Mediated

I picked up this book, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, at the Amsterdam airport for the long flight back to the U.S. It’s a good read, covering the stories of important scientific findings in physics, biology, chemistry, geology, paleontology and more, often digging into the stories of the scientists themselves. I’d recommend this book if you’d like to catch up on a wide range of sciences (and the last time you thought about science was in high school 20-30 or more years ago!).

My main conclusions:

1. Scientists can be a strange, obsessive bunch.
2. New ideas are frequently rejected initially, even those which seem to do a much better job of explaining the known facts better than existing ideas.
3. Scientists frequently express great certainty, which is frequently unwarranted.
4. There’s still a whole lot we don’t know!

Very interesting interview with Andrew Bacevich, author of a new book entitled “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism”. About Bacevich:  After 23 years in the Army, the West Point graduate retired as a colonel and has been teaching international relations and history at Boston University.  Here he makes a point that I think voters of both parties should consider:

BILL MOYERS:  Do you expect either John McCain or Barack Obama to rein in the “imperial presidency?”

ANDREW BACEVICH: No. I mean, people run for the presidency in order to become imperial presidents. The people who are advising these candidates, the people who aspire to be the next national security advisor, the next secretary of defense, these are people who yearn to exercise those kind of great powers.

They’re not running to see if they can make the Pentagon smaller. They’re not. So when I - as a distant observer of politics - one of the things that both puzzles me and I think troubles me is the 24/7 coverage of the campaign.

Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected. It’s not going to happen.

I think we’ve gotten a hint of this lately with McCain’s aggressive comments with regard to Russia’s actions in Georgia, but I have no doubt Obama & team yearns to likewise wield government powers (perhaps in a slightly different way than McCain would, but in the end not so different).  Ambitious people rarely take any pleasure in dismantling things, even when they clearly aren’t working very well.

Well worth reading the whole interview.

Yesterday I rode out to Kinderdijk near Rotterdam, a spot where about 20 old windmills still stand. They were built in 1738-1740, and were built so families could live in them. They were used to move water. As you can see, the wind power idea hasn’t changed a whole lot in nearly 3oo years.

And while on the topic of wind energy, I noted this in Sunday’s column from Tom Friedman (who I don’t always agree with, but I think he’s right on about energy these days), where he writes on Denmark’s success with wind energy.

“Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” [Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy, quoted] In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.

“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”

…

Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.

Why should you care?

“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”

Came across a fun story today in the NY Times - “David Byrne, Cultural Omnivore, Raises Cycling Rack to an Art Form”. From the story by Ariel Kaminer:

In recent years his interest in bicycles has expanded from riding them to thinking seriously about the role they play in urban life, as he has started making connections with politicians and international design consultants keen to keep cars from taking over the city. So when the Department of Transportation asked him to help judge a design competition for the city’s new bike racks, he eagerly agreed — so eagerly, in fact, that he sent in his own designs as well.

In Times Square Mr. Byrne wanted to invoke the young lady whose vivid profile is enshrined on the mud flaps of every other truck on the Interstate. “Somebody hinted to the Department of Transportation that the city might get negative publicity,” he said. “She’s definitely low culture, but there’s nothing obscene about it — and in a way it acknowledges Times Square’s seedy past. I heard that Janette had to go to Bloomberg just to make sure it was O.K.”

Did the most powerful mayor in the nation really have to issue a stay of execution? Did some big-rig interest group push the design through in the middle of the night? Ms. Sadik-Khan insisted there was no such drama. “Mudflap Tammy” made her debut along with the other racks.

By the way, you can get a free track “Strange Overtones” from the forthcoming David Byrne/Brian Eno release, entitled Everything that Happens will Happen Today.

Above is (my photo of) a painting of what the Utrecht Dom presumably looked like in 1674, just prior to the big storm that knocked down a good portion of it. The Dom was built on a bit of high ground that was earlier marked out by the Romans in around year 50. Here is a graphic map of the area around the Dom with markers of buildings and walls that existed at various times.

