The Theory of Nevolution

Health, Vigour and Good Medicine

It is interesting to note that while my formative years could and should have been spent ignoring the dangers of the day, the Encyclopaedia of Health and Home; Adapted for the Home, the Layman, the Family has illustrated the follies of my way. While every young man should display his interest in the whimsy of the day, one should not ignore the importance of health and vigour, especially when undergoing physical and mental changes. I present to you, fine reader, these words of wisdom which have indeed stood the test of time. 

Those who would achieve the maximum vigor must observe at least five essentials. The first of these is sufficient exercise  of the right kind. A young man's daily exercise should be vigorous enough to cause him to perspire freely. This helps his body to throw off certain waste products which would act as poisons if they were allowed to accumulate. 

Second, young men should sleep in the fresh air, work and exercise in the fresh air as much as possible, and be sure to have the indoor air kept fresh during the day. In the third place, most young men need at least eight hours of sleep every night. With less, one can get along, but he can not keep himself in the best physical condition. 

Proper food is another requirement. The system needs not only the kind of food that is rich in nutrient, but vegetables and other coarser fod to give bulk and stimulate the action of the intestines. All food should be chewed to a pulp. Not only is it necessary to eat wisely-it is also important to pass off the waste materials by regular movements of the bowels. Regular movements of the bowels are aided by the abundance of exercise and by eating plenty of fruit and drinking plenty of water.

The head consists of the skull and the cranium, and the face-the former contains the brain. The whole structure is marvelous for its strength and lightness. The brain is a wonderful organ. It weighs about three pounds, and almost fills the inside of the skull. It is shaped like an oval loaf of bread and is split in the center, in two parts that are called hemispheres, and look like enlarged coffee beans

The most interesting part of the brain is the gray matter which makes up its most outer layer. This gray matter contains cells which take care of the important and delicate work of the brain. The rest of the brain is made up d white nerve fivers, which are called white matter. These are like telephone wires, carrying messages to the muscles.

However, there is very little we know about the way the brain carries on our reasoning and thinking processes. The thoughts or experiences are entered in the brain. They are compared with each other and with the previous experiences it has stored up, Thus memory, judgement  and thought are developed. We do not know the particular part of the brain in which each of these processes is carried out. It is the work of the brain as a whole. Anger, joy, jealousy, fear, and other emotions and mental powers are general effects of our heredity and environment and are not found in any particular spot in the brain.

Naturally, when dealing with the goings on of Man's brain, is important to look to the wisdom of Phrenology, especially when dealing with the importance of Matrimony:

The theory underlying Phrenology is that the real spiritual personality, in clothing itself with a material covering for its temporal sojourn in this material world, has stamped its quality upon the body generally, and upon the covering of the brain specifically; that the appearance in general, and in particular of the head of the man, gives an unerring guide to the inherent nature of the individual. 

It claims, by long continued observation, to have acquired such a knowledge of these cranial protuberances and depressions the as to grade them with exactness as to their location and degree or size, so that they may be read with accuracy by one schooled in the study.

If we need any apology for here introducing what phrenology has to say on the question, it is that nowhere else do we find any coherent teaching bearing upon it, and that, so far as we have examined the subject, phrenology has some strong points in its favour.

Dr John Mason Good, the celebrated English author and physician in his last contribution to the Medical Magazine writes: "Medicine has destroyed more lives than war, pestilence and family combined." He further says: A good motherly old lady is more valuable in a family of children than any physician." (Wouldn't Vitalogy be of more value in a house than any two old ladies? – Editor.) It is with this knowledge that one's house should always be stocked with not just medicine, but sage and sound advice; and a good motherly old lady, of course.

Vitalogy

It kills me that Pearl Jam will still be around when grunge comes back in. I died my hair green in year eight to go see them just so I could stand three rows from the back and pretend to know the words. And no, I didn't see them at Myer Music Bowl when the crowd tore down the fence – I was at home playing Mortal Kombat. I was hoping someone would get me the vinyl edition of Vitalogy for my Bar Mitzvah, but, alas. I only really wanted it for the awesome packaging and bragging rights.

