The Ultimate Archive

As reported in today's NY Times, scientists are putting together a Book of All Species online at www.eol.org. The archive will eventually have an entry for every species known. If printed as a book, the known 1.8 million species would be over 300 feet long....and that's not counting the fact that it's estimated that 10 times that number of species are still waiting to be discovered. 

What's especially interesting is that the entries are compiled using an algorithm that searches through scientific databases and publications. As libraries and their content go digital through new media and the scanning and digitizing of old media, we may be looking at a prototype for a new kind of knowledge infrastructure.

Circle of Blue

This past week's edition of On the Media, the weekly WNYC program on media issues featured a segment on Circle of Blue, a coalition of journalists who donate their time and resources to produce news stories about water issues, drought, and desertification. It's an extraordinary group doing important and fascinating work that calls attention to stories about the water crisis.

The segment is available on their website: http://www.circleofblue.org/

Listening to the segment, I was reminded of the potential of the media to bring visibility to a set of issues and raise their level of prominence in the culture. The notion of constructing the conditions of visibility is certainly something that all the projects in the studio have the potential for as well. Many of you are dealing with fairly fluid and ephemeral forces and effects and more than a few of you are dealing with the movement of an edge or other aspects of a crisis front that may benefit from the responsive potentials of architecture as well as architecture's capacity for institutionalization, for marking position and establishing new datums.

The site also provides a rich history of journalism and journalists bringing visbility to drought issues going back to Dorothea Lang and the dust bowl and beyond. This is an excellent resource especially for those interested in water issues, but really for all you.

Times Roundup - Something for Everyone

Quite the big news day. Below, a number of interesting articles from today's New York Times


From the Front Page, a biggie:

"Carbon Calculus" A proposal in Congress to put a price tag on greenhouse-gas emissions could overturn the economics of energy Article Here.

Also Inside:

Salt Lake city finds that sound environmental policy has emerged as a central organizing principle of the city's economic growth. Article Here.

On Staten Island, a boggy green break in one of the city's most industrialized stretches of waterfront is being preserved. Article Here.

For decades, Japan pursued economic development at all costs, but in an effort to protect the environment it is aiming to reverse destruction along the Kushiro River. Article Here.

Mum's the Word: We Found a Greener Gas. What's greener than HFCs for refrigeration? Carbon dioxide. Enter a public relations problem. Article Here.

The United States is the fastest-growing market in the world for wind power. Despite a patchwork of laws and regulations, many European energy companies would like to plant their windmills here. Article Here.

Fiji Water plans to become carbon negative -- that is, to more than make up for the greenhouse gases released in the creation, transportation and sales of its product. Article Here.