Last edited by Backwards Observer; 12-09-2012 at 07:46 AM.
not just a stoic face
Green: Operations Alternative To Hysteria (Gr:OATH).
Urban Farming Looking Up In Singapore
Less than 20 miles from Singapore's skyscrapers is a completely different set of high-rise towers. Much smaller in scale but with a big ambition, over 100 nine-meter tall towers at Sky Greens vertical farm offer a new vision of urban sustainability. Green vegetables like bak choi and Chinese cabbage are grown, stacked in greenhouses, and sold at local supermarkets.
Urban Farming Looking Up In Singapore - CNN - 10.12.2012
The Lion City on Vimeo - Vimeo
Last edited by Backwards Observer; 12-10-2012 at 05:52 AM.
Leone di San Marco
Venice in a Day, Joerg Niggli, http://vimeo.com/40977797
Venice, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice
Enrico Dandolo, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Dandolo
Venetian Arsenal,
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetia...d_Shipbuilding
Portugal, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuga...tion_and_trade
Vasco da Gama, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama
Caravel, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravel
Last edited by Surferbeetle; 12-10-2012 at 06:53 AM.
Sapere Aude
see venice and get yelled at
I remember it well. Piazza San Marco, summer of '69, a bucolically porcine gondolier yells at me to get the blankety blank off his gondola which I've been horsing around on. An emotional moment.Originally Posted by Surferbeetle
'First encounter' with Portugal, a visit to then sleepy Malacca in the early seventies. Interesting cannons.
Malacca - WikipediaIn April 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque set sail from Goa to Malacca with a force of some 1200 men and seventeen or eighteen ships. They conquered the city on 24 August 1511. After seizing the city Afonso de Albuquerque spared the Hindu, Chinese and Burmese inhabitants but had the Muslim inhabitants massacred or sold into slavery.
It soon became clear that Portuguese control of Malacca did not also mean they controlled Asian trade centred there. Their Malaccan rule was severely hampered by administrative and economic difficulties. Rather than achieving their ambition of dominating Asian trade, the Portuguese had disrupted the organisation of the network. The centralised port of exchange of Asian wealth had now gone, as was a Malay state to police the Straits of Malacca that made it safe for commercial traffic. Trade was now scattered over a number of ports among bitter warfare in the Straits.
The Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier spent several months in Malacca in 1545, 1546, and 1549. In 1641, the Dutch defeated the Portuguese in an effort to capture Malacca, with the help of the Sultan of Johore. The Dutch ruled Malacca from 1641 to 1798 but they were not interested in developing it as a trading centre, placing greater importance to Batavia (Jakarta) on Java as their administrative centre. However they still built their landmark, better known as the Stadthuys or Red Building.
Malacca was ceded to the British in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 in exchange for Bencoolen on Sumatra. From 1826 to 1946 Malacca was under the rule of the British, first by the British East India Company and then as a Crown Colony. It formed part of the Straits Settlements, together with Singapore and Penang. After the dissolution of this crown colony, Malacca and Penang became part of the Malayan Union, which later became the Federation of Malaya and eventually Malaysia. (Wikipedia - Malacca)
Portugese Malacca - Wikipedia
does this mean ann-margret's not coming
Follow up to post #13, article on Urban Farming in Singapore.
Wrong on so many levels: The Vertical Farming Scam - Counterpunch - 11.12.2012Why, after more than a decade, does the idea of “vertical farming” keep gathering momentum? Why hasn’t it collapsed under its own weight of illogic? And why is media coverage of vertical farming almost universally positive, often enthusiastically so?
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised when a fantasy persists and thrives despite being unrealistic; after all, that’s what fantasies do. And the vertical-farming concept, unlike, say, creationism, aims at worthy goals. But when a pipedream comes to be regarded, wholly uncritically, as a means of fixing our broken food system, it becomes a dangerous distraction.