That niggling tale of grunge and regret has finally come to an end. If only I had have known that one day I would have the real Vitalogy book that the cover art was based on I would have saved myself a lot of trouble. Just think about about all of those wasted man hours memorising the words to 'Jeremy' and 'Better Man'.

Instead I can now wisely spend my man hours giggling over cures for Spotted Fever, Gout, the Clap, Dyspepsia and Seminal Emissions (giggle). What alarms me most is the extensive notes a previous owner has made next to Chronic Constipation. I hope for their sake the five tablespoons of scraped turnip helped soothe their ailment.

Thank heaven for little girls

Thank heaven for little girls
for little girls get bigger every day

Thank heaven for little girls
they grow up in the most delightful way

Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
one day will flash and send you crashin' through the ceilin'

Thank heaven for little girls
thank heaven for them all,
no matter where no matter who
for without them, what would little boys do?

Thank heaven... thank heaven...
Thank heaven for little girls

Why the sudden resurgence in little girl Adventure books? Boys as well, but the female variant seems to be popping up with more veracity. Op Shops, bookstores, interior design blogs, magazines, window displays; everywhere I look there they are. Smiling at me with their pre-war earnestness and reassuring outdoorsiness.  I'm guessing it stems from the recent spate of newly made adventure books (mostly for boys), or has it been running parallel to this coming from the new craft movement? As vintage trends go, they're a winner. They look drop dead gorgeous and you can always expect charming illustrations and lettering alluding to good natured fun and whimsy inside. Is it simply an aesthetic fascination or does it come from a desire for when rosy cheeks were the norm and little girls grew up in the most delightful way? 

Do You Remember the Future?

I remember the future well. Jetpacks, Mars and food capsules. It used to be so much fun. The promise of plastics just over the horizon and a helpful robot in every home. Say what you will about those times, but at least the future meant something in those days: Progress. You knew where you stood and our enlightened little selves could never do any wrong.

But then some of us started venturing off into the night like moths to a neon green flame. It was getting dark and we didn't really have a choice. Besides, Mars was getting boring and we needed something grittier than what our streamlined lives could give us. The first time you jacked into cyberspace with it's glowing grids of unfolding information you forgot how painful getting those damn chips inserted into your brain was. And oh the parties; throbbing music, lasers and reflective fluoro clothes were such a distracting novelty at the time. But we'd all become fragmented cynical beings and whimpering moral relativists. So much so that we didn't realise the robots had started turning against us until it was nearly too late. I mean, who were we to judge their value system? Thank god for the millennium bug is all I can say. Who knew that little bit of errant code would shut them down? 

But where to now? It's been nine years since we've been really living in the future and everyone seems to be taking it for granted. We've been sampling the past for so long that everyone's forgotten how to look forward and come up with something new. I thought progress was supposed to be a linear function of time? People just don't seem to want to live in the future anymore. Sure, we have personal communication devices but how boring is that? Speaking of boring, have you been to the suburbs lately? There's not a cantilevered helipad in sight. And what's with all the cheap neo-Edwardian facades? That's not how I remember the future. They're pretty much raising their finger to any notion of futurity, aesthetic or otherwise. Hell, I'll even sheepishly admit to turning my back on the future. I've had a beard for the past few years and nothing says dismissal of the future like scruffy unshaven facial hair. Who saw that trend coming a few years back?

But as much as I miss my jetpack I don't really want it to be part of my future today. I don't have a nostalgia for the absolute and I'm certainly not sentimental about the impotent haze of moral relativism. So where does that leave us? It seems people are just getting on with it and being pragmatic about the whole thing. It's not like we have a choice these days. Sure there's movement, but it just seems to be too informal at this point. Everyone seems to be so process orientated and participatory; but I'll happily accept that this seems to be the point.

But If you want a taste of what it's going to look like, trawl through some architectural renderings. Big shiny impossible ones. The crazy stuff seems to be coming from students and the big studios.  You can't start with the future until we have a general consensus of what the city should look like. If any of those urban concepts intertwine with a global mega-slum as their backdrop then you know you've found something. 

