the art of loitering · 8.03.10

I should save this for another project, but I love it too much to wait. I came upon a curious little book called In Your Stride by A.B. Austin (1931, Country Life), not so much a walking guide, as a guide to a walking life, with hints about where and how to spend your time throughout the year, rather than specifics. The Daily Telegraph called it “one of the most happy books of home travel.” The first chapter sets the scene, and it’s that that I reproduce here. It’s just a lovely piece of writing, full of character, useful tips, tales and stories. Like many authors, its hard to find much about Austin, other than the books he’d written.

Whilst the exact manner of his travel can’t be quite reproduced now, it makes me want to get out, to travel and to walk – or loiter in Austin’s parlance. I hope you enjoy it too.

THE ART OF LOITERING by A.B. Austin, taken from IN YOUR STRIDE, 1931

YESTERDAY I came upon the Portsmouth road, not far south of Liphook, where West Sussex touches Hampshire. I had not meant to come near the Portsmouth road, but that part of Hampshire is so distracted with ways—beech and oak lanes, heather tracks, sand paths, cart ruts, drives, rides and avenues, public and private—that I defy the most cunning in mapcraft to keep a straight course.

The Portsmouth road held me for a mile before I turned away to make for the woods that lie between Woolmer Lodge and Ludshott Common. I had not been walking on it for more than five minutes when I came to the conclusion that something must have stricken the inhabitants of London and the country to the north with terror. Panic reigned on the Portsmouth road. Panic had set these refugees hurtling southward to the sea. I began to feel quite heroic— a lonely figure walking north to face the unknown terror from which the rest of the world was fleeing.

Never before had I seen so many people in so many cars all streaking south at such a high average of speed —family cars, intimate cars, baby cars, limousines, open cars, closed cars, cars glittering and young cars, travel-dimmed and old, cars foursquare, cars aquiline, feline, purring cars, bronchial cars. There was hardly any pause in their flight. The rude, windy buffets of their passing became so monotonous that I felt as if some playful spirit were trying to turn me back by blowing an invisible bellows into my face. Yet when I looked at the faces of the drivers of the cars they did not seem to be panic-stricken. They looked eager. They crouched forward slightly, their eyes staring ahead, their lips compressed.

“ Perhaps,” I said to myself, “ they are not afraid. Perhaps they are full of hope. Perhaps someone has found gold near Portsmouth.”

And then I remembered that this was Saturday afternoon, that it was early in January, 1931, that it was the first time I had walked on a main road away from Lon- don since the new traffic laws came into force. This was neither panic nor hope. It was the first surge of delight at the passing of the speed limit. These were men and women clutching freedom with both hands as they bent over the steering-wheel. They were no longer merely licensed car drivers. They were citizens of the speed world. Let them not drive to the public danger and no one cared what they did on the open road.

I had really no business to be meandering along their road. My creeping progress might spoil someone’s new-found pleasure. For it was their road. It had been built, or rather adapted, for them. Without its glossy blue-black surface, its faultless camber, its generous width, its gentle curves, they could no more pursue their hobby, seize their thrill, than the railway train could run without its track.

When I left the Portsmouth road, feeling almost as apologetic as if I had strayed on to the course at Epsom while the Derby was being run, the perfection of this arrangement of modern England seized hold of me. Here was I, and doubtless innumerable others, born with a taste for loitering, a habit of exploring at leisure the bumps, curves, hollows, lanes and watercourses, all the places in this island, waste and fertile, that could be most conveniently come at by using legs. There, on the other hand, were the thousands who found their joy in swift travel, whose highest exhilaration came from the skilful handling of machines at the highest possible speed.

I felt that we, the loiterers, owed those others a debt of gratitude. Instead of being too ready to assume a somewhat priggish superiority, we ought to be thankful for the excellence of a compromise that has left us by far the greater part of this island or of any other country for our pleasure. They have taken from us “ the open road “ and have left us every lane, path, cart-track, hedgerow, field, woodland, forest, common, moorland and mountainside. Their pleasure demands the greatest skill that the road engineer can bring to his work, and the greater their demand for speed the more like a racing track must the road become. Nor, having once known the exhilaration of the perfect road, are they likely to be tempted by the less even surface of the tributary ways that branch off from it here and there.

It really is high time that we stopped making our futile complaints against the spoiling of a countryside, parts of which can never return to the quietude that possessed them when travel could only be on horse or foot. It is time that we began to take stock of the wealth that is left to us and to consider how we may best spend it for our own enjoyment.

We no longer grumble when we come across a railway track in some remote district. Why should we grumble because an arterial road happens to lie across our path ? It is crossed in a few seconds, it is hidden by the next hillock, the drone of its traffic dies away, the architectural and mechanical excrescences that may happen to squat upon its flanks are forgotten. For the loiterer it is merely an interlude, a reminder that there are other necessities and other forms of enjoyment than his.

It is also a reminder, for those who happen to live in towns, that nowadays there need be no specified times and seasons for journeying into the open. In the summer, in the holiday months, there is naturally a greater amount of coming and going upon the main roads, but there are few week-ends in any month when the roads running away from London or any other large city do not carry their quota of pleasure-hunting motorists.

Now the art of loitering is one that can be studied all the year round in almost every corner of this island. Perhaps I shall be accused of having twisted the mean- ing of the verb to suit my own purposes. I cannot think of a word that would better express this particular form of pleasure-seeking. To loiter, says the Oxford dictionary, is to “ linger on the way”, to “ hang about”, to “ travel indolently and with frequent pauses”. There are three kinds of walkers, and only one is a loiterer within the dictionary meaning. There are those who walk with a grim determination as if the world were a sanded track marked in laps of twenty or thirty miles to the day. There are those who walk with a bleak purpose, far enough to coax the appetite but not far enough to derange the digestion. And there are those who walk because they can’t help it, because walking is for them part of the business of living.

