Transmission #33: Living Structures, Data Retrieval, Techno-religions, Laotian Bats and Several Paradoxes.
Design, ideas and other flotsam
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker, sometime lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
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Design
At Any Given Moment in a Process
Dorian Taylor, Substack
Another passing of a legendary figure. This time, the architect and writer, Christopher Alexander, whose book A Pattern Language was a revelation to many designers, not just those working in the built environment. This article gives an overview of some of Alexander’s ideas, and his focus on what he called ‘living structures’.
A recurring theme is the challenges that Alexander faced when trying to integrate his complex, esoteric and beautiful ideas with the brutal reality of trying to get things built. As the the article breaks it down there was an irreducible conflict:
System A, Alexander’s worldview, which creates the built environment based on deep feeling and devotion to the people who will ultimately occupy the space,
System B, the one we typically see around us, which designs based on images, and where the reference image supersedes the actual work product, cutting corners to maximize profit.
I Want You Back: Getting My Personal Data from Amazon was Weeks of Confusion and Tedium
Nikita Mazurov, The Intercept
It’s fair to say that, at Amazon at least, the user experience of requesting one’s data has not received the attention it deserves, as this tale of woe documents (ht long-time reader @misterluxe).
Also noteworthy, is how erroneous many of the inferences drawn from one’s internet data trail actually are.
One of the ironies of the modern internet is that despite the hoopla over ‘surveillance capitalism’ – even the most data-rich companies are mostly grasping at straws to understand who you are and what you might be interested in. As an example, I’ve used Google, for pretty much everything, for 20 years and it still thinks I am interested in cats, perfumes, word processing software, and Bollywood movies. Which I am most definitely not. (You can check Google’s assumptions about you here)
Ideas
The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling
Karl Ulrich, SSRN
From the Face-in-Hands department: a new study states that the entire positive environmental benefit of cycling over more carbon-intensive forms of transport actually reduces to zero… once you factor in the fact that cyclists tend to live longer lives. 🤦♂️
And along a similar track, this study, which argues that smokers don’t actually negatively affect the health system, because they simply die sooner, and therefore have less health complications later in extended old age:
Between ages 65 and 84, we find that the expected value of the discounted sum of total [Medicare] expenditures is lower for smokers, mainly because of excess mortality. We find no evidence that cigarette smoking is a burden on Medicare.
(ht @robinhanson)
Quote of the Week
You may think you’re a Christian, an atheist, a Jew, or a Buddhist, but you are wrong. You are a follower of this modern American information regime built on the networked computer. You have ritualistically sacrificed far more in the last year to it than you have to whatever dead gods you claim to worship. Where you sacrifice reveals your true religion. The architecture and features of this new socio-cognitive substrate will be the essential form of our future spiritual life.
– Wolf Tivy, Terry Davis was Right, Palladium Mag
Chart of the Week
This graph will make sense to those who follow Australian politics. Not sure I agree with the witches on much, they’re right that Murdoch is a scourge on democracy.
(ht @Travis)
Other
😷 Dysons has created the most apocalyptic product of 2022. Released dangerously close to April Fools Day, surprisingly, this personal air purifier seems legit. Link
🧬 Another parry in the lab-leak vs zoonotic COVID-orgin debate. This one on the overwhelming likelihood of Laotian bats being the culprit. Link
👩💻 The value of designing and testing services using real data, from Normally. Link