A Map of "The Five Points" neighborhood in New York City and its relationship to today's streets and the old Collect Pond.

A Map of "The Five Points" neighborhood in New York City and its relationship to today's streets and the old Collect Pond., a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

This is my first attempt to try to render the story of "The Five Points" Neighborhood in historical layers. The neighborhood or more aptly, slum was also known as Paradise Square was always notorious but was made famous more recently as the setting for Martin Scorcese's, "Gangs of New York" film.

Here’s the story...
The area that was eventually to become the Five Points was originally a spring-fed fresh water pond known as the Collect Pond. It shows up clearly on British maps of Manhattan around the time of the American Revolution. The pond was a major source of drinking water in the colonial era. There was also an area of the pond known as “Cow Bay” where farmers would bring their cows to drink.

As lower Manhattan grew, several breweries and tanneries set up shop near the Collect. This included Coulter’s Brewery which was built in 1792. Coulter’s building would eventually become known as “The Old Brewery,” perhaps the Five Point’s most infamous tenement. The breweries and tanneries no doubt benefitted greatly from their proximity to the Collect Pond’s fresh water but it was not a mutually beneficial relationship. Over time, the pond had become quite polluted and smelly and the city made plans to fill it in. The Canal that gave Canal Street it’s name was built, in part, to drain the Collect and it’s surrounding marsh. The City backfilled the collect with garbage and debris around 1811 and began allowing buildings to be erected. The pond however had been poorly filled and was still being fed by the underground spring. The area remained wet, muddy and mosquito infested. As a consequence of this, anyone that could move out of the area did. In the 1830s, more and more tenements were built on the soggy ground and began to settle and lean almost as soon as they were completed. Little Water Street, which had once been the footpath to Cow Bay was now a dangerous, crime-infested alley. There was a building at the northern end of Little Water Street known as “Jacob’s Ladder” because the front steps were badly rotten, broken and misaligned.

Eventually only the poorest of the poor chose to live in the area known initially as Paradise Square and later as Five Points. This included freed black slaves and a group of immigrants arriving from Europe. The Potato Famine had hit Ireland in the 1840s prompting a huge exodus. As they arrived in New York poor and destitute, many ended up in the Five Points. As many as a thousand may have lived in “The Old Brewery” which had been broken up into tiny, one-room “dwellings”. It was said that there was a murder every night in the brewery for months on end.

The emergence of The Five Points as a crime-ridden slum feels like destiny in action. Had the Potato Famine happened a decade later, the Irish might have ended up in a different neighborhood. If the Collect Pond had not become polluted then drained and backfilled, there would not have been the cheap, undesirable land to build on. Had the buildings not been built on soggy, marshland, they might have been more stable, desirable and able to charge more rent.

With all of the above conditions in place, in came the poor and the crime associated with so many scrambling to scratch out an existence. The area was famous for numerous gangs including the “Dead Rabbits” featured in Scorcese’s movie. The neighborhood had many alleys like “Bottle Alley” and “Bandit’s Roost” that were gang hangouts. Some gang members eventually ended up at “The Tombs” prison after being convicted of a crime. The Tombs was built in 1838 in the Egyptian Revival style in the hopes its ominous appearance would be a natural deterrence against crime. It too was built over the Collect Pond and suffered as a result. The foundation sank and leaked eventually forcing the building to be destroyed. The Tombs was replaced twice with newer buildings. The current nearby detention center is still referred to as The Tombs by some law enforcement officials.

Despite the seedy history of the Five Points, some good did come out of the area. There were a number of dance and music halls in the area. One came to be known as Almack’s Dance Hall. Both the Irish and African Americans living in the area frequented it creating a mix of African and Irish dance traditions. It is said that this combination led to what eventually became what we know now as tap dance.

A Map of the Strange Border Between Sweden and Finland on Märket Fyr

Scary Skerry… A Map of the Strange Border Between Sweden and Finland on Märket Fyr, a photo by amproehl on Flickr.

How did I not find this awesome border sooner. An island less than 1200 feet long with a border that takes more twists and turns than a Stieg Larsson novel. It is now possible to walk the length of this short island and cross an international border three times. However, despite the strangeness of the border, Sweden and Finland have always agreed on shared ownership of the skerry (a Norse word for rock in the sea) and the serpentine border results from an effort to correct Finland's accidental siting of the island's lighthouse on the Swedish side of the border. The island is otherwise a textbook example of international cooperation and agreement.