When your done glossing your eyeballs with pretty pictures go read some good old fashioned Science. The mind bending stuff. Anything that does a good job of melding complexity theory, relational generative networks and biotech is a good place to start. As long as you're running far away from Reductionist and Post Structuralist theory. And if you don't understand it yet, just keep on going until your nose bleeds. Those scientists never give up on progress, whatever the political climate. It's in their blood to keep on pushing the boundaries of what's appropriate. We'll worry about navigating microtopian ideologies later on, if at all.

Were not there yet, but we'll know when we move back into the future. We'll know because it will be weird, achingly weird. If it's both familiar and unrecognisable but it smacks you in the face with progress then you'll know you've found it. Even if it happens to have a damn jetpack.

Design Reportage

Have you picked up yours yet? You should, it's great. Pick it up, if there are any left from Greville St books, Metropolis, the Narrows, Lamington Drive and the Melbourne Museum of Printing. Oh, and it's free, so you have no reason not to. Great writers, great design, great design writing. We're looking at making more and turning it into a bi-monthly thing. Which, is awesome. We'll be looking at ways to improve on it (hard to do, I know). Particularly in the area of creating a community around this thing (everyone else seems to be doing it) and looking at post-collapse methods of income generation (is there any other choice?). Naturally we'll be looking at design and writing and design writing (kind of a no brainer) but trying to expand and improve upon the gold standard that's in issue one. And if I said I'd send you one, I'm working on it (I promise).

Transport of Tomorrow

Civilisation depends not only upon possessing the means to make things, but also the means to move them. The history of civilisation might, indeed, be described as the history of transport. This will be even more true tomorrow, although the present century has already seen advances in transport that equal all the progress made in every other century.

A little bit of post war enthusiasm can go along way. The predictions are, however, laughable. Not because they are so far off the mark (which they aren't), but because we take so many of them for granted. I find it hard to believe that people put up with such a lack of basic infrastructure within the past two generations. It's mostly the front cover illustration that sets up a ludicrous premise. The text is mostly conservative in it's predictions of how the men and women of tomorrow will live. Take the issue of the jetpack. There is no mention of man's desire to commute via them; instead it focuses on ensuring that roads are not built for the horse and cart, but for automobiles. There is some small space dedicated to the jet plane, and how it should be the norm in travel. Disappointingly, the article is not referring to a daily commute via the plane, but instead urges the engineers and scientists of yesterday's tomorrow to create planes capable of transporting more than 100 people at a time. Which, by today's standard is laughable. Horrendously laughable.

The exchange of goods between countries has been revolutionised, and transport has made possible the existence of industrial Britain; all our skill and enterprise in industry would have been wasted if ships, aeroplanes, trains and motor vehicles did not bring us and distribute vast quantities of food. 

The topic of the transportation of goods is lightly discussed above, but generally the focus seems to be on the transportation of people. Perhaps the most important infrastructural system and object of the 20th century has been the shipping container. The standardisation of the shipping container (there are only two sizes) brought about huge changes in not just the transportation of goods, but world trade, manufacturing systems and ports throughout the world. I haven't read it, but The Box by Marc Levinson charts the story of the shipping container to the cog and gear that it is today. Most appropriate to this post is how far removed it is from the scrumptiously curved forms of yesterday's tomorrow. It is almost the aesthetic antitheses: ugly, stackable, modular and angular. 

Despite this, or because of it, container architecture seems to be popping up everywhere. Not just in trendy laneway bars and pop up ethical cafes, but as genuine bona fide housing. I've taught English to Israeli Bedouins in a makeshift classroom made from a converted container. Hell, there was that proposal for a new type of shipping container housing estate replacing the trailer park. On the trendier scale there is the Container Home Kit which utilises them to create gritty urban looking prefab housing. Shipping container ideas just keep on popping up all over the web these days (often to the point of saturation); something about them seems to tap in today's tomorrow. Don't take my word for it, go read BLDGBLOG's love affair with them: 

What I think is, actually the point of reusing shipping containers as architecture is: 1) when you can, you should reuse existing materials for somewhat obvious environmental reasons, and 2) the spatial, logical and combinatorial systems that cargo containers imply are simply awesome. The possibilities excite me. Container-made buildings are fun to look at, they're fun to render, and they're fun to imagine forming new architectural reefs and Tetris cites, interlocking in a sci-fi future coming soon to a landscape near you.

