Seen Around Town

Here is a collection of photos I have taken while driving and walking around Starkville, Mississippi. Click in the image for a larger version.


The really interesting thing about this intersection is that, the ambiguous directional signals aside, straight on through is a legal move if you are in the right hand lane. At least I think it is.



2009 Subdivision of the year, compared to WHAT? This place has an 8-foot wall around the entire neighborhood, plus a gate and a guardhouse.



Cool inverted pentagrams on a downtown building, perhaps a Masonic symbol.


Inverted pentagrams in context. Sadly, this building on Main Street is now empty.



A concrete wall in front of Cadence Bank bears the ghostly inscription "BANK OF COMMERCE"


The Entrance to Cadence Bank.


Cadance Bank.I like modernism, and I love this building. Bauhaus anyone?



The Regions Bank building is directly across from Cadence Bank, and the two are having some kind of twentieth-century conversation. "Let's take the classical motif of the arcade and stretch it vertically four stories. Now we have post-modernism!"


Majestic lions guard the entrance to a residence from their juniper nests.


Oak leaf and laurel motif in the Oddfellows Cemetary



Blue foamy water flows from the a car wash into Hollis Creek at Acadamy Road.



The architect who built this office cluster put his name and number on a little sign right next to the broad flume that delivers the parking lot surface runoff directly into Hollis Creek.

Follow-up on the Asian Carp in Lake Michigan

Things aren't looking good for Lake Michigan. According to this story the US Supreme Court rejected an injunction from all the Great Lake states (except Illinois) and the province of Ontario to close the locks in Chicago, the likely avenue by which the Asian Carp will gain access to the lake system. The US President, having close ties to Chicago, has sided with Illinois, citing economic disruption and flooding. The US Army corps of engineers is betting on their electric fence to keep the voracious feeders out. Biologists have recently found Asian carp DNA in Lake Michigan. It constitutes a terrible example of myopic planning. In order to protect one important economic aspect of one city, the US is willing to put the entire fishery of Lake Michigan at risk. This post is a follow up to my Jan 9 post entitled "Another Great Story."

Another great story

Heard another great story on NPR here.

This story has some of my favorite elements: a great engineering feat, an invasive species, history, and planning issues.

About a hundred years ago the city of Chicago dug a series of canals that caused the Chicago river to run backwards. This allowed them to send wastewater away from their drinking water source of Lake Michigan, and created an important transportation link between the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes. Other states on the Lakes sued in 1922, fearing the level of Lake Michigan would drop. Decades later the US supreme court ruled that Chicago could continue to drain the lake, but left open the possibility that the canal locks could be closed if the neighboring states could prove that they are causing harm. Enter the Asian carp.

The Asian carp has been detected seven miles below the locks. It is a voracious feeder, and if it gets into the lake system, the environmental impact would be disastrous. Recreational fishing alone provides billions of dollars to the regional economies. The state of Michigan is using the threat of the carp to try to get the locks closed. A lot of industry has grown up around the locks and thousands of jobs would be affected if they close.

NPR followed the Chicago story with a more positive Asian carp story. Turns out they aren't bad to eat. They interview a Louisiana chef who speaks of carp in terms of being similar to scallops and crab meat. Yum.

NPR dairy farm series

I have been listening to the recent series on dairy farms on NPR's Morning Edition. Yesterday's was about groundwater pollution in New Mexico. From the article:

More and more milk comes from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where large herds live in feedlots, awaiting their thrice-daily trip to the milking barn. A factory farm with 2,000 cows produces as much sewage as a small city, yet there's no treatment plant.

Here is a link.

Today the piece was about an Ohio farmer, Warren Taylor, who raises his cows outdoors on grass (the CAFO cows are fed a mix of corn and soybeans). He also pasteurizes at a lower temperature and does not homogenize the milk: the cream rises to the top, and you have to shake it before pouring. The milk is sold 48 hours out of the cow and he won't deliver more than an eight hour drive. He claims that all this makes the milk taste better. He can only produce about half the milk per cow that the CAFO operations produce, so his milk costs about twice as much.

Read it here.

Both pieces have good examples of dairy industry propaganda. In the New Mexico piece, the industry sponsors a billboard with an image of a family in front of a green field with cows grazing in an effort to dampen public support for tougher regulations of the CAFO farms. Of course, the image is nothing like the actual farms.

In today's story, the industry spokesman disputes that Warren Taylor's milk tastes any better than industry standard milk. He speculates that it is a "placebo effect." People just think it tastes better because they are paying more for it.

The piece ends with customers at the local Whole Foods tasting Mr. Taylor's milk and just going bananas about how good it is. It would have been better had he asked them to compare it to the standard milk.

I used to buy milk from a local farm when I lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was definitely better than the industry standard, and not that much more expensive. I miss it, especially their egg nog, which they sold this time of year.

Microliving

Here is a neat article about a couple who bought a 175 square foot apartment in Manhatten for 150K. They lived in NJ for a while and decided they wanted to live in the city. With such a small space, they just have room for a bed and a cappuccino machine. They don't even have a trash can - but with no possessions, they generate very little trash (and what trash there is they walk across the hall to the chute). They keep their clothes stashed at various dry-cleaners around town, wear jogging suits at home, and change on their way to work. So their lives are totally in the urban fabric of experience. They don't nest. Maybe not for everyone, but it can be done.

The grad studio 3 class finished their models and presented them yesterday. We all worked very hard and we are pleased with the results.

Adding roads and painting terrain



Cutting house shapes out of foam, painting them black and wrapping them in card stock.


Here we have some foam townhomes, painted and waiting to be wrapped.


Adding trees made from wax myrtle twigs.


A view across the wetland at the pavilion, styled after a Greek temple, beyond which is the common green and the cohousing community's common house.


Another view of the pavilion.





Austin's model


Casey's model.


Presentation in the gallery.






From left: Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell.

Bjork finds a model of a city inside her TV

All the work we have been doing on models in Studio 3 (and watching the undergrads put together their models earlier this semester) has reminded me of one of my all-time favorite videos on YouTube, where Bjork explains how TV works. This makes me want to put some circuit boards in my model. You can enjoy it here.