The outside border with the rounded corners marks the Roman settlement, called Castellum Trajectum. I live near the upper right corner of the map. The Dom tower is marked by the two rectangles over toward the left side. The portion in the middle marks the area that was destroyed in 1674. Next is a representation I found today of the Dom built out of sand!

This view is from the north-west, of the back side of the Dom. The portion on the right side of the photo is where the damage occurred. And here’s what some of this looks like today:

The border visible in the street at the bottom marks the boundary of the old Roman settlement (this is a view from the north), and by next year they will be putting that marker in place all around the Dom area. Here are a couple more then and now shots; first a photo from about 100 years ago along the old canal, with the Dom tower.

And a shot today from a bit closer to the tower.

Update: a couple days ago I finally climbed the tower - it’s about 96 meters high, which translates into some 460 steps. You can go all the way to the top - the level right at the top of the photo above! It’s quite a view over the whole area. I also learned a bit more of the history of the tower - it was actually built over 60 years from 1320 to 1380, after the rear part of the church was built. It was only a couple hundred years later that the rest of the church was finished.

Here’s a shot from this past weekend, out on a bike ride with some co-workers, we stopped in at a fancy restaurant right on the canal, between Maarssen and Breukelen.  Unfortunately this photo captured about the only 10 minutes of sun for the day!  The rest of the ride was a little wet, but we did find a good place selling fresh cherries.

After the Bauhaus visits, I took a little wander around the town of Dessau.  Here I found more obvious traces of some fairly brutal architecture from the Communist years.  I can’t object to the goal of providing decent housing for people. but these places just clearly aren’t loved by anyone anymore.

After the rigorous straight lines of the Bauhaus school, on the same day I paid a visit to Die Grüne Zitadelle of Magdeburg, the last completed architectural project of Austrian artist Hundertwasser. One of his main tenets was the rejection of those straight lines!

I took a tour, but it unfortunately didn’t spend too much time inside the building. The hallway floors have a tendency to rise up in the corners and edges, and most every surface gets rounded off in some way. There are obviously some correspondances with what Gaudi was doing in Barcelona a hundred years back.

On my way up to Berlin, I paid a visit to Dessau, where the restored Bauhaus buildings are the main attraction. Above is one end of the main Bauhaus school building built in 1926 and used until about 1932, when political resistance got too high. Below a shot of another side of the complex - notice the sheer glass wall with no outer supporting columns.

About five minutes aware are a set of restored Bauhaus houses, built for the faculty at the school, and including such inhabitants as Kurt Weill and Paul Klee. Also built in the late 1920s, and only restored in the last 5 years or so. There were originally 4 duplexes, but half of one was destroyed at some point, but the ones that are left are in a lovely wooded area.

After Prague, I took the train north, making a short afternoon stop in Dresden.  One sight there was a massive mural of the leaders of the region over the last thousand or so years!  Below is the August, who ruled at a time of great wealth and power there.

A couple days later I paid a visit to Augustburg, his summer castle built atop a hill some 70 miles or so south west of Dresden.  Quite a place!

That’s looking from one of the four corner towers down toward the courtyard.  All basically built in 4 years, they say.

The start of my travels last week was in Prague, and I had some lovely weather there.  On Sunday I climbed the wooded hill on the right side of the picture above, and then climbed up the mini ‘eiffel tower’ on top of the hill for the shot below of the castle:

Here’s a shot along the river…

For now I’ll just put up one building picture - take note of the line of windows toward the top - Praha!

Orange is the color of the day! That’s because Holland has gotten off to a great start in the Euro 2008 soccer tournament, with victories over Italy (3-0) and France (4-1). I’m not much of a fan really, but it’s great fun to see how the country has come alive and the national color is out all over. Read all the latest news on the Euro 2008 site.

Update: Well, it’s all over now.  Last night Germany lost to Spain, 1-0.  A kind of surprising result after all the higher-scoring matches.  I watched the Dutch lose to Russia in the Old Town Square in Prague, then saw the Russians lose to Spain a few nights later.