His book better make its way to a bookstore near me or I will be very disappointed. Meanwhile, in the other issue of Authentic Science is an article titled Sport and Leisure in the Future. Just as verbose as the previous one and in this case, the predictions are laughable because of how far off the mark they are. 

Our hours of work could be halved tomorrow, giving every man another twenty odd hours of leisure a week. The price would be that of halving the number of things he could buy or, for that matter, which would be available. Some might consider this worthwhile. The need, therefore, is to draw up a "work and play" budget in which hours of work and leisure for the nation are balanced as money expenditure and revenue are balanced financially.

The author then goes on to predict sweeping changes to sports in how they are scored and the eventual weeding out of blood sports through mans elevation to a higher state of cultural intelligence. But really, I only needed that as a vague segue into Matt Jones' Reboot 9 video on Travel and Serendipity. But considering it insists on not wanting to be embedded here means I'll have to just provide the link and his summary of the talk:

Travel has always been part of how humanity has broadened its horizons and minds. Humans are more mobile than ever before, but we're still passengers in an industrial-era travel infrastructure. Paradoxically, industry has been using informatics for lowering the economic and environmental costs of transporting goods for decades. A new age of personal travel information tools will change this, and to illustrate this we'll talk through our thoughts in developing Dopplr. Dopplr is a service we hope will play a part in this change: to increase serendipity in your social world, lower the impact of travel on our biosphere and help create a new golden age of travel. Don't worry though. This won't be a sales pitch for anything other than getting all of us to rethink and rehumanise travel - and look at tools to help us do so.

Some good old fashioned enthusiasm.

Mind Grenades: Manifestos from the Future

Despite never having held this book until well into my second year at uni, the contents within stirred me to want to be a designer years before. When I first stumbled across Wired magazine I could never understand why, at the start of each issue, surrounded by adds were these stunning double page spreads. Dripping in cyber cool and using all the tricks in the computer enabled post modern designers arsenal they shouted at me that I needed to read this thing. I think they still stand as the greatest editorial device I've ever come across. I can remember the issue when they stopped using it as I nervously flipped through the pages trying to find my beloved Intro Quotes. But alas, they were gone, and I've never looked at that specific issue with fondness, but with scorn. I think the end of the intro quotes signalled the end of my initial love affair with Wired and it took me a few years to get back on the bandwagon. While the recent (brilliant) redesign of Wired drips with visual intelligence on a scale unmatched by the previous issues; it still lacks the genius of those mind grenades. 

Taking a quote from somewhere in the magazine, the creative director John Plunkett would design these spreads as a way to advertise the contents of the magazine. Bending the capabilities of the computer (in those days) and printed using 6 plates (yep, six) they exploded off the page with ideas my fragile juvenile mind was just beginning to understand. My bedroom (refer two posts back) was plastered with these grenades, skilfully sliced out of the magazine. I only mildly regretted cutting them out and ruining the magazine, and have kept all of them in good condition in a box somewhere. The book, Mind Grenades, reproduces the first three years of Wired's Intro Quotes and it's funny looking back at them now. The ones on my wall were from later years, and so weren't as grotesquely dated as these are. They seemed so current, so very very now. But these ones (printed with 25 match colours (double yep) are so laughably dated that I just can't take them seriously. They really went all out with the fluoro in Wired's early days, and the front cover screams how proud they are of this. To let everything just pop off the page and into the fluoro appreciating part of the brain (c'mon, we all know we have it, it's between the pleasure seeking part and the reptilian core). Hell, I've had a headache just looking at the front cover - both here and on the screen.

