Everyone knows that table salt is sodium chloride, but many people don't know about the explosive power of metallic sodium. Back in high school chemistry lab, when the teacher wasn't around, some of my fellow students and I sometimes flipped a tiny chip of metallic sodium into a bowl or water. The sodium would spin in flames and burn out as it is converted to corrosive sodium hydroxide. This unusual video demonstrates what happens when you throw a huge roll of sodium in to a lake.
This Park Service video shows the speed and ferocity of a recent Texas wildfire. This video was shot in Bastrop State Park in Bastrop, Texas, where this fire ruined all but 100 acres of the 6,000 acre park.
Please allow me to tell you about today's trip to Missouri's Cuivre River State Park, about 1 1/2 hour drive from St. Louis. My family and our friends had lunch in the picnic area before setting out on a short hike on a half-dry creek bed. To the right you'll see a typical portion of this walk (clicking on these images will give you bigger higher-res versions). No, we didn't see any bears or snakes, but it was a beautiful day (high temperature about 70, after a summer filled with 100 degree days) and we saw quite a few small spectacular things.How about this blue moth, for example? I looked up this article and it really seems to be a moth and not a butterfly.
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In this three-minute talk, Mathemagician Art Benjamin urges that we change our emphasis when we teach our children math. I couldn't agree with him more.
It saddens me to consider the immense amount of self-inflicted damage that Americans could have avoided, if only they were more savvy regarding probability and statistics. For example, very few Americans die of "terrorism," whereas the lives of millions of Americans are severely damaged or destroyed every year by crappy schools, lack of health care (including the failure to obtain colonoscopies), wars begun on the basis of lies, various risky behaviors and many other problems almost too many to mention, all of which leave the actual danger of "terrorism" in the dust. Yet Americans spend a massively lop-sided portion of their tax-dollars each year preventing "terrorism." Each of the serious causes of death we face would be much more preventable if only Americans had a better grasp of statistics and probability. With better training in statistics and probabilities, Americans could better understand the risks that they faced and the probabilities of success of various proposed "solutions." With better training, as Art Benjamin suggests, we would be better able to order our national priorities to better prevent the things that are most likely to harm us.
I have worked with architects, engineers and contractors for nearly 20 years, managing the design and construction of all manner of facilities. As more than 18 of those years were in the public sector (15+ federal - military, 3+ municipal), function over form was unfortunately a primary design consideration. Where form did come into play, it was usually a more decorative stone face instead of some brick. Too often, I was working with budgets set down four to five or more years earlier, and in some cases with unchangeable scopes of work - the military construction (MILCON) program is rather rigid in that respect to ensure what is authorized is built (getting permission and funding for one thing but building another is verbotten). You can imagine that the crystal ball gets a little foggy out that far. And, by the time you get the funding to design and build, the budgets are usually too little to do what is needed, requiring creative scope cutting to get the most product for the buck. And that is why almost no federal, and very few municipal buildings are anything other than sterile designs that serve a functional and nearly never a visual need.
So you can probably see why architect Thomas Heatherwick, and his firm Heatherwick Studio are such a treat for me. His designs are visually stunning, incredibly creative and are slap-the-forehead wake-ups to what we should be able to do at no more cost than traditional design. I was amazed at the very innovative solution to a common construction requirement (no spoiler...it's at the 4 minute point in the video), and even more amazed at the focus of his talk: the British contribution to the 2010 Shanghai Expo, the Seed Cathedral. Imagine deliberately designing a building with 60,000 penetrations...and then making it work.
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