Market Island or Reef (Market Fyr in Swedish) is part of the larger Aland Island chain that lies between Sweden and Finland. According to Wikipedia, ownership of the islands has been shared ever since the Treaty of Fredrikshamn in 1809. Prior to the building of the lighthouse, the border between the two countries passed down the middle of the skerry so that half the island's land mass was in Sweden and half was in Finland. When it was discovered that Finland had accidentally built the lighthouse on Sweden's half of the island, a fix was necessary. The resulting zig-zag border allows the lighthouse to be in Finland while retaining the 50/50 split in land area and avoids any changes to the maritime border. Any alterations of that would have resulted in a change in fishing rights… Perhaps the one thing that might have caused strife between the two herring-loving nations.

Newt Gingrich on Libya

Newt Gingrich on March 7th:

"Exercise a no-fly zone this evening."

Newt Gingrich on March 7th:

"I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Gaddafi."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/23/newt-gingrich-attempts-to_n_839816.html

Seeing patterns where others see none... the brilliance and madness in pattern detection

Although I didn't plan it, this post is related to my previous post on "Seeing Variety". Both posts explore perception.  

Behind the brilliance of Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" lies the idea of pattern recognition. Successful designs respect the patterns that enable people to feel good in a space or building. As a visual species, pattern detection is something we are all do. It happens when we recognize a familiar plot in a TV sitcom. It happens when a doctor starts to recognize a pattern of symptoms prior to making a diagnosis. We all see patterns in our daily life but some see more than others. 

About eight years ago, I was managing a team of designers in a studio in San Francisco. One of my designers was a bright, young, and enthusiastic designer who I initially hired as a production assistant. He would attack everything I assigned him with passion. He was always asking me for more work so, eventually, I started giving him his own projects. Seeing his thought process made me realize you can go too far in pattern recognition. As he presented his designs, I noticed that he was a bit too conceptual. He would make up wild metaphors. You could ask him to talk about basic issues like design requirements, the client, the user, etc. but he would quickly switch back to broad stroke concepts. He would say something like, "Andy, it's all about x". I'd say, "OK, tell me why it's like x." We'd discuss that a bit but then he would lose interest and announce, "Andy, it's really all about y" and then "z" and so on. I enjoyed the theoretical discussions but eventually, I realized I was dealing with what might be described as an attention deficit disorder approach to metaphor. "A is like B... and C... and D, an so on. At the time, I thought it truly had more to do with ADD than pattern recognition. But then, several years later, I was speaking with a woman who had also managed him and she had similar experiences. It solidified the hyper pattern recognition theme.

This all came home for me when I saw the movie, "A Beautiful Mind" about the mathematician, John Nash. There is a scene in the movie where Nash, as played by Russell Crow, starts to see patterns in everything he looks at. The scene is augmented by graphics that show the geometry he is seeing in the words and images of a newspaper or between the pattern of light on his wall and the geometry of the quad outside his dorm room. By this point in the movie, Nash has established himself as a brilliant theorist but one who is also starting to show signs of psychiatric problems so you don't know which mind you're seeing. Sadly, it is the madness at play... a battle with paranoid schizophrenia that he dealt with for the rest of his life. It is only many years later that the genius of his early insights into game theory and mutual cooperation are recognized by the scientific community. His brilliance and victory over illness are represented in a very touching scene where fellow faculty members surrender their pens to Nash. The ritual was entirely fabricated for the movie but it touched me and strikes me as a beautiful gesture.

When I reflect on the experience with the designer on my staff, it seems possible that those patterns did exist and that I was just not capable of seeing them. But if you are designing for the mainstream, you have to reflect what others will see. Consumers will not make esoteric connections and they certainly won't pay you for it even if you point it out. In fact, they are more likely to do their own pattern recognition that will connect your work to something considerably more mundane, maybe that sitcom they were just watching. So with pattern recognition comes the responsibility to discern which ones will connect with your users and which ones just might be the work of a mad man.

The Street

"The street is a room by agreement with walls contributed individually, a floor contributed publicly and a sky contributed by God and nature."
-- Louis I Kahn

Seeing Variety Where Others See None.

Seeing Variety Where Others See None.

There is a desert dwelling community in India with forty different names for clouds. They are experts at gathering water and their interest in clouds, no doubt, stems from their need to know which ones will deliver rain versus those that just blow by. Like the Eskimo's snow, every culture seems to have a vocabulary to match it's passions. But seeing it from the outside usually produces the opposite effect. To someone who's never seen it, all snow looks like snow. I now realize that this happens in our daily lives more often than you'd think.