I'm beginning to love the act of looking back at the future. I'm reading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock at the moment and it's just so quaint. The same for these. Not just the texts but all the Photoshop gimmickry and horrible 3D models. It is probably the most dated design publication I have (save maybe for Typographics 2: Cybertype), but that's what I love about it. It isn't a Manifesto from the Future, it's a Manifesto of a Future. Not our future, but yesterdays future. 

Jack In

A nice little happy accident occurred with the white balance when I was photographing this book; but I think William Gibson would have wanted it this way. With everything turned up, way up. Looking down at Spinal Tap's setting of 11 and laughing at it. With the book acknowledging it's age, the cracks and folds turning it back in on itself and the background behind. Turning those cracks of ink into a crackling of the artefact and novel itself. A nice way to age considering it just hit it's 25th anniversary. I read this book when I was 17 and it blew my mind. Completely and utterly transformed it into something else and I've been eternally grateful for that mental reboot ever since. 

One thing that has always bothered me with the nature of the Gibsonian Matrix is how little it has to do with the workings of the internet. The money quote from the book still tingles the hairs on my head but only in it's impossibility:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

Don't get me wrong, I like my neon Cartesian grids as much as the next guy, but there's nothing Cartesian about the internet. Where's the sense of a network? The spatial aspect of the matrix is incompatibable with the linked internet we deal with day to day. What makes it worse, although thankfully we seemed to have moved away from this metaphor, is the constant attempts to visual the web this way. The one area where we seem to be moving towards in regards to a spatial understanding and visualisation of the interwebs is with the geospatial web on the mobile phone. This is a far cry from the old fashioned but very (very very very) awesome method of plugging in a jack into the rear of our cranium. Hell, even Gibson himself has remarked that we don't leave the internet anymore. There's no difference between cyberspace and meatspace, it's all around us, overlaid.

But as a world building exercise, this book is second to none. I was fully convinced (I secretly still am) that this future would come true. That we were on a path towards not just this consensual hallucination but a world of chips inserted into the head, mirror shades implanted over the eye sockets and runaway artificial intelligence. Not to mention neon lights at every turn and the odd bit of vat meat here and there.

I thought it might be worthwhile tracking the tone of some of his later novels. Clearly, the top two still share the breakneck extremist cyberpunk aesthetics of Neuromancer, but with an early nineties facelift. The Neuromancer cover is a child of the eighties, with all it's airbrushing and neon lined cityscapes. These two, while the literature is a product of the eighties, are steeped in mid-nineties visual mythology. The layers upon layers of dirt, noise and texture, the use of Helvetica (appropriate?) and the killer dreadlocks and sunglasses. The Neuromancer edition in this series is just as extreme, but with an aggressive male and a moody blue palette. But even still, we can see a delineation of the original cyberpunk into something else, something more realistically digital. I've omitted my copy of Count Zero here, notably because the edition I have is fairly uninspired and doesn't match the aggressive nature of the rest of The Sprawl series.

Moving on to the Bridge Series, Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. These three tap into the nineties in much the same way that the previous three ripped up the eighties. I'm digging the use of Letter Gothic over the artificial Japanese celebrity. I mean, you can't more 1996 than that, even the colour of the blue fish is spot on. All Tomorrow's Parties, released in 1999 is my favourite of all his novels. Only on the second reading did I realise it to be a product of pre-millennial fever. The description of nodal points as a way of understanding history, progress and change (not to mention the networked links of the internet) still fascinates. By changing tack with the latest trilogy (I am painfully waiting for the last one to be finished) and writing about the present, he successfully makes the case that we're in the future now. Which, considering that it's halfway through 2009 is a fair case to make. 

Almost too thin

Continuing on with the dematerialisation of my collection is this little beauty. They're not messing about by calling them Extra Thin; the most delicate of strands crumbled every time I so much as looked at them. The whole design, while fairly busy, has a lightness to the touch that successfully conveys what was inside. Only now do I notice the thin white rules over the thicker bands of orange. It's a shame they forced the scrumptious lettering into the awkward shape on the side though. The inside was just as delicately thought through. Each bundle of noodles were tight together with a single loop of thin white thread. I made extra care to leave one bundle inside just as an excuse to leave it in the cupboard for just that little bit longer.

