Model Reality

Australian photographer Antti Kemppainen creates a panorama incorporating all three elements in a single stitched together photo.

I just returned from a trip to Ithaca (recruiting at Cornell). We flew into Syracuse via Chicago. On the way into O’Hare on the first leg of the trip, we wheeled around over the lake for an easterly approach and I saw something I’ve never seen: expansive ice floes in clogging up the lake. I summarized it to friend in an email thusly:

Travel has ways of opening up new dimensions, perspectives. Some enabled by humans, some enabled by technology. I’m sitting in O’Hare (my first and home airport) waiting for a delayed flight to Syracuse. The Midwest is iced over, Iowa a white dream of sparkling hills punctuated by meandering streams and the brown texture of small groves of trees looking like oasises amidst the white desert.

We came in on the eastern approach. In order to do this, we had to fly over the northern suburbs and pinwheel back around, low, over the lake. The lake is partially frozen with waves lapping at the shores while huge ice floes sit stoically surrounded by undulating waves.

Lake Michigan was the first body of water in my life. I grew up 4 blocks away from it. I’ve seen ice from the shore in the dead of winter. But today, seeing it from the air, was a whole new experience. It was beautiful.

Coming over the houses and neighborhoods of the North Shore, I was reminded of the rugged and classic beauty that it Chicago.

Unfortunately, my camera was up in the overhead bin and there was no way to grab it while strapped in for landing. But on the way back, I was prepared. I snapped a lot of shots and stuck the best ones (still not really well culled, I just pulled the really bad ones) in this gallery.

The Michigan shore of Lake Michigan, covered by scattered clouds. Note the band of ice leading out from shore. Oddly, it was exactly the opposite on the Illinois shore: ice floes choked the open water but there was liquid for a few hundred yards from the beach out.

Illinois shore of the lake. The promontory on the shore is next to the Baha’i Temple in Wilmette.

The texture of some of these floes is amazing. It looks like solid land.

Extreme zoom shot reveals the surreal and abstract texture of the ice.

I don’t know

Wavy Gravy once asked a Zen Roshi, “What happens after death?”

The Roshi replied, “I don’t know.”

Wavy protested, “But you’re a Zen Master!”

“Yes,” the Roshi admitted, “but I’m not a dead Zen Master.”

His passing comes at an interesting time for me. Many, many years ago, I read the The Illuminatus Trilogy and enjoyed it immensely. It moved me, but in ways that were unclear. I wasn’t the only one. The boys over at Boing-Boing put out a call for help a few months ago which I answered with a donation. In reading the post, I learned about his most influential book (not his most popular), The Cosmic Trigger, which I purchased and am still reading.

It’s a good book, written with his trademark tongue-in-cheek humor, that explores his travels down the path of his life.

So I’ve been seeing a number of posts from my freaky/mystical communities about his passing, where he was revered luminary and jester. But then I came across this today: Death of libertarian, his obituary in the excellent Democracy in America blog, run by the Economist.

Some quick back story: I work for a company founded by a bunch of hardcore libertarians. I was raised a capital-L Liberal and even have some capital-C Communists as my ancestors. As a younger man, I was active in Habonim Dror, the worldwide Labor Zionist youth movement. Over time, as we are wont to do, my politics have shifted. I’ve become much more cynical towards traditional political affiliations and have a lot more sympathy for notions of smaller government as it applies to the bedroom (but not the boardroom). At the same time, I’ve had some trouble with the classic libertarian viewpoints regarding things like helping the poor and taxes.

The obituary quotes Wilson:

Once, when explaining why he didn’t vote for Libertarian Party candidate Ed Clark, Wilson wrote “I am not that kind of Libertarian, really; I don’t hate poor people.”
…
According to Cato, More than 15 percent of Americans are libertarians rather than big-government liberals or conservatives. Democracy in America would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the passing of Mr Wilson, one of the most influential members of that small band since Ayn Rand.

And that pretty much sums it up. I guess I’m more of a Guns & Dope Libertarian (how very Burning Man of me!).

Reason’s Brian Doherty, also mentioned in the DiA post has some interesting comments on how RAW influenced him:

He was my gateway to Welles and Chandler, to Leary and Fuller, to Pound and Reich, to conspiracy theory and libertarianism, and to all the ideas and experiences, intellectual, aesthetic, and actual, that rolled from those varied and fascinating entryways into art, ideas, and living. I hope I can do good by the principles he helped imbue in me. He excelled as both novelist and essayist; he was a noble steward of the ideas he espoused, a brilliant and passionate popularizer, and the characters and scenarios and approaches to fiction of his novels reward constant reading with constant pleasure and insight–he was a pop-Pynchon of sorts in his sprawling, comic-serious approach to Big Crazy Ideas, who got a thousandth of the respect and delivered a thousand times the joy and humanity.

I, and many others, will continue to read his work with both intellectual and aesthetic pleasure from now and on into the limitless human future he helped so many of us to see. If anyone deserved to reach techno-immortality, it was him. That’s what’s making me saddest right now. The best of him remains, and will always.

That all said, two words should suffice. as Pound said of Eliot on his passing (and I know this because I read Robert Anton Wilson): Read him.

Wonkette’s obituary has some more choice tidbits:

His platform for the mostly fictional Guns & Dope Party went like this, in part:

We advocate

1. guns for those who want them, no guns forced on those who don’t want them (pacfists, Quakers etc.)
2. drugs for those who want them, no drugs forced on those who don’t want them (Christian Scientists etc.)
3. an end to Tsarism and a return to constitutional democracy
4. equal rights for ostriches.

And here’s a little Poor Richard’s-esque homily:

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another. After the 6th candy bar, a man on the bench across from him said, “Son, you know eating all that candy isn’t good for you. It will give you acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat.”