I took a class in ethnography when I was in college. The professor was an ethno-musicologist and had studied communities in Africa, New York and the jazz and blues communities of the Mississippi Delta. Prompted by a derogatory comment about the Laurence Welk Show (which was big at the time), he interviewed a number of people in the local Polish community about Polka music. When he interviewed people from the general population, he found that many people despised Laurence Welk and his music. "Every song sounds exactly the same" was the characteristic comment he received. However, when he interviewed the Welk fans he found the opposite sentiment. Where some heard a grating monotony, fans heard an infinite amount of variety. They knew there was a familiar pattern... the part that outsiders disliked. But once you got into the music, they felt each song was unique. Hard core fans appreciated the subtle differences in every polka he played.

What the polka community experienced applies to almost any sub-culture. One person's variety is another person's monotony. In college, I experienced the same phenomenon in trying to negotiate music interests with one of my room mates. He was into the Stones and Zeppelin, I was into Steely Dan. He despised Steely Dan. When I asked why he said, "It all sounds the same". What I saw then as just blind (or deaf) criticism I now see as the Laurence Welk phenomenon. Steely Dan has a distinctive sound. From an outsiders perspective it might all sound the same. But for an insider's perspective, I hear a wide range of songs framed by the common elements of Walter Becker's distinctive guitar and Donald Fagan's keyboard and smart vocals.

When I was in an NYC runners group for a few years, I was amazed at how much we could talk about our most recent run. To an outsider it was just a workout but to a runner there is an almost infinite level of detail to review. There is the technique one used on the slight incline versus on the flats and the steep uphills. There's the start of the sprint versus the push to the finish, passing another runner versus drafting, and the list goes on.

I've even noticed having these two impressions when viewing my own work. When I would work on my freehand maps, I would be intensely focused on the quality of my line. My line would waver as the hand tends to do. Sometimes I could even detect the echo of my heartbeat in the waver. So I would worry that the drawing was going to look sloppy. But over time I realized that people didn't feel that way. Thus is partly due to the fact that people like the "life" of a freehand line over a perfect one drawn by a ruler. But it also has to do with the fact that what I was seeing as big wiggles in my line disappeared when you looked at it from a normal viewing distance. It was almost like I had been viewing the map under a microscope.
I don't know what the greater meaning of all this is but it's clearly a part of human culture. Seeing the detail that outsiders miss helps cement the community. Focus sets the craftsman apart from the hobbyist and the fan from the casual observer.

The Medium is the Exploration: A Tribute to Magda McHale

The Medium is the Exploration: A Tribute to Magda McHale

I was fortunate enough to know Magda Cordell McHale while I was a student at University of Buffalo. I took her class and Magda served as an advisor for my Masters thesis. All these years later, the image of Magda that sticks in my head is her at her desk, writing longhand, pen in one hand, cigarette in the other with the ashes falling on her papers. She would write notes on typewritten pages that had been cut into strips, re-arranged, and pasted onto new pages. This was how she worked, the smoking and the constant cutting, annotating, and re-arranging of words. Her office was elegantly decorated… clean, and sparse save the piles of paper and interesting artifacts from her life. Her desk and credenza were full of journals and copies of articles, each dog-eared and bookmarked with notes. As I sat down, she would hand one to me and ask me to read the part that she had circled. As I was reading, she would smile and raise her eyebrows as if to say, “See what I mean? Isn’t life interesting?”.

If you saw her office you might have wondered, why is she in a school of architecture? An architecture historian’s office might look like this, but she wasn’t even writing about architecture. As I was taking her class, I could tell that she was having a big influence on me, but I didn’t know what it was I was learning. With many professors, you just know. Now I understand “x”… structural engineering, Psych 101, Mandarin… whatever it was you didn’t know when you came in, you knew now. It wasn’t until many years later that I finally understood what I had learned. Since Magda is no longer with us, I feel compelled to share what she taught me and why it makes total sense that this happened in a school of architecture.

I took her class in 1982. Harold Cohen, the Dean at the time, had just started the short-lived Design Studies Program. Don Glickman, the Chair of the new program convinced Magda to teach a class. I don’t remember the name of the class but, in the fall of 1982, the eight or ten of us in the program showed up. The first assignment was a book report. Read a piece of fiction and report on it. Again, why was this being assigned in a school of architecture? I chose Charles Dickens’, “A Tale of Two Cities” because of the title and the, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” opening. I was taking a couple of classes about cities at the time and thought Dickens might shine a historical light on the subject.

When it came time for us to report on our books, I remember Magda being wide-eyed and smiling as I described some visceral urban details from the early chapters of the book. After class, she asked to see me in her office, the first of many meetings we would come to have. The first thing she said to me in her unmistakable raspy voice and heavy Hungarian accent was, “Prohl”. My family pronounces this as Prole (as in “rhymes with roll”). Magda pronounced it as they do in Germany with a drawn out “o”… the kind with an umlaut over it. As she said my name, I could tell I was in trouble. “Prohl, I know you didn’t read the book.” She was right, I hadn’t. I’ve always been a slow reader. Not wanting to miss any details, I read every book like it’s a textbook. In the process, I tend to miss the second half of a lot of books. As she spoke, her eyes were looking right through me as if to say, “small town kid, straight, untraveled, Catholic school, insightful but naïve. Searching for meaning.” She was right about those things too.