These last, for whom walking is an incurable habit, are the true loiterers. They are of so curious a mentality that they cannot bear in their leisure to be carried about too quickly for fear they should be missing some delicate touch of colour, some sound only to be heard by the unhurried, some stray human encounter. The bumps and hollows on the face of the earth have a fascination for them. They are collectors of days and hours and minutes, savouring the fine essence of each according to its season, storing in their memories its subtleties of light and shade, the quality of its stillness or its movement, the tone of each instrument in that orchestra of two players, wind and water.

How, then, could they fail to be loiterers? They pass along many ways, but they are given to lingering on all of them. Their curiosity about the details of earth causes them constantly to “ hang about”. They may appear to be more than normally energetic, and no doubt they do make great play with the muscles of their legs, but that is because the places of their keenest enjoyment can only be reached on foot. It is admitted that they travel. They frequently travel great distances, but if the habit of loitering is ingrained in them it will be found that, more often than not, they “ travel indolently and with frequent pauses”. How else could they “ hang about,” or “ linger on the way “ ?

This type of individual is, I am convinced, increasingly to be found in this country. England has an amiable way of falling in with his, or her desires. Not even a year of constant loitering will reveal all the intimacies of one district. Many seasons, with all the variety of mood of which each is capable, must pass before acquaintance becomes friendship. There is no naked magnificence, boldly etched against the sky, saying, “ Like me or dislike me, this is my face.” Ask three or four different people not merely what they mean by England, but what they mean by one county —Devon, or Surrey—and each will give you a different answer. And when you have counties lying side by side—Sussex and Hampshire, Devon and Cornwall, Yorkshire and Westmorland—each having a character of its own that differs strongly from its neighbour, it would seem that a lifetime of wayfaring would leave unanswered the question—” what is England ? “

Some, perhaps, would rather ask, “ What is left of England ? “ Their answer would be as shortsighted and as full of pessimism as their question. Theirs is a tacit admission that they find themselves defeated by modern circumstance. They have loved leisurely ways ; they find all about them a desire to turn leisure into meaningless haste. They have loved quiet ; they find the places of their solitude shattered by the noise that speed begets. They have loved the unbroken hillside, the unspoiled valley and the unscarred plain ; they find wayward roads, pleasant to the feet, being made straight, gashes being cut in the rising slopes to carry the new highway on an easier course, and a sudden thrusting outwards of dwelling-places from the towns into the country. They watch this transformation being accomplished with most undignified haste in their own particular district. They feel resentful, and uncharitably disposed towards the strangers who have suddenly squatted in their midst. They rush to the conclusion that this island has become a network of swift roads lined with raw villas.

Their conclusion is not unnatural, but it is very far from the whole truth. It is true that there is hardly a village or farmhouse in England, and in a great part of Scotland that docs not lie within easy reach of a main road or a railway line. But, as I have already said, main roads and railway lines are but streaks of speed. They do their duty by the traveller without regard to the country that lies on either hand. I could point to many stretches of countryside within twenty, or twenty-five miles of London that lie as quietly between the traffic routes to and from the city as if these were turnpike roads and their only traffic stage-coaches and hay wains. I am not sure that their quiet is not even more profound, partly by contrast with the bustle on the highway, and partly because those who use modern roads have less time and less inclination to turn aside into a maze of cumbersome ways and rutted tracks.

If that quiet can be sought and found and enjoyed within easy reach of London consider the rest of England. Consider your own county, your own parish. Think of the commons and woods, hillsides and valleys where, as one with a taste for loitering, you take your constant pleasure within comfortable distance, as modern transport measures distance, of your own home. Let the thought expand. Add to the places of your intimate knowledge other districts equally enjoyed by the loiterers of other counties ; think of Dartmoor and Exmoor and the Dorset heaths and coast, and the New Forest and the Sussex Downs and the Kentish orchards. Range from south to north, or north to south, according to your situation, over every county in England. Add Scotland and Wales to the sum total and then tell me that there is little left for your enjoyment in this island !

The thought is almost depressing to one greedy of his countryside. To sniff the thousand fragrances that go to make up England one would need to have far more leisure than falls to the share of the ordinary man. And yet the ordinary man has leisure enough, and the means of going where he pleases, if he has sufficient imagination to discover how speed can be made to serve his purpose. He has, as a general rule, thirty-six hours a week, and very often more, in which he is free to go where he likes. He has also a period, once a year, of anything from one to four weeks in which he is the master of his movements. Fifty years ago he might have had cause to complain that his movements were circumscribed. He could not, unless he were wealthy, wander at random over any part of England, Scotland, or Wales, except, perhaps, during his annual period of freedom. Now those who love speed have discovered that the roads of this island are theirs. They can devour, if they choose, thousands of miles of the finest tarmac in one year. They have no need to wait until the recognised holiday period. Every week-end brings renewed freedom, calling on them to set a vast space between themselves and the places of their daily occupation.

And what of the loiterer—whether he be also a motorist, or not ? Is not England his estate ? Can he not savour England afresh week after week, all the year round, in as many different regions as he has days at his disposal ? If he should happen to live in London can he not enjoy his spring on the Welsh border, or on the Peak, or in Devon and Somerset, as well as in Bucks and Hertfordshire, and Kent and Surrey and Sussex ? Indeed, he is no true connoisseur of England if he does not, for who can claim to know England who cannot tell you how April creeps up the downland slopes from the Sussex Weald, or blows a warmer breath through Lustleigh Cleave, or stands a few buffets from declining March on the hillsides above Llanthony ?

