an old friend who graduated from Cambridge and has no way to make a living.  So you put him up in a guest house and he tutors your daughter in mathematics.  That sort of thing.  (Arcadia). 

6. Castles in parts of Europe were built with access passages such that fireplaces in guest rooms could be lit without actually going into the room. There was a whole infrastructure behind the scenes for the servants which allowed them to come and go without disturbing the rest of the house. This also provided storage spaces for artwork that was not currently being used. The big idea is to consider building such passages, whether overt or covert, into your house for a variety of reasons and purposes. This might be special access from the kitchen to the outside entertainment area. Or it might be dumbwaiters between levels for various functional rooms of the house.

7. I recently spent the night at a hotel where I was given a room that was built to ADA standards. I loved it. The bathroom was one huge shower stall, nothing to trip over, and a nice seat to sit on while showering. There was nothing to trip over in the entire room.

8. A variety of techniques can be used to blur the outside with the inside. A good skylight or series of mezzanines can completely open up a space. A projection system designed for screenings in the house could perhaps also be designed to be redirected to project on an outside screen for those parties and events on a warm evening. In this way one can also entertain the whole neighborhood in the same way drive in movies used to. A friend of friends has built their master bedroom in Telluride such that the bed is mounted on rails and can be easily be moved outside to sleep under the stars or pushed inside out of the rain.

9. Wherever possible, combine functionality with character. The classic door knocker is of course a lion or some other creature. I always thought gargoyles were just decorative, but no, they are used to redirect water away from the stone cathedrals.

10. The Romans often built interior design into the s tructure of their homes. A painting might be implemented as a fresco and last for much longer than merely being painted. A floor was usually a mosaic made of stone.

11. The British and the Italians were particularly active in building formal gardens. There are some great books on this.

12. All Roman houses in the country were really working farms. I am not sure you want to go that far, but a nice greenhouse or container garden would be useful. Maybe make your own olive oil?

13. All homes should have an observatory of some sort to check out the countryside for hostile forces or perhaps to observe the universe.

14. All homes should have major built in bookcases, perhaps used as entrance ways into storage or corridor areas.

15. Of course we have to consider how to hide the computer infrastructure so it is not intrusive.

16. And it would be only sensible in 21^st century America to consider how we house the slaves. No need to go overboard here, a little cubicle with a stone bed was enough for the Romans and it should be enough for us.

17. One of the odd triumphs of S. California was the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century.  One might consider recreating some of their designs or setting up a workshop to do so on site or in some way to feed into your house construction.

18. One might research current artists and workshops capable of creating decorative stone or bronze work. And select an artist or two to work from their workshop or at a workshop you create to feed decorative elements into the house.  If one did create frescos one would need to find artists capable of working under those very wonderful and strange constraints (the key to a fresco is to paint it while the plaster is wet, and essentially without making any mistakes).

20. One could set up to do bronzes with the lost wax method but use 3D printing (there I go with these modern techniques again) to create the molds.

21. One might want to create and store spare parts for the house from the very beginning. It would be easier to make spare parts, tiles, sculptures, etc while the workshops that are creating them are building things for the house and just put them underground and wait the 10 or 20 or 50 years until they need replacement.

22. If you do use concrete, recall that Roman concrete is better than Portland cement and that there should be a discussion here.

23. If you do build mosaics, consider designing them with a computer and using some sort of automatic stone cutter or even 3D printer to create elements.  Remember a key to a mosaic is longevity, so it might be better to automatically cut stone or tile than to print with modern materials.

24. When working at Robert Abel & Associates, I would often walk down Romaine to visit Opamp books, which is now out of business after a long decline.   On the way there I would pass a building that was a ruin, uninhabited, that fascinated me.  At some point I noticed some sort of ironwork railings, and older leaden glass in the windows.  I eventually discovered that this was the old Hollywood headquarters of Howard Hughes in the period when he made movies.   The older glass was fascinating.  Consider using handmade or leaden glass, even consider stained glass.  Glass does not have to be boring.

and finally,

25 A carillon is a series of bells, usually played by a kind of keyboard that is below it, that has at least 24 bells or three octaves.  A chime is the same sort of thing but with at least one octave or 8 bells, but not as many as a carillon.   There is a famous chime at Hollywood Forever but it is not playable and would need restoration.   Maybe you can buy it?   I have always wanted a carillon! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carillon

The carillon in St. Petersburg, Russia.