Little Tony replied, “My grandfather lived to be 107 years old.”

The man asked, “Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?”

Little Tony answered, “No, he minded his own fucking business.”

So my father is fascinated with structures. It comes from his general fascination with the world and his professional focus (for 21 years!) on the world of commercial construction.

I had a neat time with him at Burning Man. I sent him out on a mission to check out the Belgian Waffle and figure out how it was built. At the time, I had felt like he had been a bit standoffish, reminding me of the wicked son in the passover parables: “What is this thing of yours and how do these traditions relate to you?”

So he came back and blew my mind.

“So how was it?”

He starts: “It was really very Burning Man because… ”

At this point, I start smiling, ’cause I know he’s hooked. Here he is, telling me what Burning Man is. The sense of ownership and presumption was rich! I loved it.

He continues: “… it’s like jazz.”

Now I’m really listening.

“Oh? Do tell,” I say.

“Well,” he say, “they started with a central structure, a tripod and some vague idea of what they wanted. But once that was up, they just got like 70 guys on lifts with nail guns and whole bunch of wood and jammed. If something didn’t work, they might back it out and try again. It’s an improvisation on wood.”

He pauses, then: “It’s gonna be really beautiful when it burns.”

So the other day he sends me a link to this article: Painful Precision Allows Frank Gehry to Twist the Glass Envelope

Three years ago, standing on a cladding factory floor watching robots lift a 10 x 5-ft window pane, Frank Gehry was surprised to see the glass sag under its own weight. It was a pivotal moment, for it led to a suggestion that freed the famed architect to sculpt his first all-glass curtain wall, full of his signature sweeps but lacking budget creep. The novel twist on the 10-story headquarters for Interactive Corp., near the Hudson River in Manhattan, is that crews purposely cold-bent each of the 1,437 flat-glass cladding panels with their “bare” hands as they installed them. It had never been done before.

The 195,000-sq-ft building’s wavy form evokes ship sails. The cold-bending of the glass, instead of prohibitively pricey factory heat-bending, “was really the trick to give us the shape,” says Craig Webb, Gehry’s design partner. “The breakthrough was to actually think of doing it on purpose,” says Webb. Warped panels are normally a “no-no” in the curtain wall sector, he adds.

My dad was so intrigued by some specifics in the article:

Work called for exact placement of 1,600 steel embeds for the glass panel brackets. If the brackets were not set to 1/100 in., site-bending would go awry. “Bracket layout was the most time-consuming activity,” says De Gobbi.

To minimize error, Turner departed from custom and established direct communication between Sorbara and Permasteelisa, which set the embed locations. In addition, Turner required Sorbara to have a licensed surveyor checking work before concrete was cast, instead of after. Turner also had its own surveyor double-checking Sorbara’s.

Because of the building’s form, the slab edge was a segmented radius, with a 10-lb embed every 4 ft. Using a global positioning system-based 3D transit, surveyors first located every insert in theoretical space. “Then we connected the dots” to create the slab edge, says Kell.

So 1/100 in. is an unheard of tolerance. He wanted to make sure that was right. He emails ENR who emails the contractor in question. His question:

This is an order of magnitude tighter than normal construction tolerances? Is it possible that it was to 1/10″ (i.e., 0.01′ or 1/100 of a foot)?

The answer he got:

First of all tolerances that the building SKIN must satisfy (typically 1/8″ max variation from plumb and angles) are much smaller then tolerances of the building STRUCTURE (typically +/- 1″ in every direction).

On a conventional curtain wall project the tridimensional adjustment of the bracket is simpler to accomplish as small variations will not change the geometry of the building (if a panel is sets higher it will just close the joint between panels but it will not change the angle and remains “vertical”). On tilted and curved surfaces, any variation will change the angle thus the geometry will change greatly.

For this reason the tridimensional setting of the anchor brackets (not the embeds in the concrete) at the Interactive project was done (aiming to) at zero tolerances. You can be very accurate with the Total Station on the space coordinates and the tolerances are the ones from the instrument. As far as the curtain wall panels, to address manufacturing and installation tolerances, the system was design to absorb about 1/10″ to 1/8″

He writes back:

Most architects do not understand cumulative tolerance (suppliers and subs do) and so this interests me. Under certain circumstances on certain structures, temperature variations can cause problems where precise measurements are required. The issues here are the elasticity of the structure and possibly the instrument’s response to temperature variation. I ask you: 1) is the Total Station less subject to this than conventional instruments; 2) given your constraints was temperature an issue (or is it simply that there was enough tolerance in the system as a whole that if you went for zero tolerance on bracket placement then any temperature and other variations were absorbed within the panel tolerances)?

So in other news, I’ve met some special, Paula Goldman. I’ll leave the details unpublished, but in trying to (successfully) distract me at work today, she sends a link to her friend Guy’s blog. His first post: gehry building cracked.

I guess my dad was onto something.

NOTE: the original but lost comments by Guy point out that was not a stress fracture, but probably due to an impact of some sort.

Dinner with Ari and Leo, 8/30/06 - a photoset on Flickr

I had Sushi with Betsy and my dad before picking up Ben from the airport. (We three were on our way to Burning Man the next day). Always a pleasure to see someone that was such a huge part of my life for so long.

An amazing panorama of the 2006 burning of the man. I’m standing on the right side, just about underneath the giant flower.

I’m back from my fourth immolation of the effigy and back to the grind at unamed company.

I turned 30 on Aug. 30 (my golden birthday!), out in the desert. I’m not how I feel about passing that milestone.

I’m still recovering from Burning Man; you don’t really realize how much it effects you until you leave. I think that I have a high tolerance for surreality, but once that stimulus is removed you end up feeling very strange in your mundanity, not unlike the feeling of floating after someone’s been sitting on your shoulders.

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