That, you may protest, is rather a tall order, for who has leisure to go exploring all the solitariness that is left in England while he has to find the means to spread butter on his daily bread ? The question may be answered by asking another. How much do we spend on holiday comings and goings every year, including not only our annual exodus to sea or countryside, but all our odd motoring, sporting, walking, climbing, butterfly-catching escapades ? How much, in other words, does our leisure cost us ? I have tried every variety of holiday, from the comfortable security of hotel, farmhouse or furnished cottage to the choice, dictated by your weather sense, that lies each evening between a barn or stable-loft, and a sheltered, heather hollow. Ten years ago I had no choice. It was sleep out or stay at home. One pound meant a week’s wandering in the Highlands or over the Border hills, choosing a sleeping place before dark where the pool tempted, or the wood was dry for kindling, or the slope of the hill cut off the wind. Four pounds in my pocket meant wealth and freedom for a month. My first extravagant outburst was the spending of eight pounds on a journey which took five weeks and carried me on a bicycle from Edinburgh to London, by boat and train from London to Dijon, on foot for three weeks from Dijon round the Lake of Geneva and across the Juras again to Pontarlier and so back to Edinburgh by train, boat and bicycle. That, too, was a nightly affair of seeking the most comfortable resting-place in the open. I did not dare to spend a night indoors for fear the expense would not leave me enough money to bring me home again. In more generous days I don’t think I have spent more than fifty pounds in any holiday year, and forty pounds would probably be a good average.

With forty pounds, or even thirty pounds, to be invested yearly in leisure, what can you do with England ? Not much if your desire is for one expensive “ rest “ in the height of summer ; a great deal if yours is the art of loitering. There is a certain convention in the matter of holiday-making, a tendency to observe times and seasons in going to Switzerland and Scotland, and the other migratory homes of our island species. In one way it is a blessing. Those who follow the convention no doubt do so because they find that it gives them the greatest enjoyment of their leisure, or because they find it hard to rebel against fashion. Those who are con- trolled, in their seasons of work and play, by the limitations of school terms or office routine, appear to accept their limitations philosophically. Those who have the opportunity, and the taste, for unorthodox holiday- making rejoice because the convention gives them chance to find the places of their choice unvisitored, living an unselfconscious life “ off-season”. And yet — it seems a pity that, in spite of the swiftness and (if you know how to go about it) the comparative cheapness of modern travel, we should make so little of our island — that we should only know Scotland as a grouse-drive, or leave Paddington in overcrowded trains because the heather only purples once a year in Devon.

It should be possible for a great many people to obtain, at small cost, greater benefit from the whole of our island year than they do from one unvarying period in the months of July, August or September. It should be possible to work, as the majority of us do, nt an occupation requiring a fixed number of hours every day, and yet from time to time to escape from London or any other town to almost any corner of Great Britain we choose, and there, thrusting away habit and routine for the briefest space, to find refreshment that lets us begin work again with vigour re-doubled, and to do this ten or twelve times in one year.

Assuming that our modern calendar allows most of us a week-end of two consecutive days in practically every month, may I draw upon one experiment of my own, not as a specimen for every loiterer (we all believe that our own choice of enjoyment is the most satisfying) but as a tested sample of one year’s rich experience of the people and the places in every seasonal mood that this country has to offer ?

I had not long been in England, and I wanted to see as many parts of it as possible, as often as possible, and in the way that happened to please me best— on foot. I had one month’s leisure in the year, and I did not want to spend it hurrying in unleisurely fashion between all the places of my choice. I divided my month into eleven periods of two days and one period of a week—eleven monthly week-ends, and one little holiday. There is unbounded freedom to be got out of forty-eight hours if you can make the most of them. To keep time at bay one must avoid long hours of daylight travel by rail or road. With two days to command, you can travel to Scotland, or Wales, or Devon, going by night and returning by night—sleeping one night in whatever inn or cottage chance, or your own forethought, has provided for you. Travel by night is not tiring nowadays, if you are in good health. And who minds the risk of two nights of broken slumber in one month, if they are set off by two days of unsullied air and bodily freedom ?

That was a year in which the most uninteresting work in the most unprepossessing surroundings would have seemed like a flat plain—uninspiring to the eye, but always touched with the heady air of hills not too far away and the promise of deep valleys and climbing pinewoods.

January found me on Dartmoor, a Dartmoor like a stormy sea, her tors billowing in and out of the wind- blown mist. Late in February I could bathe near Lulworth Cove— a Lulworth gone back to former loneliness, keeping company with cormorants—and then go inland over Bere Heath to watch the evening sun sitting on the edge of the world. In March I lost myself on the Black Mountains, just over the Welsh border in Brecknock. In April I took my week’s holiday, and, surrendering to nostalgia, caught the Cairngorm mountains in Aberdeenshire before the wind had stopped fretting the frost flowers on the snow slopes. I climbed, glissaded, fell through the snow crust into growling burns, and grew as black in the face as any yodeller.

May was more modest. I sought out the Chilterns before the rogue-haunted beechwoods of that old “ Hundred “ had lost their first freshness. But June found me once more over the Border— where Yarrow and Ettrick run down to Tweed, and spring begins all over again in the upland places. I spent one July night in a gamekeeper’s cottage on that more abandoned edge of the Peak district that straggles along the Yorkshire border, and was allowed to return next day along forbidden paths, over peat bogs from which the infant grouse were beginning to spread unsteady wings. August took me no further than the upper valley of the Wey. There Surrey touches Hampshire, and the heather bloom is as drowsy as any in the north.