[By the way, if you look closely at the bells above, you will see that there is type extruded on the surface.  Do you have any idea how hard that is to do?   Its amazingly difficult if it was put there as part of the pouring process, which I think it must have been.  This was an aside.]

That is enough for now.

This needs to be rewritten.

UC Berkely article on Research into Roman Concrete

http://news.berkeley.edu/2013/06/04/roman-concrete/

Cistern on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistern

Moat on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moat

Fresco on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresco

Sunset Magazine reprint on making your own olive oil

http://www.sunset.com/static/pdf/OneBlock_OliveOil.pdf

An entertaining narrative by someone who ended up with an olive grove in New Zealand

http://jaredgulian.com/2009/07/11/make-your-own-olive-oil/

Evidence of Vast Improvement in Los Angeles Mass Transit

I have recently been shown evidence that we are on the verge of a vast change in the way we do mass transit in this country. Well maybe that is a little bold and overreaching.   The evidence relates to Los Angeles specifically, not very well known for being progressive in this area.

In order to understand this evidence we first have to discuss certain techniques used to predict the future and also certain aspects of the history of the topic as it relates to the evidence. But don't worry we will get there.

It is a theme of this blog that predicting the future is sometimes easy and sometimes very hard if not completely impossible, but that it is always entertaining. One complicating factor in predicting the future of course is predicting when it will happen. Predicting what will happen is not enough. When is just as important as what.

One technique used is a concept known as the "indicator". The indicator, stolen from the fields of National Security and Economics, is nothing more than a carefully chosen event or trend that is used as a signal that something of greater scope is happening. The price of corn, the temperature of sea water, and whether a nation's troops are mobilized are all examples of indicators.

Recently I have come across solid evidence that we may be on the verge of a genuine revolution in how we do mass transit in urban areas. I suspect that this might be autonomous vehicles, which I discuss briefly below, but it might be something else. The evidence is not too specific although it is clear that something is coming.

Autonomous Taxicab, the JohnnyCab, from the original Total Recall.  If its good enough for Arnold, it should be good enough for us.

I am a firm believer that autonomous vehicles are in our future and that this is a good thing. I think that they have the potential of changing many things about how we deal with transit in an urban and non-urban environment and that many of these changes will be somewhat unexpected. Maybe we will not own cars, maybe we will just call one up from a pool when we need one. People may never have to worry about parking again and a host of other possible changes.

But being certain when this change will happen is less clear. There have been a lot of promising technologies in the past that have never been deployed in real life: people movers, monorails, levitating trains, not to mention personal airplanes and jet packs. And there are many obstacles in the way of deploying autonomous vehicles beyond the merely technical ones. I will mention just two which are daunting: the greed of the insurance industry and the stupidity of local city governments. Just navigating those two barriers will require more skill and probably more money than solving the technological issues.

Consider the following evidence of imminent change.

Slowly, and without a lot of fanfare, Los Angeles is in the process of building two mass transit systems that will reach the west side of Los Angeles. One is light rail, the Exposition Line, and it is well along and already reaches Robertson near Culver City. The other is a subway down Wilshire and it is in the early stages of construction. The estimated completion of all this work is a date well beyond 20 years from now. But there will be incremental deliverables and parts of the system will be in production sooner than other parts.

The Expo Line actually runs to Culver City.  Its like a Miracle from God that they built this thing.  

To understand why this matters you have to realize that mass transit in Los Angeles is different from other places. In other places, mass transit may be controversial, it may be a compromise, it may be expensive, it may be bankrupt, but it proceeds. But in Los Angeles, you literally have world class crime, political malfeasance, and fraud not to mention racism and major lawsuits. Volumes have been written about the stupidity, short-sightedness and corruption (e.g. bribery).  But most of all, this is an area where the politicians and the civic community failed together to find a solution to a problem that was clearly going to get worse.  In other words, they "kicked the can down the road" and hoped that others would solve it.