Out here in Kansas, for example, farmers and agribusinesses often back up their resistance to much-needed systemic change by claiming that America’s urban-suburban majority has no understanding of what it takes to produce food. And when they learn that city people are wanting to stack fields of crops one above the other, you can be sure that their convictions are reinforced.
chiong sua lor
Walao! Now mesti ada 6Cs mah.
Cyber Wargame Centre opens at Singapore Polytechnic - straits times - 1.3.2013.Cyber Wargame Centre opens at Singapore Polytechnic
Singapore Polytechnic students will now have state-of-the art facility to learn how to handle realistic cyber security scenarios. The Cyber Wargame Centre, the first of its kind to be based in a tertiary institution, was official opened on Thursday. The centre will be used mainly by students in the school's diploma in Infocomm Security Management course. There are four labs where students will learn how to attack and defend networks, analyse malware systems and investigate cyber security problems.
Singlish - A Language Guide for Foreigners - aussiepete5Cs [polite version]: The 5 C's of Singapore, namely Cash, Car, Credit card, Condominium, (Country) Club
fearful symmetry
Interesting architectural discussion of contemporary adaptations of Hakka Walled Village mentioned in post #5.
Hakka vs. Panopticon - agraphia - 7.18.2009Hakka vs. Panopticon. Sounds like a bad Transformers duel...
Last Year's Man has written a great response, The Human Desire for Order, to my previous post on Hak Nam, where he reminds us not to romanticize the uninhibited, unorganized growth of anarchic space (Republican free market ideology?), and remember order is natural, safe, and makes creativity possible (Democratic government intervention?). He uses the idea of Chinese Hakka architecture as an example of good space. Beautiful.
[...]
Not to be suspicious of everything 'made in China', but unfortunately, with my dystopian bent, the fist thing that came to my mind was Bentham / Foucault's Panopticon:
"The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience." Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example ...
... the design was invoked by Michel Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) as metaphor for modern "disciplinary" societies and its pervasive inclination to observe and normalise. Foucault proposes that not only prisons but all hierarchical structures like the army, the school, the hospital and the factory have evolved through history to resemble Bentham's Panopticon."
Reinventing Hakka Tulou for modern living - whatsonxiamen.com - 10.14.2008
***
The Human Desire for Order - Tecumseh Valley - 7.17.2009While uninhibited, unorganized growth is certainly a feature of nature itself, in human hands, the results tend to be less than ideal. I grew up in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, and it's hard to imagine a more perfect realization of the American ideal of decentralization. Yet far from a paradise of individualism and undefined creativity, the surroundings have produced only more conformity, more pressure to succumb to pressure from the top. New York on the other hand, with its rectangular grid, strict zoning, and centuries old neighborhoods has always been a beacon of diversity and eccentricity, place where citizens feel comparatively empowered and motivated to take action (it's hard to imagine neighborhood residents in Texas coming together to stop construction on an apartment complex. I don't even think there's a mechanism for them to voice their complaints). Like the human skeleton, the arranged streets provide a vessel for living tissue.
This leads me to believe that artists may have been looking at order in the wrong way. For better or worse, a majority of human beings have an aversion to violence (at least in their immediate person) and an impulse to group together. We are happy when we are at peace with our environment and free of stress from outside sources. You could even go as far as to say that the only way humans can achieve this sense of freedom from coercion is by being organized enough that the power of these outside influences is checked. In this way, one card argue that laws protect freedom, not encroach on it, by constraining the actions of people who hold power.
The same goes with regards to creativity. We often assume that systems exert a force that negates creativity. This is not necessarily the case. Systems can be used to refine and strengthen creativity. The great mistake that many without creativity have made, and the one which is the true source of annoyance for those who have it, is not to say that systems and creativity can coincide but that systems can be used to generate it.
Great art often comes from the most boring of places. Markets free of regulation have done little to encourage the diversification of business. These statements are at once paradoxical and ,in my opinion , indisputable. I wonder if we would have enjoyed meeting the people who actually lived inside the walls of Hak Nam.
Tulou Housing Guangzhou / Urbanus - archdaily.com - 6.8.2009
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