Most important for this story however, is our final project for the class. The assignment was simple. Pick a topic, and explore it in any medium you choose: painting, music, photography, whatever. Anything we wanted to do, we could. As any professor will tell you, this kind of freedom is a recipe for disaster. “Give a student enough rope and they’ll hang themselves” as the saying goes. By this time, Magda’s penetrating eyes and stern admonitions had put the fear of God in us so we knew we had to perform. I stuck with my interest in cities. I had been reading some books by Lewis Mumford and an article in the New York Times about the character of cities and urban dwellers. My “History of Cities” class revealed the origins of major cities around the world which got me wondering about the very nature of cities. What made a city a city? How were city people different? So I chose the theme “Cities & Time”. The medium I decided to pursue was poetry. I don’t know why I chose poetry. I’ve dabbled in it from time to time but I don’t think I was writing at the time. I might have stumbled on a book by John Cage, someone I think both Harold Cohen and Magda knew. I remember loving his quote, “Every seat is the best seat in the house”. Ostensibly about theaters and performances it is a wonderful piece of philosophy.

So here I was, writing poetry while pursuing a degree in design. It was a revelation to me that the finished poems didn’t spring forth onto the page in their first draft. I went through many revs of typing, editing, and retyping. It was only through tearing some of them apart and wrestling with the words that I arrived at something that flowed. The most creative parts came in the act of editing not in the initial writing. This reminded me of the process of drawing with tracing paper when you redraw on successive layers of tracing paper until you get something you like. More than once in my life, this process has resulted in the discovery of an idea or concept that was not what I was consciously working on. In this mode, drawing becomes the search not the presentation. This is what happened when I was working on those poems. This is also what Magda’s personal process was all about and what I realized I had learned from her many years later. New ideas emerge from the pasting together of existing ideas and your efforts to make sense of them.

In collage, the raw materials are frequently the work of others. Magda’s husband, John McHale was an artist. His primary medium was collage. According to Wikipedia, John McHale was “a founder of the Independent Group, which was a British movement that originated pop art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies.” John made several trips to the US after WWII and was amazed at the rapid growth of our consumer culture. Lots of things were changing after the war and John McHale and his contemporaries struggled to make sense of it. As Magda explained it to me, he would collect magazines on his visits to the US, take them back to the UK, and start cutting them apart. He created compositions that combined paint and the magazine images into visual observations and commentary on a changing world.

Magda was also a founder of the Independent Group. As an artist and writer, Magda saw the social impact of John’s paintings and decided that the same process would work for writing. The class she taught and the assignment I described above clearly grew out of her own experience. If a group of painters could extend their creative process beyond the medium of paint, then why couldn’t she help students explore a range of media. Not everyone who goes to school for architecture becomes an architect and regardless of academic discipline, we all have to find the medium that’s right for us.

My medium has migrated from blueprints to wireframes, websites, and interaction design. Like Magda, I am a student of technology. I work in Silicon Valley, the heart of new technology. This is the birthplace of Intel, Steve Jobs, Google, and the iPhone among many others. Here, technology collides with human innovation perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. Most people working here do not consider themselves artists but much of the work would be familiar to John McHale. Blogging combined the concept of personal journals with a public website. Twitter took the concept of blogging and combined it with the short text messaging behavior of cell phones. The iPod changed the world of music forever by connecting the previously separate worlds of mp3 players, desktop software, and online music store.

On the Internet, the term “mashups” refers to efforts that are quite similar to collage. One of the first to gain attention was a mashup of Google Maps & apartment rentals posted on Craigslist. Two separate sources that yielded new value when combined. This was enabled when Google opened up the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for Google Maps enabling programmers outside Google to use the maps as a building block for their own creations.

Many people, not just designers, are using the Internet to combine and remix digital content into new forms of entertainment. Jesse Dylan’s famous mashup of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech into a music video helped get Obama elected. It then inspired the remixed version mocking Senator John Boehner’s “Hell Know You Can’t” speech opposing the healthcare bill. It should be noted that the ability to create these mashups is not a given. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and commercial interests threaten to prevent this type of experimentation and commentary from happening. Lawrence Lessig has been an excellent spokesperson on this issue. Although a lawyer by training, he believes in the issue so strongly that he has lectured extensively, setup the Creative Commons as an alternative approach, and even argued in front of the Supreme Court on the subject. The Internet is really one big mashup. It needs to remain open so that the Pablo Picassos and John McHales of tomorrow can continue to mix and remix our cultural artifacts.