The problem is that in this area, as in others as well but this is an excellent test case, solving the problems require capital investment, tremendous political will, short-term grief, and a lot of time to execute.   It is an excellent example where naive, one might say, stupid, reliance on "free market solutions" is obviously a failure.   The benefits of mass transit take many forms, but several of them require the system to be planned and executed and in place for a period of time so that things can be built around it and make it all the more useful.   In other words, the transit system may have to be there for 20 years before all the benefits accrue to the investment (through the placement of hotels, universities, theatres, etc).

To ask politicians and citizens in LA to face a problem 20 years in the future and a benefit also 20 years or so in the future is so far beyond their limited intelligence and wisdom as to be beyond funny into farce.   Los Angeles was built for a reason, and that reason resounds in every decision that the civic body makes.  Los Angeles is built on a desire to steal money and fuck people right now, not on stealing money and fucking people in some future day.   This is obvious in the cheap architecture, the lack of zoning to control cheap real estate development, the dumping of wastes into the water system, the failure to control pollution generated by container ships at the Port of LA that causes a substantial percentage of the air pollution in the LA basin (is it 30% ? 40% ? No one knows).

The point is this:  it isn't possible or plausible that LA would just get around to fixing this problem, or at least some of this problem, by building a transit system, eventually.  I don't buy it.  If something like this is happening, it is an indicator, as previously described, of a larger process that is taking place behind the scenes, even if the people executing this idea are not aware of it.  I think that the will of the people and the force of shame and the collapse of the transit system in Los Angeles over the last 15 years or so has finally caused the City of LA and related areas to finally move in an area that should have been addressed 50 years ago and therefore there is no possibility of this being a wise move.  By the time it is done, something will have happened to expose why this was at best a very late decision for LA to make.

Therefore I am very optimistic that we will see a sea-change in urban transit technology in the near future, as these things are measured.  Its about time.

In a later post I will discuss why I am holding back my real feelings here about Los Angeles and their failure to deal with fundamental issues.

I grew up here.  I know where some of the bodies are buried.

Links:

Ancient History of the Expo Line
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/rail-to-the-westside-the-expo-lines-historical-precursors.html

Some Criteria for Excellence in Computer-Based Entertainment

Several years ago I did a survey of certain genres of computer game to better understand where they had come since my involvement in that industry, before it was an industry, years ago. I was looking for notable examples of the following sorts of things:

1. The illusion of intelligence

Either the game itself had some function or response that made one think that it was actually paying attention to what was going on, or the computer generated entities within the game, either opponents or allies, exhibited behavior that seemed to indicate that they were aware and responding rationally to the events.

2. A strong subjective impression of a different world or period

A good book or film will often take us to another world, real or fictional, and make us feel a part of it to some degree. So I was looking for that same sort of feeling or impression from a game.

3. Something is learned from the experience

By playing the game in a certain scenario, something is learned that is applicable to real life or to understanding a historical situation. Historically, the armed services of a nation will run "war games" or simulations because they can be so useful in learning about the sorts of things that are hard to imagine in advance. Although the popular press and imagination makes fun of these "games", thinking them frivolous, experience has shown they can be very valuable tools for planning and training.

4. Something surprising (and interesting) happens

Events and policies often have "unexpected consequences". A classic example is the question / issue of whether a minimum wage increases unemployment for certain kinds of workers. If it does, that would be an unexpected consequence. Suprising, interesting and plausible in retrospect.

5. An excellent use of an advanced technology

A game that uses a technology in an unexpected or particularly skilled manner.

6. A particularly humorous or ironic situation is created

The game has some situation or appropriate use of technology that is particular funny, or ironic, or sarcastic and indicates that someone actually thought about the game, its characters and its situations.

7. An excellent user interface.

A user interface which is beyond what you normally find, or which demonstrates some creative or appealing approach to the problem of what we see of the game and how we interact with it.

8. A fabulous concept.

A game with an idea that is so great you wish you had thought of it yourself.

9. A strong personal vision.

A game that in some way demonstrates the values or ideas of an individual or group of people who are collaborating, in a way that indicates some style or aesthetic that is clearly their own.   A writer such as Hemingway or Faulkner falls into this category and people can have a lot of fun trying to recreate or satirize their world view.  

A game that has even one of the above to some degree is an exceptional game.

In a future post, I will go over some examples I found of these (most of these) in recent games.