September and October I divided between Exmoor and the South Downs up in the morning and down at night, from the valley of the Barle across the moor to Badgworthy Water, from Adur slinking out of the Weald up and over to Arun as quietly moving through its Downland gap. November sunshine refurbished for me the fading tapestry of autumn in London’s nearest wilderness-the less beroaded parts of the Forest Ridge on the edge of Sussex, between Balcombe and Crowborough. To end the year I tried the New Forest on two still days in December. The morning frost crackled under foot in the cart ruts of the rides. In the afternoon I looked across the Beaulieu River from Buckler’s Hard and saw the forest standing close on the further bank. The stark branches of the taller trees dissolved into floating mist as the day drew in.

And the cost of this month of leisure spread thin over the year’s work? For nightly lodging, food and rail- way fares (generally week-end)—something under £30.

I have tried to sketch, in barest outline, one year out of some ten or twelve that have been devoted to the art of loitering. For the moment the colour and character of each day, the pleasant flavour of adventure that hangs upon the mind’s palate after each of a thousand fresh encounters, must be left to the imagination. I am only concerned to convince those who live in London or any other large city, and whose movements are confined by a daily job of work, that theirs is the freedom of England whenever it pleases them to accept it, that it is possible for them to know the way from Chagford, on the Teign, over to Postbridge, on the Dart, or from Steyning across the Downs to Arundel, or from Kimmeridge along the Dorset coast to Lulworth as well as they know the way from Trafalgar Square to Ludgate Circus.

Many will need no convincing. Ten years ago the Cairngorm mountains, in Aberdeenshire, the highest group in this island, were looked upon as a kind of sanctuary by those who thought nothing of a thirty- mile march by glen and mountainside, and a night’s rest in the heather, or in some lonely stalker’s bothy. Last summer there was a different tale to tell. The hills were speckled with walkers—not climbers ; this was no rock-scrambling entertainment. The path that goes across the Lairig Ghru, and never touches a main road for between twenty and thirty miles had become a highway. The Lairig Ghru is the pass that cuts the Cairngorm mountains in half. It lies, a mighty fissure between the bare granite shoulders of Ben Macdhui and Braeriach, and it takes you from the headwaters of the Dee down to the valley of the Spey, out of Aberdeenshire into Inverness. You would meet walker after walker on a day’s march, girls and men, young and old, some still children, some grey-haired, stepping it along the toilsome track, over heather and granite scree, in all the chancy summer weathers, leaping the burns that hurtle down the mountainside, breathing the air so rare and fresh that it makes the limbs rejoice, and the lungs work as they never worked on the plain.

I am not suggesting that we have suddenly become a nee of mountaineers, but if this new enthusiasm is leading so many people to spend their holidays in a part of our island so comparatively inaccessible, it will not be stretching credulity too far if I say that our other uncultivable regions, lonely, but less difficult and expensive to reach, our heaths, commons, moors and mountain ranges, are coming in for their share of eager exploration.

Exploration. That is the word for it. There never were so many explorers in this country before. We have tried to make our world smaller by reckoning its surface in terms of time rather than of distance. In this island we have built highways to make accessible even those waste regions that were isolated before. The car and motor-coach have carried hundreds of thousands of people to parts of Great Britain whose existence had been for them almost as legendary as the Himalayas or the Andes. They have paid, at first, hurried visits to those new lands, noting, as they passed, the flying outlines of scores of places, lowland and upland, bare or wooded, whose silent appeal has called for quieter and deeper exploration. For some the experience has not sufficed. They have yielded to their curiosity. They have gone back, and they have gone back on foot, eager to explore byways, to climb hills, to scramble through passes and over moors that they had only glimpsed from the road. And the oftener they have gone back the less have they become tourists, and even walkers, and the more has the desire come to them to loiter, to abate their hurry, to become connoisseurs of the rare essence of this newly discovered land of theirs.

If my own private store of enjoyment is worth anything as a comparison, those who have recently found in themselves the instinct for loitering have a deal of fun to look forward to.

When I remember being broiled, and stung by the wind from Highland snow-slopes, and being soaked through, and covered with dust, and, losing my way in mists, and being benighted, and sleeping in turf huts, and under hedges, and cart-sheds and barns, and on the heather ; when I think of bathes in burns and lochs and rivers, and of most exquisite hunger, and of hospitality ungrudgingly given by total strangers in lonely places and most unblushingly received ; when I come to reckon up the total of value received from the hobby of loitering, I find myself quite undeservedly rich.

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socialising chatroulette · 21.02.10

The ChatRoulette phenomenon is fascinating (seriously NSFW and not for the gentle, if you don’t know what it is) partly because it’s dragged niche and less salubrious corners of the Internet into the glare and use of the mass-market. I personally don’t understand the appeal, either exhibitionism or talking to complete strangers, but it’s struck a chord.

Quite a lot of comments on ChatRoulette mention wanting to rub the sharp edges off the service. A standard approach would be user accounts, or a reputation system – but these both seem to go against the ethos and genius of ChatRoulette.

I’m interested in what’s the smallest interaction tweak you could do to (partly) civilise and socialise the service.

Two methods come to mind straight away:

The first is subdivide it, if informally. Allow <anything>.chatroulette.com, and only get connected to others using the same subdomain. Much like IRC channels, publicity and organisation through other means would create convention and standards of use. It doesn’t stop other people being dicks (or showing dicks in this case), but it would be slightly more consensual.