So this is what I learned from her. Experiment with different media. You might find you’re better at one than you expected. Don’t be afraid to find your new ideas in the mix of existing ones. Whether you are combining words, magazine clippings, or materials in a building, we are all collage artists. Even the city is a kind of collage… the result of many “artists” unknowingly collaborating over generations. Any effort to make sense of the world around us, whether on paper or only in our mind is the making of a collage. This is why Magda Cordell McHale belonged in a School of Architecture. She would have been a treasure in any school or department but I’m glad she ended up in ours.

Giving Thanks

I've never been what would be described as a fan of Pearl Jam but I like their music. Perhaps from seeing him in the Sundance "Iconoclast" series, I've been generally aware that Eddie Vedder is a respected musician. But seeing them perform at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit last night gave me deep new respect for the man and the group. For those who've never been, the annual concert benefits the Bridge School. The school was started by Neil and Peggy Young and works with severely mentally and physically handicapped kids. The concert is also notable in that the kids are up on stage and, along with their parents and caregivers, form a backdrop to the stage. We've been going to the benefit for the last 4 or 5 years and it is always telling to see whether musicians play solely to the audience or to the kids as well. I've never spent much time with someone that was severely handicapped so I have to confess that I would more likely avoid contact for fear of not knowing how. Among the musicians that I remember paying special attention to the kids are Dave Matthews, Gwen Stefani, and now, Eddie Vedder. Other have as well but these are the ones that made an extra effort. At last year's benefit, Gwen Stefani sang a whole song facing the kids with her back to the audience.

 

My wife and I came away from last night's performance personally touched, not just by Eddie Vedder's talent but what seems to be a deep respect for others around him. He started by dedicating his first song not just to the kids, but to one in particular, Cara. You could tell this brought enormous joy to her. Her face was contorting among several expressions no doubt due to her disabilities but you could tell that what she was trying to telegraph was deep, profound joy. Eddie also thanked "Uncle Neil" for helping to launch Pearl Jam's success. Later in the set, he was joined on stage by some classical musicians most likely from here in the Bay Area. As he was wrapping up for the night, he took to time to thank each of the classical musicians by name. Lastly he thanked the "amazing kids" and "incredible parents" of the Bridge School for inviting him to play, something he has done many times over the years. He then told the audience that, "we think we're doing this for them but really, it ends up doing so much for us."

 

Of course, one could be cynical and say that he knows what to say or that he was handed a slip of paper with Cara's name and the names of the classical musicians on it. Whether this happened or not, he spoke the names from memory and with sincerity. Eddie Vedder's voice is clearly the dominant instrument of the band. But on several songs I was struck by his sense of timing in remaining silent when you expected him to sing again. With all of his talent on voice and guitar, he could be forgiven if he became the typical self-obsessed, publicity-seeking rock star. Perhaps in part due to Uncle Neil's example, last night Eddie made it clear that he is a man with great integrity and someone who has earned my respect on many levels.

collaboration: win/win or win/lose?

While looking back on the last six months at my new job, it occurred to me that along with the rise in the level of collaboration with my Marketing, and Engineering coworkers came a feeling of having less control over the design. I was sharing very rough wireframes with the engineers and they were giving me very clear feedback. The engineers had been quite frustrated by the process prior to my arrival on the scene. They felt they were being dictated to and had little say in the design direction. I've always tried to be collaborative but bigger companies have bigger silos so collaboration often means collaborating with your immediate team (in my case among my fellow designers) and then reviewing the design with the engineering and product teams. Design reviews are not the same thing as collaboration.

Now that I have worked on two separate startups and several small product teams, I've experienced what it is like to be part of a small, truly cross-functional team. The benefit to me is that I am often able to see my designs implemented before I've even finished specifying them. Once there is consensus on the direction, the engineers start working on the code even though some details remain open. This was different from my last couple of jobs. But these  small team meetings mean I'm discussing rough designs with engineers and marketers instead of my fellow designers. It also means that I was the only voice representing the interests of design. The bulk of the feedback was technical and marketing. Their feedback also includes thoughts on what they think would most benefit the user but it is still a different type of input than a typical internal design review.

