Orientation

Orientation of the windows in rooms I've had for the past 13 years.

Happy Home - South and East Windows
Mosers - East
House in Nang Lae - South and West Windows
House in Bandu - South
Isaksons - West
Dorm Room 1 - North
Dorm Room 2 - Northeast
Basement at Zach's - North
Wallingford - West
Queen Anne 1 - South
Oxford - South
Queen Anne 2 - West
Capitol Hill - East

East: 3.5
West: 4
North: 2.5
South: 5

East is the ideal direction, for sunrise. But I would take any orientation of window, or any size of room, for a room that wasn't ground level or basement.

My window at the Bandu house caught a lot of the afternoon sun, and a lot of my books were subsequently damaged.

fashion

 

'Last Stand' Canvas Mocassins - $70
'White Flight' Single-Source Cotton Socks - $25
'Emergency' Topless Jumpsuit - $180 (belt loops available by special order)
Pinstripe Rayon/Polyester Shirt with Pre-Popped Collar - $120
'Blu-nibrow' Indoor Shades - $65

21st Century Scientists Have it So Easy

After several years of collecting specimens and keeping journals in the Amazon, AR Wallace was on his way back to England when his ship caught fire and sank. He ended up spending 10 days on an open boat before being picked up by another ship. He notes in the November, 1852 issue of Zoologist that "The only things which I saved were my watch, my drawings of fishes, and a portion of my notes and journals. Most of my journals, notes on the habits of animals, and drawings of the transformations of insects, were lost."

A few pages down, I started reading about another naturalist named Julian Deby. The account is that "suddenly he was himself seized with the malignant fever of the country, and had his whole body covered with tumours. He was for six weeks completely laid up, and nearly all the time unconscious; when he came to himself, his first thought was for his collections: alas! his Indian servant had forgotten to fill up with tar the plates laid under the bench which supported his boxes, and the ants (a small red species) had devoured every specimen in his collection."

I love that whoever wrote up that second report paused to specify what type of servant failed to protect the research, and what type of ant ate Deby's collection. A true scientist.

markets

In the Malay Archipelago, written in the 1860s, AR Wallace comments on the state of Timor. He notes that it is more trouble than profit to the Dutch and Portuguese rulers, proposes a few changes, then finishes with this:

Under such a system the natives would soon perceive that European government was advantageous to them. They would begin to save money, and property being rendered secure they would rapidly acquire new wants and new tastes, and become large consumers of European goods. This would be a far surer source of profit to their rulers than imposts and extortion...

While Wallace didn't anticipate the end of colonial rule, isn't this more or less what has happened? The formation of new desires and new markets?

The Kind of Barber I Want

The last time I went to a barbershop for a hair cut, I was 15. In the 8 years since then, I've cut my hair myself with a little help from my friends and mom (to trim up the back) and have even handed over the scissors to my girlfriend to do the whole thing. Reading Arabian Nights, I came across a barber who makes his customer miserable with endless talk. He says this about himself:

God in His bounty has provided you with a barber who is also an astrologer, a chemist, an expert in natural magic, grammar, morphology, philology, rhetoric, eloquence, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, religious law, the traditions of the Prophet and the interpretation of the Quran. I have read the relevant books and studied them; I have a practical knowledge of affairs; I have commited to heart a perfect knowledge of the sciences; I am a theoretical and practical master of technical skill. There is nothing that I have not organized and undertaken.

Now that's the kind of barber I'm looking for. I've considered a few barbers at various times, but at the moment of decision I've never gone through with it. If I found a barber shop that was open at 3 in the morning, an all-night barber shop, I would have gone a long time ago.

Night Walks

Since I was a teenager I've enjoyed walking around at night. Most nights while vacationing on the Gulf of Thailand, I'd walk up and down the beach and, while visiting other cities, I loved walking around the night bazaars and streets to see what was happening. I kept this up when I moved to the States for college, but I was disappointed to find that not much happens in Seattle outside, after dark.

Charles Dickens was a big walker, and a big night walker, and started out a piece on the subject this way:

Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed, but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.

I think he was on to something. All of last year, when I was working on my project on Dickens, Darwin, and Nietzsche, I suspected that I would have breezed through it if I'd written all through the night, rather than trying to write during the day. I never had the guts to do it.

architecture

…but another aspect (or spectre) of architecture is how sedimentary it is, either the different buildings in a neighborhood or city, or the difference in the building (renovations, I guess). And what is sedimentary? Differences of materials used for construction, the money and means available to whoever was bankrolling the project, restrictions that speak to different building codes at different times, the technologies first included or added on afterwards (some more successfully than others). And then there’s the history that gets wrapped up in a building through fire, earthquakes, vehicular accidents, etc.

Returning to Thailand after the economic crash in 1997, one of the first things I noticed was how many buildings were left half-built after the funding disappeared. Most of them are still unfinished.

And, of course, while we often know who rents or even owns a building, the designers and, especially, the builders disappear.

Many other professions depend on form, materials, and aesthetics working together, but a lot more depends on the structural integrity of, say, a 6-story apartment complex, or a half-mile suspension bridge than on the structural integrity of a 12-string guitar.