The second is to make it slower in some way. It’d be interesting to remove the instant visual decision and the brutality of the Next button. Let the picture rez in slowly – maybe over an hour. Initially just a flickering pixel, gradually movement, maybe a shadow or an outline of a face appears. Half an hour later, everything’s visible but out of focus, frustrating or intriguing. Only after investing an hour of time, do you get reality.

underneath the arches · 21.02.10

Under the M3:

Under the M4:

Under the M25:

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no map for this territory · 5.02.10

I’ve been playing with Mapumental a bit, as it’s a front end to an awful lot of data, particularly public transport. I’ve been creating maps of how far you can travel in an hour for a few places:

1 hour from EC2:

1 hour from SW11:

1 hour from W9:

But the maps only show one snapshot, one piece of the story. Being able to grab a slider, and see how things react, makes a difference – looking not only at the rate of change, but for the rate of change of the rate of change. There is no single view that can either capture or convey this, no static insightful picture. It’s constructed in the mind, giving an instinctive feel for the data.

I’ve made a few videos of just moving the time slider as smoothly as possible. Watching these, on loop, dragging the isochrone forwards and backwards, is the only way to make sense.

from SW11:

from W9:

(and thanks to Stamen, mysociety and Channel 4 for Mapumental)

Long Finance · 2.02.10

Yesterday I attended the Long Finance conference, taking some of the principles of the Long Now foundation and trying to apply it to capitalism and market economics. There were two panels, the first on the Long Now & long-term thinking with Stewart Brand, Brian Eno and Alexander Rose, and the second on enduring value and the eternal coin, with Edward Bonham Carter, Professor Sir Roderick Floud, and Bernard Lietaer. In between were a few other short presentations, and, errr, surprisingly successful attempts to get bankers singing.

Very very rough notes, with little attribution – the density of different thoughts, questions and ideas was quite something, especially when I’m not completely au fait with all the economic theory. E&OE.

Long finance – trying to answer the question “when will we know our finance system is working?”

There’s been a systemic failure in the current system.

How could finance look forward even one lifetime?

The recent crunch involved just 15 banks, 4 brokers, 3 credit rating agencies, and controlled a third of all money (200 trillion) – and the solution has been more consolidation – not a good market.

When can you recommend a financial retirement structure to a 20 year old?

Move from responsive to anticipatory governance.

Eternal coin – could a coin exist that doesn’t lose value?

Panel 1: Long Now

Brian Eno: the scale of things makes a difference to how it operates – Aristotle

Societies that thought in terms of weeks and months work differently to those who think in years and decades.

New York in the 70s – everyone was there just for a short period. Used the city as a springboard to somewhere else. Caused the city to stop functioning. A short now – exciting city but not functioning or smooth running.

Looking for long now societies.

Alex Rose: Making a clock that runs for 10,000 years.

Danny Hillis – wanted to make a monument scale clock.

Physical objects have an ability to change conversations.

5 design principles for the clock – but they are pretty good to measure anything against them.

solar time vs. absolute time – a problem for a 10,000 year clock

Purchased the site for the clock: Mount Washington in Nevada. Dark sky site, 5 hours drive to anywhere. Also home to some of the oldest living organisms.

Currently building machines to build the base.

Stair cutting machine – 9ft blade 32ft reach robotic chainsaw.

What foot pitch should the staircase have for 10,000 years time?

Rosetta Project – collect all the languages and transcribe them in stone.
1500 languages, 13000 pages microetched onto a tablet.

Why bother?

Maeslant Barrier in Holland. Designed for a 1 in 10,000 year event. Costs €600m.

Hurricane Katrina – a once in a century event – cost €10 billion.

100x leverage for thinking in these longer timescales.

Stewart Brand: Heinlein – Time For The Stars, 1956.

A Long Range Foundation – only spends money on something so big or so long a return that no government or organisation would touch – such as space travel, seems a good pit to pour money into. Keeps on making so much money, has to keep spending and investing more.

Puzzled by the economics of infrastructure. No good economic theory. Always – financial excuses are made, initial investors lose money, gets bought and re-bought. Normally the 3rd owner makes money. BUT – we keep on making them.

Bridges – make London possible. But the river is infrastructure too, and can be maintained in a similar way to built infrastructure.

Now got to scale up infrastructure management to the whole damn planet.

We need people to be comfortable thinking in long terms, and long finance to do this with.

Q: why 10,000 years? Not 50-100 years?

Peter Schwartz – Long View book. Towns started 10,000 years ago as the ice retreated. Always good to imagine being in the middle of things.

Can we think about the last 10,000 years in the same way as thinking about the last week?

Q: Does this relate to the average person in the street?

BE: Physicality, not just a thought experiment. Something to visit.

Building it lets us think of all the design problems. Even 1,000 years is further than anyone thinks.

Q: Our culture is increasingly faster and disposable, why look at the opposite?

Danny Hillis – built the fastest computer. Aware that horizons are getting closer and closer.

New College, Oxford – in 1860s the beams started to decay and started looking around for suitable wood to replace them. The woodsman at the College had planted trees 500 years ago when originally constructed for just this purpose.

As a person, we’ve never been more powerful, and less responsible.

Q: are people planning in decades less democratic?

AR: If a monarch, knowing you’ll have to run the country, you think longer term. There’s remarkable consistency in monarchy.

Democracy and finance work well in the growth phase.

Germany – was thinking (may have?) altered constitution to protect future rights of future generations.

Q: Generational equity?

SB: Problem of discounting the future. How do you finance a forest? 70 years investment for not much return.

Externalities etc. – not solved financing the future, long-term democracy.

BE: look at religions – remarkably long survival. Other rewards than monetary.