Display mechanisms

The cleaning fun didn't stop yesterday. Almost all of my waking hours was spent cleaning the walls, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom from mould and of course attempting to spring clean. Apparently these piano mechanisms aren't aesthetically pleasing enough for our house, and I finally lost the argument (I'll let you all know that I haven't gotten rid of them, but the battle has indeed been lost). I'll admit that they're not the most pleasing of objects, but I love looking at the mechanism needed for each piano key.

I feel that by dematerialising them and putting them up here means they're not really gone in some sense. There's a whole essay on post materiality regarding this trend that I'd love to sink my teeth into but instead I'll get you to read Bruce Sterling's last Viridian note instead. Whenever you feel cluttered by too much stuff, read it. Hell, just read the last half. But read it. If reading isn't your thing, watch him discuss his closing talk at the recent Reboot conference. It's slow and only streaming, but well worth listening to him talk about recognising material objects as fossilised social relationships and how we are moving on to looking at our possessions as flows, not as finite materiality.

The Shilo Haggadah

I wanted to bring this out last year, but mum lent it to someone a few days before pesach and instead I've had to wait a whole year before showing off this beauty. We've had it for years, or at least long enough for me to remember it from childhood. The illustrative typography and drawings are quite something and I've hopefully picked out the best spreads and details. It's clearly aimed at kids, with a few naive children looking earnest and well behaved throughout the book. 

For some reason, the Didone really complements the hebrew font, despite their obvious historical differences. I'm not talking about the difference in language; more that Bodoni/Didone modern faces  were a brave leap from their historical forebears and the hebrew script is a  a faithful echo. The urgency in the hebrew is much more emotive than the english, but they balance each other quite well. Full marks to the original designer for giving the didone the perfect amount breathing space on the page. In most cases the hebrew side leaps off the page with thick lashings of black while the english seems to be a calm restraint - perhaps to make it easier and less threatening for kids to understand. Only now do I realise that the left side is english and the right is hebrew throughout the book. Making it easy for kids not only to follow, but to keep parents convinced that the good little children can learn hebrew by osmosis.

Bodoni aside, there's some really wonderful expressive typography throughout. They're mostly chapter/page headings and really serve to balance the strong vertical emphasis. They've even gone and used the long forgotten long s; they get full marks for trying to bring that back although I wonder how many kids tripped up on this (I know I still do).

Loving these crazy as hell drawings as well. Nothing like a bit of forward thinking messianic belief to pave the way for children to be sitting on a lion and playing with birds and a giraffe. What's with all the animals being african? The reason I think Passover is the big festival on the jewish calender is it really gets to show off and flex the biblical god's muscles. Killing the first born, splitting the sea, all the plagues, he really gets to wave his smiting stick around.

Check out the trippy get up going on here. Here's this kid just calmly accepting the presence of a star-traveller who's turned their door into a portal just so he can come and get a free glass of wine. If you're not big on your jewish mythology, this guy is Eliyahu (or Elijah if you want his lame name) who is coming to decide on whether or not there should be 4 or 5 glasses of wine. By leaving one out for him we're leaving the decision up to him, but if he does come and decide to be a guest get ready for the end of day; fun times.

I should have the rest of this stuff up on flickr by the end of the week.

The Joy of (complete) Sets

I was planning on doing a nice big reveal of this gorgeous set of Nitsche designed history books but AceJet beat me to it. Having been too busy (and possibly too intimidated by it's awesomeness) they've been sitting there, staring at me, taunting me with the breadth of seriously high quality design contained within. I'm working on it, I promise, but until then, point your clicker at his lovely (yet incomplete) collection here and here.