It reminds me of something Tim Barber told me in the early days of forming his design firm Odopod. I was considering hiring Odopod to work on a project for Sony (where I was design director). Tim had just come off a challenging demise to Rare Medium Inc., the web design firm that had grown from its start by three design freelancers in New York City to a firm comparable in size and influence to Razorfish and Sapient. The company gobled up smaller studios in cities where it wanted a presence, (including the San Francisco firm where Tim worked). It was then bought by a company with no presence in the web design space and proceeded to implode. It was a trying time for several amazing creative minds who were there at the time. After a classic Silicon Valley "sabatical," Tim started Odopod with two like minds. They wanted to start from scratch and do things differently. They sought to eliminate the tendancy among design consultancies to "toss it over the fence"... taking elegant but impractical designs and handing them off to the company as "fait accompli". By the time I hired Odopod, they had already worked on several successful partnerships with early Web2.0 companies. What Tim relayed to me about his experience made a lot of sense and cemented my decision to hire Odopod. For Tim, close collaboration meant sharing designs before they really wanted to. It was fine to talk about true collaborations but this was testing their comfort levels. Showing incomplete ideas makes you feel uncomfortable. But doing so inevitably confirms that you're understanding the client's intent (or misunderstanding it) earlier than you would when you work on a design until you feel it's airtight.

So, here I am, six months in and wondering if collaboration is win/lose where you win on collaboration but lose on design control or win/win where the ultimate design will be stronger because of the closer collaboration. Of course I know the answer but we'll have to wait till launch to see what the market has to say.

The City as Dance Floor

The City as Dance Floor

The city is one big dance
we're all on the dance floor
not everyone dances

Most know they're on the floor
some have no clue,
others ignore the dance

Some dance only with their partner
though dancers appear at every turn
Some dance only with the family
never with a stranger.

Which is why as a dancer
it's so nice to see
strangers dancing with strangers

a slight move left,
while you slide right
a momentary dance
then on to the next partner.

My letter to Nancy Pelosi after watching the documentary, "Gasland".

Dear Speaker Pelosi,

I just finished watching the documentary, "Gasland" and was appalled to learn that hydro-fraction wells drilled by the Natural Gas Industry are exempted from the Clean Water Act.

This practice is doing incredible harm being to the natural environment and people across many states. The stories of what has been happening near these drill sites made my wife sad and angry. Sad for the people being killed and sickened by this practice and angry that our government turns a blind eye. It is yet another example of how big business is able to control the laws congress passes to the detriment of who you are supposed to serve.

I am a life-long Democrat, and a proud Californian. But in the last few years, I have been saddened by story after story of how politics is dominated by the interests of big business. The BP disaster is the most visible example but certainly not the only one. President Obama and the democratic-led Congress had an opportunity to clean up the MMS when he came into power and did nothing. BP and the Gulf disaster have happened. Something must be done. I'm convinced that if Republicans and Democrats across the country knew what was happening in their own backyards, they would act to stop these toxic acts.

Please, do the right thing.

Sincerely,

Andrew Proehl

Extremely Drug Resistant Tuberculosis
This site launched yesterday and is worth exploring. XDR-TB stands for Extremely Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis. There is an overview slideshow of XDR-TB victims around the world that features the photographs of James Nachtwey. The website was designed by Dean Kamen of Radical Media. Nachtway was a TED Prize winner a couple years ago and is an amazing photographer. His TED wish was to be able to reach more people using his skills as a photographer to document the World's problems.

National Investments

I find what unfolded over the last week quite ironic. When it comes to
discussing healthcare, something all Americans need and want, the
Republicans think nationalizing the service is unthinkable. But when
it comes to insurance, bad debt, and bad mortgages... things we don't
really "want" (even when they're healthy) somehow the Republicans have
found a way to justify these massive, multi-decade national
investments. Not that I'm disagreeing with the decision but isn't
healthcare kind of an important investment too?

China's Hidden Export: Air Pollution

China's Hidden Export: Air Pollution

The run up to the Beijing Olympics was full of photos and news reports of Beijing's legendary smog. Almost any distance shot comes automatically with a smog-induced atmospheric view. The reports talked about concern over the affect of the air pollution on athlete performance. Well I'm starting to wonder, with everything that China is making and exporting over there, How soon before they start exporting their air pollution all the way to California?

The Bay Area has been environmentally concious for a long time. But I can't help thinking that some of this came easy. When it comes to air pollution, we of course have rules designed to minimize power plant and factory emmissions but we are also blessed with a steady stream of fresh air off the Pacific.