Q: Can this be achieved through the free market?

BE: No such thing as a free market – there’s always restrictions. A free market would be utterly chaotic. It’s a spectrum from total control to total freedom. Where do you want to be?

SB: Land as sustained value. Cities have lasted even longer than religions. Cities have longevity and adaptability.

Want to see an economic theory of infrastructure, an economic theory of the informal economy, and an economic theory of real estate that reflects history.

Q: Copenhagen?

Countries don’t play ball.

192 countries with veto power. Set up for failure.

Have to make things “more expensive” – especially coal. Need to look at game theory.

Q: Some countries don’t even see the benefits of trade. Stronger international regulation?

SB: Geoengineering – the engineering is easy. Hardest is political problem. $300b to regulate the climate – nothing. And some countries may just do that – China? Need international regulations to work out the norms. Global governance.

BE: People are terrified of the idea of global governance. BUT we’ve been living with it for ages – e.g. the Universal Postal Union, set up in 1874. It’s a very sophisticated mechanism. Reciprocal agreements of 165 countries. International agreement for genetic labelling of mice – 59 countries.

Q: If an eternal clock had existed before industrialization what would have changed?

AR: There’s a thought that if we dig, we’ll find the clock already there. Neal Stephenson’s book Anathem.

SB: Want to make long-term thinking automatic and common.

BE: Images and metaphors last for very long periods.

****

Bernard Lietaer – the Terra mechanism

Using value discounting and positive interest automatically discounts the future.

Demurrage = time-related charge (the opposite of interest)

Need diversity – another currency for value in long-term.

Used in Dynastic Egypt – “Age of Cathedrals”

Terra – a standardised basket of a dozen key internationally traded commodities & services. e.g. oil, copper, wheat, gold, carbon emissions.

4x less volatility, inflation resistant, fully backed by inventory receipts.

Storage costs = 3.5% demurrage paid by bearer.

No central bank, just an accountant : Terra Alliance.

Would be countercyclical.

Terra makes countertrade/barter trade bankable.

Sustainable capitalism is an oxymoron. Needs something like this, need to realign shareholder interests with societies.

Regulation never works (lobbyocracy), and never been an example of preventative care of the economy.

****

Panel 2: enduring value

Edward Bonham Carter: reminds me of the marxist theory I studied at university. If changing systems, you have to reduce perceived short-term pain. Not capable of organising ourselves because of the short term. Need a system of incentives for change. As human beings, you react to the incentives you’re given.

Prof Flagg: Glad that history is being taken seriously. We’re all very bad at predicting the future. Gresham College – long term thinking to educate the city of London.

Q: are there benefits of volatility?

GDP down 6% in current slump – but still a lot more than when we were born. 300% more than 68 years ago. Now at 2005/6 levels. Is this really the end of the world?

UK Economy has had 1.8% growth for the last 150 years (with peaks and troughs).

World without crisis – less dynamic, creative.

Schumpter.

e.g. wars – when do the disturbing aspects outweigh the innovation and creation? Positive and negative aspects to most things.

Human nature – not a patriarchal society. Multiple currency environments. Programming another incentive scheme.

Q: isn’t one of the problems the definition of GDP?

PF: Has a perverse effect on happiness. Long term stability – reflected in other factors: height, longevity.

(argument about whether the tallest women were now or in the 12th century)

EBC: Ecological/sustainable investing – trying to find the right metrics.

Asset inflation – after a crunch. Always need more money the later you fix something.

Q: Incentives – systemic mis-allocation of money. Is the financial system working for society?

Has to be servant of its clients.

Worst system, but it’s the best we’ve come up with.
More intelligent use of privacy system. Use short-term thinking.

Dubious relation between monetary system and rate of growth.

Capitalism doesn’t think. It’s in the heads of many individuals.

Egypt: was long-term thinking for the benefit of a very small few.

12th Century: King’s currency, invalid when king dies, with 25% tax.

Q: the dollar?

Dominant currencies will change. New emerging markets. Disallocation and reallocation of resources.

Need to think in longer term. That’s what governments are for – recovery plans are long-term thinking.

But Gvts not good at long-term thinking that’s preventative. Should we meddle with the future?

Gvts can mitigate effects of economic exuberance.

Short-term democratic system. Most people vote on deferral of pain. Market failure is a discount mechanism in the long term.

Q: What eternal coins do people want?

Eternal coin of knowledge (universities are another structure that has lasted long-term)

Eternal coin of atoms. It’s where we end and where we came from.

truth is stranger than fiction · 2.02.10

Asylum, my Lyddle End 2050 building:

OMA’s interlace residential complex:

Tbilisi Roads Ministry Building:

(via Owen Hatherley)

the past is the curse of the present · 24.01.10

London Gastronomy Seminar #2 · 22.01.10

Great LGS again tonight, looking at wine and coffee. We were also given a sample of a very interesting white wine (macerated, unusual for white wine) – it was yellow, cloudy, smelt of sweet apples, tasted herbal, slightly metallic. Also, two samples of coffee, one tasted quite traditional to me, but the second was mindblowing – smell of farmyards, just about turning perfumed/bergamot when drunk. Showed just how different coffee can be.

Definitely something worth unpicking about how context and knowledge changes perception – of taste, quality, and worth. Russell’s spoken before about pre-experience design (particularly with luxury goods), and there’s some interesting science going on in this domain. I’m also interested in how genetics play a part – much like modern pharmacology. The idea that a wine tasting is an interaction between taster and wine rather than a scientific report feels right, and an extension of a lot of thinking about experience design.