The Ghost Map

Let me make no bones about this: Steven Johnson is my favourite non-fiction author. His books are awesome, his talks are awesome, his blog is awesome, his business is awesome, his articles are awesome and the way he chuckles is awesome. Despite my literary crush, I stubbornly chose not to pick up The Ghost Map for a year or so. As soon as I finished reading it, I realised what a fool I had been, and promptly decided that it was his best yet. Not because it's the most visceral description of Victorian England I've come across (having never read Dickens) but it allows the main point of the book - the long zoom - to be revealed to you in ways that a typical piece of non-fiction would not have been able to do. I figure that seeing as though his new book The Invention of Air has just come out, I may as well discuss this one.

But first, a little bit of prefacing needs to be done. A previous book of his, Emergence, blew my mind. I picked it up at the airport a few years ago and it almost ruined my holidays by being so good. It's subtitle 'The connected lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software" neatly sums up the major points of the book as it springs from subject to subject looking at how decentralisation and bottom-up networks allow for complexity, adaptation and intelligence. It also happens to be the future of how we look at everything (if I say so myself). It also allows The Ghost Map to act as a sequel of sorts to Emergence, except instead of hopping from subject to subject, The Ghost Map looks the cholera outbreak of 1854 as the impetus for the book. 

While the book revolves around the four central characters, the real star of the story is the way in which Johnson allows us to travel through multiple scales of experience. The two human characters give the book narrative grounding, providing us with an account of the outbreak at ground level; the different backgrounds and beliefs of these men give us differing perspectives of the neighbourhood and how they came to the solution. The doctor, a trained anaesthetist, was able to recognise that the disease wasn't a cause of miasma but of dirty water. Whitehead, being a man of the community, was able to traverse the social networks of the neighbourhood and find the initial cause of the outbreak - a bucket of soiled water from an infant tossed into the cesspool at the base of their house which would later make its way to the water system. The intertwining tales of these two, detective work and scientific enquiry, provide the foundation for the account, which allows Johnson to get into the meat of the book, germs and cities.

The disease, Vibrio Cholerae, is particularly nasty. If I ever feel the need to spend the last day of my life lying in agony shitting out rice water as I excrete every last bit of liquid from my system as my dry skin stretches itself over my weakened body while allowing my brain to be active of my fate, I know who to call. It doesn't help that Victorian London wasn't exactly a bastion of cleanliness; neither does Johnson's particularly colourful prose, making up for long stretches of fairly disgusting reading.  Given the conditions of day, it comes as no surprise that the disease was able to spread the way it did. Nor does it surprise that the developing world is facing the same problems, but we'll get to that at the end, as does the book. The horrible irony of the outbreak was that while the cure for cholera is to re-hydrate the body as quickly as possible, the Broad street pump which was the cause for the disease, provided the cleanest looking and freshest tasting water of the neighbourhood. Meanwhile, the conditions for Cholera to survive perfectly suited the largest city in the world at the time. 

The squalid living and working conditions were able to reinforce social conventions through the outbreaks that the lower classes were lesser peoples due to the concentration of the outbreaks in specific neighbourhoods. The issue of density comes into play here and was one of the shocks to the system that one encountered in 1850s London. He also discusses the issue of density in Emergence, and how its power and creative potential is a good thing. Coincidentally, the release date for Emergence was on 9/11; not exactly the best time to be espousing the virtues of urban density. The hopelessly inadequate public infrastructure was in no way capable of preventing something like this from happening. The sheer stench of the place would be enough too convince anyone that this experiment in Urbanism was not suited to human living. Thankfully, the outbreak forced the authorities to invest in modern infrastructure that would allow it to expand. 

I'm of the firm belief that urban development is a mixture of collective action and individual choice. That any bottom-up emergent behaviour as a result of individual choice should interface with responsible top down decisions to shape the direction towards a positive outcome. Call it a Keynesian approach to urban design I suppose. This is especially relevant in shantytowns, which are soon set to house one billion people in the near future. We all know that the human race just tipped over the threshold of 50% of us living in urban areas, but a lesser known fact is just how many of us will be living in shantytowns. While they are breathtaking in terms of ingenuity, adaptability and all of that delicious emergent behaviour, they're sorely lacking in terms of official infrastructure that will allow them to continue to grow without crumbling in on themselves. Johnson brings up the issues of urbanism in the closing chapter; how we are to deal with it and what problems will arise. It becomes clear at this point that urbanism, like feminism or environmentalism, is a principle worth advocating.