I went to school in the 80s in upstate New York. Acid Rain was a common topic of interest at that time. Lakes were dying because the coal induced pollution was raising the PH of the lakes to a level where they could no longer support life. It was particularly dramatic in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains. The Adirondacks are one of the larger wilderness areas on the East Coast and yet they were being heavily affected by the output of far away industries. At the time, NYPIRG, the New York Public Interest Research Group was spending a lot of time on the issue. They determined that industries based in Ohio were partially to blame. Ohio's coal, tire and steel industries were releasing a tremendous amount of sulfur into the atmosphere. Once in the air, the pollution would move east with the weather. Eventually it would rain and the sulfur would mix with the water to create sulfur dioxide: "acid rain". It became an eye opener to many that actions in one state would have most of their impact felt in the next state.

When I first moved to San Francisco, I remember thinking how lucky we were to live on the Pacific coast with regards to air quality. There's no Ohio sitting next to us spewing sulfur into the air. But now I'm starting to wonder. It might not be next to us but China is a lot bigger than Ohio and putting a lot more up into the air.

How bad does it have to get before California, the most ecologicaly-minded state in the US, gets on the pollution watch list. Of course LA is already legendary for its smog. But smog in LA is a very local phenomenon. It is a combination of locally generated pollution, weather and geography. The hills surrounding much of the city give the smog no easy exit so the problem is both contained and concentrated.

According to this article, China is now opening up two new coal-fired power plants a week. Coal represents one of our biggest challenges with respect to global warming. It is possible the dirtiest carbon-based fuel but the only one the countries like the US and China have a large supply of. With oil prices skyrocketing, the temptation to burn even more coal will continue to grow. How long before our beloved cool Pacific breezes start to feel a bit warmer and take on a brownish tint?

A Thousand Drums in China

A Thousand Drums in China

2008 to be precise. If there's one image that I will remember from the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies it will be this one (photo by Michael Macor of the San Francisco Chronicle). 2008 individual drummers in perfect synchronization. What made it even more amazing is to see them drumming independently one second and then in absolute sync the next. The effect was all the more apparent when the lights were out and each drum lit up as it was hit. You could see all these drummers with separate heart beats playing independently and then, with some invisible order, they were all in sync. I can't think of a more potent symbol of today's China... 1.4 billion people who are more and more independent yet willing to march in perfect step when the government asks. Amazing and scary.

The Science of Gods and Variables

The Science of Gods and Variables

It occurred to me that there is a similarity between the number of variables in scientific models and the number of gods worshiped by people of faith. It seems like the trend over the millenia has been to reduce the number of variables and gods respectively. In the case of variables, the goal is zero while in the case of gods worshiped the trend has been towards one. But it makes me wonder if the ultimate trend for both is zero.

The evolution of science starts with a world where almost everything in human experience is a mystery. Over time, as cause and effect are discovered, the mysteries are removed. As science becomes formalized, scientists sought to broaden their knowledge by coming up with new theories for how the universe works and testing those hypotheses through experiments and measurement. Early in an area of study, there are multiple variables. But as theories are refined, more and more of the equation becomes known resulting in fewer variables. Theories on the cutting edge of how the universe works try to unify all the known forces into a single, elegant equation. There are still variables that are not fully understood but fewer than there were a decade ago.

Computer modeling follows a similar but inverse path. Predicting the weather is done by running complex models. Early models were simpler due to the limits of both understanding and computer power. Simpler models have more external variables in that fewer of the contributing forces are being factored into the equation. Over time, our understanding and processing power have increased and this has allowed us to reduce these external variables by incorporating them into the models.

This sounds very similar to the history of religion. To early humans, everything is a mystery. Cause and effect is beyond understanding and so, to compensate, gods are created that "cause" certain things to happen. With so many mysteries in the world, many gods are created, each responsible for one or more effects. One god is the sun, giver of light, another god brings the rains and yet another brings abundant or scarce harvests.

I don't know when the religions of the world peaked in numbers of gods worshipped. Poly-theistic religions remain to this day. But eventually a turning point was reached and religions decided that there were too many gods. This resulted in a slow but steady trend towards worshipping fewer gods. Religions that worshipped multiple gods were seen as engaging in "idol worship".

Catholicism tried to sit on the poly-theistic/mono-theistic fence by introducing the concept of the holy trinity: essentially saying that their one God is simulataneously made up of the father, the son and a very fire-like holy spirit.

Islam took a firm, mono-theistic stance with the Koran saying, "there is no God but God". Islam was laying down the law... that's it, there's only one.

Sir Richard Dawkins made this trend humorously clear in a speach I heard him give on problems of discrimination against atheists in the US. With all the focus we put on a candidate's faith here, an atheist, even if he/she was an amazing statesman, could never be elected president. Dawkins then made an interesting point. The general history of religion has been towards worshipping fewer and fewer gods until we reached the current situation where Islam, Judaism and Christianity all worship one god. "Atheism is not that different", Dawkins said, "we just go one god further."