Rough notes:

Flavour of Wine – Jamie Goode

PhD in plant biology, science editor, started a blog about wine (wineanorak.com ).

Single species – vitis vinifera – 1000s of varieties.

Vines – freeloaders, grows up trees, when hits sunlight it grows a bunch a grapes.

Great vineyards – low vigour, enough water (reducing later in growing season), cooler temperature during final stages, low disease pressure (no harvest rain), low frost, hail risk.

Terroir – sense of place.

Burgundy is the test case. Wines from adjacent fields processed in the same way – 900 euro difference per bottle.

Choices:

when to pick? – when they are ripe, but when within that is an important stylistic choice.

de-stem? inoculate with yeast or use natural on the grape skins? immediate or delayed fermentation? (for red wine) maceration – how? in what? post-ferment maceration (using CO2)?

Extra pressings from the must – normally kept separately as different flavour.

Barrels?

Elevage – raising of the wine. Benefits from oxygen in very small doses (that barrels give, even if neutral in taste). Or use stainless steel. Or now, concrete eggs.

Wine tasting – think of it as an interaction between taster and wine – context, experience. The information around changes the perception.

Quite literally – stick ‘em in an MRI!
Sommeliers vs. novices – they use different parts of the brain when tasting wine.
There’s lots of higher-order processing in our senses.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness – study showing that knowing the price of the wine changes the perceived taste.

Things like interesting creative wine writing can change perception.

From Q&A:

Biodynamics?
Interesting but weird, for a scientist. Lots of the best wine growers have converted – and the wines get better/more interesting. Need to look more carefully at the parts of biodynamic preparation, work out how and what works.

Cork vs. screw caps?
There is a difference – 2 kinds of screw caps too. Tin+saranex and just saranex. Tin + saranex means very little oxygen transmission – conditions, develops differently.

*****
Flavour in Coffee – James Hoffman

Started in 2004. 2006 – won UK Barista Championship. THere were 2 coffees in the blend – one from El Salvador. Was invited over, went to see his 1st coffee farm.

Tried a ripe coffee cherry – sweet, tart, watermelon taste.

It gives context to how coffee is experienced.

Creation:
The moment you pick the cherry, creation stops. Cannot make it better – but you can obscure or degrade if not handled well.

Most coffee ripens red (some yellow, orange).

Not as advanced an industry as wine – but terroir – weather, soil, altitude – do make a difference.

Great coffee need altitude – slower grown, denser beans.

knowing it’s “from Brazil” means nothing – 2/3rds the size of Europe.

Volcanic soils, phosphorous in soil (Kenya) do give taste differences.

Many varieties of coffee. Combination of right variety in the right place with the right microclimate – coffee that sells for $130 a pound, rather than $1.

Yield. Lower yield gives better coffee.

Ripeness. Coffee doesn’t ripen uniformly. Up to 3 stages of fruit on the same branch (due to rain). Have to hand pick, many times – expensive.

Cup characteristics – sweetness, aromatics, acidity. From cherry, terroir, and processing.

Coffee beans grow inside a parchment casing, inside the mucilage, inside the skin.

3 main ways of processing/removing beans from fruit.

Natural/dry process – just laid out in the sun. Some will go bad. Can be positive in done carefully.

Pulped Natural Process – Pulped by machine, then dried using sunlight.

Washed process – most desirable due to less defects. Normal for single estate coffee.

Then the beans are hand sorted to remove any defects.

Roasting:
Roast depth. Initially smells of rice, then baked bread. Boils off all water before interesting flavours can occur. First crack – beans double in volume due to gas pressure, then crack to release.

Believes in roasting as transparently as possible, not to mask flavours.

Roasting removes acidity (no natural sweetness, sugars all react) but adds bitterness. Looking for point of balance.

Different roasting philosophies – Scandinavia: lighter, more acidic, West Coast: v.dark roast/charcoal/Starbucks. UK: no defined character. Italy: N Italy lighter than S Italy.

Extraction:
Most frustrating part. Most coffee sold is horrible – due to poor extraction.

Coffees have a recipe (amount/temperature/time).

How much do you use? Test the coffee, as dissolved in water – refractometer, TDS meter. 18-22% extraction – generally perceived as good. (average for Europeans, some differences per country, and chart was drawn in 1965 – currently being updated).

Strength – technically – ratio solubles to solvent.
+ personal preference

60g of coffee = 12g of coffee dissolved for right extraction.

Common mistakes:
If not enough dissolved – people use more coffee. But – then underextracted. Instead use hotter water, finer grind, longer steep length.

more science needed · 19.01.10

My quick fragmented notes from Stewart Brand talking at the RSA (who should be posting the audio/video on their site soon, and there’s another version of the talk viewable here):

Rethinking green.

Climate change changes everything.

He majored in ecology in the 1950s – when no-one was thinking about it.

“It’s all gardening”

Positive feedback and invisible thresholds in the environment.

MORE SCIENCE NEEDED – in data and in models.

Nature doesn’t kill you. People fighting for resources do.

There are some hidden negative feedbacks too, and we need to understand those.

e.g. E.hux algae.

Whole earth problems need whole earth solutions.

Predictable climate is a natural infrastructure.

City population: 3% in 1800, 14% in 1900, 61% by 2030.
1.3m new people a week in cities.

Moving away from subsistence agriculture -> land improves, cash crops.

Not cities as we imagine/live in – squatter cities – currently 1bn people. Another 1bn expected.

(see the video clip at 11:00 on fora.tv)

Creating own homes, jobs, infrastructure. Informal economy relates to the formal economy. The economics of collaboration.