But back to the map. As a piece of graphic design, it's a stunner and is a great part of the history in the design of information. The sparse lines and grim marks illustrating the deaths also make for a great piece of Victorian aesthetics. It perfectly displays that the disease is in the water, but also allows us to move across perspective in one quick glance. Snow believed that the disease existed and knew that it was ingested instead of inhaled; he was thinking on the level of microbes but didn't have the technology of the day to see it. With Whitehead, he was able to access the local knowledge to find out who had died and where. Furthermore, he was able to scale back out to the level of the neighbourhood to see all the deaths. It's through this map that they were able to conceptually move between the very small up to the very large and capture the scales in between and use them in a productive way.

The Church of the Long Now

I'm usually not one for the reading of fiction. If I want narrative I'll soak myself in a nice multi-arc TV show (although I'll be damned if I'll actually watch it on TV). As my reading habits to the left will attest, I have fairly specific tastes and I try not to veer too far from them. However, I am willing to make exceptions, especially when Neal Stephenson has a new book out. I've read a few of his previous books – Snow Crash and The Diamond Age – blew me away. I happened to pick them up at the right time and they magically tapped into whatever train of thought had been playing in my mind that month. His latest is no exception. Growing out of a few sketches for the Long Now Foundation resulted in a novel that asks the question: What if we lived in a world that took long term thinking seriously? 

Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside “saecular” world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent’s walls. Three times during history’s darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.

With this fantastic inversion, the Saecular world consist of those caught up in day to day fashions and the latest explosions on TV, while the Mathic world live in closed off monasteries that are only allowed outside of the gates once every ten, 100 or 1,000 years depending on their assigned caste. This allows them to remain unchanged by the speed of day to day and minute to minute living. 

But the plot nor the world isn't the star. The real beauty of the book is it's constant homage to Western philosophical and mathematical traditions, constantly played out as dialogues (reminiscent of Plato's The Republic and many more in the tradition). While set on another world, using different names, the book spans through Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Leibniz, Kant, Husserl and Godel to name a few. He even touches on Post-Modernism through the use of a particularly annoying character who just won't shut the hell up about semiotics. The question of whether eternal truths exist and would they exist on different planets is played out to near perfection; the value of pi, Pythagorus' theorem and most importantly the Platonic theory of forms. The discussions concerning these quickly became the centerpiece of the novel and had me most excited and yearning for more. 

The 900 pages of the book is testament to the long term thinking imbued throughout the book. This slowly converted my brain to slow down it's processes, forcing me to think slowly and with a long view in mind. Since I finished a few days ago everything outside of the book has seemed unimportant, not grand enough. Having come out of a two month marathon of constant news leading up to the US election, it's seemed completely irrelevant since I put the book down. It almost makes me sick just looking at the news and I've pretty much sworn off it as a result. My impatience with short sightedness and short term thinking will hopefully echo for the next few months. 

It was then with great serendipity that mondays TED video was Stewart Brand talking about the Clock of the Long Now, the very thing that inspired the novel. If you haven't heard of the Long Now Foundation, I highly recommend it. 

The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

Their monthly seminars have the most fascinating people talking, and provide a lovely addition to like minded podcasts. 

If the video doesn't work you can always look here.

The Olivetti Lettera 32

It was never bound to look as good as Uppercase's typewriters, but it was worth a shot. Took these photos quite some time ago and have been keeping my eye on a few typewriters here and there ever since. Still can't decide if it's worth buying one just for the aesthetics, but they do look good as objects. Simply looking at the instruction manual cause my mind to drift into a make believe world half filled with Don Draper and Cooper Sterling; the other half being a Vignelli designed typographic montage by way of PsyOp. Having spent the day with F looking through second had shops we came across quite a few typewriters, and they were cheap as well. A few Olivettis and an Underwood as well. Not expensive either, but I just can't justify the purchase of a dead medium, even though it would really tide over that corner. Especialy when they look as good as these.