I don't know if the two trends are linked. But it would seem natural that as science has illuminated more and more of the World's mysteries it would impact religious beliefs. As the sun is revealed to be a ball of burning gas, it makes less sense to keep telling everyone that it is a god. Perhaps the current debates over things like evolution are because some of the more extreme faith-based leaders worry about what comes after "1" when you are counting down.

The Death and Future of Paper

The Death and Future of Paper

I first heard about this William Powers article, "Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal" in an NPR story on the radio. The article celebrates the wonders of paper and fears its undoing by cold and cruel digital media devices like ebooks. Its ironic that I heard the piece on the radio since radio once faced the same types of arguments that are being made for paper relative to an encroaching new technology called TV.

Kirsten Reach wrote a nice summary of Power's article in the online version of the Kenyon Review, a traditional, paper-based literary journal. Her review is both sympathetic and fortunate. Fortunate because the original article is 75 pages long. Sympathetic I expect because of the paper legacy of the Kenyon Review. I wrote a comment which has not yet been accepted. I'm not sure if its because my comments were among the only in support of a future where both paper books and ebooks could co-exist. Here's what I tried to post.

"The most compelling argument I've heard for the evolution of paper towards digital/re-usable media is the environment. The amount of resources (wood, water, chemicals, etc.) we use for paper has an enormous negative impact on the environment. A significant percentage of the paper we use is paper we use for a only few minutes and then throw away.

So many arguments for or against a new technology hinge on an all or nothing world. But as is hinted in the radio example, older technologies don't have to go away for new ones to be valuable. I agree with Power's assertions that paper will be with us for many more years. He makes a great case for where paper is a valuable and ideal media. But that doesn't mean there might be a few places where an electronic book or medium might be good while also being much better for the environment. Many people who work in the corporate world have to read multiple reports... industry reports, sales reports, business plans, etc.. Most of these are printed, read or scanned quickly and then thrown out or put on a shelf never to be touched again. Couldn't some of these be consumed on an ebook for the benefit of the environment? Carrying 4 or 5 reports in an ebook format will leave extra room in your backpack for that paper copy of "Ulysses" you've been meaning to read all these years.

I love reading the Sunday New York Times. But I feel guilty about getting all that paper knowing I won't read it all. There is now a healthy movement across many cities in the US to replace plastic and paper bags at the supermarket with reusable bags. I feel good every time I do it and know that I'm reducing my environmental footprint.

If we all used less paper for our "disposable" content, there would be plenty of paper left for more permanent and important uses. As Powers also notes, there is plenty of content out there for paper, ebooks and computer screens to all be busy and useful for a long time to come."

Mississippi River TypeMap

Mississippi River TypeMap

This is the latest map in my "Typography of Place" series... a map of the cities and towns that lie along the Mississippi River. For a larger, readable image, you can view it here on my Flickr site.

The last two maps I did in this series (Silk Road and the Aleutian Islands) were very horizontal. So I wanted to try one with a vertical format. One of the things I am trying to achieve in these maps is to have the words that make up the maps read as a sort of free-form poem. In this one, I think that comes across strong since you can "read" it from the river's source in the top left to the mouth in the bottom right.

I have not color coded the place names on this map as I did in my Aleutian Islands Map but the same theme is present with many towns having Native American names (including the river itself). French names are also quite prevalent as you travel down the river. Then there is the intriguing sequence of Egyptian-inspired names that includes Memphis, Thebes, Angola, and Cairo.

I assembled the map from a general map of the river. After re-drawing the path of the river, I added all the towns and cities by referencing a live page from Yahoo! Maps. I originally placed the cities on the appropriate left or right bank of the river so my base would be geographically accurate. But I know as I was building it that I was going to re-orient the towns so that they were all centered on the middle of the river to emphasize the meandering path the river takes.

Where in the World is "Coco Channel?"

Where in the World is "Coco Channel?"

In case you were wondering, its here in between Little Coco and Landfall Islands. I stumbled upon this map today while reading about the remote tribes of the Andaman Islands. The Andamans are a chain of islands in the Bay of Bengal. Most are claimed and administered by India. Seeing "Coco Channel" made me smile.

...and justice for all

...and justice for all

Yesterday, a Texas Appeals Court rejected the lower court decision that had authorized siezing the children from the FLDS compound. This photo, by AP photographer Tony Gutierrez, was attached to the story. As a designer, I love images that are artfully composed but still relevant and meaningful. There is an elegant symmetry here between the repetitive columns of the court and the repepetitive dress codes of the FLDS women. There is a sense that a system other than their own has never-the-less served their interests (though maybe not that of all the children).