Not people crushed by poverty – working hard to get out of poverty. They are green – that green as they’re that poor.
And we shouldn’t try to stop them getting out of poverty.

book – The Places We Live by Jonas Bendiksen

Next 30 years – new cities of young people in the global South, old cities of old people in the global North. Where will the action be?

*****

Baseload electricity – mainly coal and gas. Some hydro, some nuclear.

the choice now is – coal or nuclear.

CO2 waste is invisible and huge.

Wind – footprint issues. 1GW = 250 square miles of wind farms. + pylons and infrastructure. And only if it’s windy all the time (normally 20% of potential compared to nuclear 90% of potential)

1GW = 50 square miles of solar farms.

Chernobyl still haunts us.

But it’s now the biggest wildlife refuge. The problem there now is economic, not radiation.

One in 10 American homes gets energy from turning Russian nuclear warheads into electricity (Megatons to Megawatts)

Governments have an enormous role, in nuclear, in geoengineering, and in keeping coal expensive.

small, modular reactors – 35MW

2010- availability of Russian barge-mounted reactor, water cooled, for newly un-iced sea and shipping lanes.

Nuclear batteries – 10-50 MW.

Small, sealed, transportable, modular.

New fuels – thorium (better for India, as more prevalent there than uranium)

*****

Genetically engineered food

Biotech is the most powerful technology today.

book – Doubly Green Revolution by Gordon Conway

book – Tomorrow’s Table by Pamela Ronald

book – Mendel in the Kitchen by Nina Fedoroff

40% of crops lost to weeds or pests.

Tropical farming is different, needs these crops to work.

Also: enriched foods, biofortified.

book – Starved for Science by Robert Paarlberg

GE pig with extra omega-3 fatty acids – as good as fish.

GE rice with cholera vaccine.

*****

Geoengineering

Mitigation has no hope of succeeding.

Geoengineering is surprisingly cheap.

Free – Mount Pinatubo eruption – 20m tons SO2. Cooled planet by 0.5 degree.

1 Pinatubo a year = 3 degree long-term cooling.

But – acidified oceans.

30 blimp supported hoses, pumping out 3m tons of SO2 costs $300m a year.

John Latham – brightening ocean clouds – a huge yacht-like inkjet printer.

But these are just hobbies, with no Government funding or backing.

Biochar – sequestering carbon by pyrolising plant waste.

We are terraforming Earth anyway. Created the anthropocene.

We are gods and have to get good at it.

*****
various answers from Q&A

Devils’ advocate: do I stop recycling, if it will all be taken care of.

Practicing and taking part at a small scale. Ned to do large scale too, but it’s all hands on deck.

Why are environmentalists so suspicious of science and economics?

THere was a flip – green used to be a conservative issue.
Environmentalists need to move on from strictly leftist ideology. De-ideologise environmentalism. Pragmatism.

Where does innovation come from?

In California, you’re expected to create things and run things. Active intellectuals.

Engineering comes from permission – social, political, economic.

You can judge the quality and longevity of a civilisation by its soil.

40% of ice-free land is agriculture. GE means less pesticides, chemicals. Synthetic biology and open source will prevent monocultures and large agra controlling.

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Christmas Day, last year · 11.01.10

I wandered around London on Christmas Day morning, and my film has just been processed. A set on Flickr here.

Soho and the more officey areas were the emptiest, but even Oxford Street was quiet enough for committed joggers to run down the road.

Not completely empty though, and not completely closed – I managed to get an eggnog latte – but certainly a different feel to normal London life. Mainly bored Italian and Japanese tourists. Thankfully the Angus Steak House on Leicester Square looked like it was about to open, so they’d have somewhere to eat.

city senses · 10.01.10

Pachube only made sense to me when I heard Adam and Usman discussing it last year. I’d been derailed by its use for energy monitoring – something interesting to yourself and possibly useful to yourself, but not interesting at a public level, unless aggregated with a significant take-up.

There are a few things I’d like to sense, track, record and analyse.

an 87 and a 77 lurk in the distance

The first is detecting the buses that pass by my front door so I know generally how long I’ll have to wait for the next one. A selfish act, yes, but one that has a useful public shadow when broadcast: magnified and multiplied when others record, share and analyse similar data too (of course, TfL could just offer up iBus feeds, but I’ll believe that when I scrape it).

Similarly, I’d like to track number of pedestrians and number of cars. Everything is time and place stamped, allowing analysis, filtering, and city sense making.

Next I’d like to wire up Nike+ to Pachube. Nike+ is a sensor that fits in your shoe that, basically, transmits constantly and publicly whenever you’re walking and running. I’ve got the Nike+ sensor talking to an Arduino, thanks to the SparkFun breakout board, but I’m limited in time and programming ability to go any further (also, any more info that a basic ID is locked up in readable but undecipherable chatter between iPod and Nike+ receiver). I’m interested in the semi-anonymous: personalised IDs detected in public that make no sense until you (as holder of the ID) plug it into the system and sees what in the network lights up or remembers.

Another leap in my understanding of the power of bottom-up sensor networks was the launch of the Pachube logger iPhone app. This lets you create and update data feeds manually from your iPhone. It lets you take the idea of Daytum, and plug it into a standardised data sharing system. Most importantly, each update is dripping in metadata; time and place.

This reminds me of Jones, Insam and Taylor’s herejustnow, which, with iPhone ubiquity and pachube now seems a lot more possible and usable than when originally conjured. It lets you say that you’ve just seen or heard something – most importantly time and date stamped. This creates maps, similar I guess to #uksnow, but for anything and everything.

I’m excited that it’s now possible to wire up a city nervous system without any government or authority, just mass enthusiasm and participation.

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