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A brief review of the fifth day of the Ales Bialiatski hearing | Belarusian Legal Portal
Brest court upholds verdict to local human rights defender UN Human Rights Committee registers first complaint on 2010 pre-election violations
A brief review of the fifth day of the Ales Bialiatski hearing
Analytics, Articles, HR solidarity, International sobjects, Miensk, News, Society Add comments
November 16, 2011 in Minsk saw the fifth day of the hearing of Human Rights Center Viasna Head and Vice-president of FIDH Ales Bialiatski.
Today's hearing was devoted to the disclosure of a new version of the indictment.
Access to the courtroom
The front of the courthouse was blocked by a prohibiting transportation road sign. At the exit, in the back of the building, militia and security vehicles were present as well as two men in civilian clothes and 2 people in special forces uniforms. Next to the building were specialized vehicles for the transport of detainees and two men in civilian clothes.
Visitors and their belongings were inspected at the entrance to the courthouse and at the entrance to the courtroom. The inspection was carried out by men in police uniforms and a man in civilian clothes. In particular, they checked for the presence of Ales Bialiatski T-shirts. They also scanned documents and selectively recorded passport data. A man in civilian clothes led these searches. He ignored questions about for whom and for what purpose the data was taken. At the entrance to the courtroom they videoed prisoners visitors. Personal inspection was carried out even more carefully.
The courtroom was full. After the adjournment of the court for a break between 10:05 and 10.30, a few more people were able to go into the courtroom. In fact, everybody had the opportunity to attend the hearing.
The beginning of the hearing
The court session began with the prosecutor Vladimir Saykovski, the accused Ales Bialiatski and lawyer Dmitri Laevski.
At the beginning of the hearing the prosecutor was to present a new charge. That is to say, he had requested an adjournment in the hearing from November 10 to November 16 in order to do so. However, the prosecutor began with an appeal to the court asking for a 20-minute break to produce "more appropriate language." Judge Sergei Bondarenko adjourned until 10.30 am. The opinion of the accused on this request was not received.
Announcement of the new charge
The prosecutor took less than 20 minutes to produce "more successful language", returning to the to the courtroom 10-12 minutes later. The court resumed at 10.30.
As presented by the indictment essentially nothing changed – Ales Bialiatski is still accused of Art. 243, Part 2 of the Criminal Code (tax evasion on a large scale) with the addition of just one phrase – "in terms of contractual obligations between the defendant and residents of the Republic of Belarus". The charges in new text have not changed: the article, times, and the claims of the public prosecutor are the same.
Ales Bialiatski and the lawyer exercised their right to a 5-day break to review the new text of the charges. Also, the lawyer requested to use the 5 days to get acquainted with all materials attached to the requests of all sides of the case and during previous trials.
The court adjourned the hearing until 10:00 November 22, 2011.
According to most experts, a new formulation of charges has not undergone the significant changes promised. Neither the preventative punishment nor the charges have been altered. However, the course of the process raises concerns that the prosecution still has the possibility to use Article 193-1 (acting on behalf of unregistered organization) against Ales Bialiatski and other activists of the Human Rights Center Viasna. The unexpected 20-minute break announced at the beginning of the meeting gives grounds to assume that the charge associated with the activities of an unregistered organization, was expelled from the day of the meeting.
The position of the International Observation Mission
In assessing the facts, the International Observation Mission believes that the prosecutor with his statements and actions demonstrated a lack of consistency and a weak position.
The Mission believe that in this situation the only serious option for the Belarusian authorities is to stop the prosecution of Ales Bialiatski as well as the pressure on other activists of the Human Rights Center Viasna. Such steps can demonstrate a commitment of the Republic of Belarus to comply with its international obligations on human rights and the rule of law.
Reviews of previous hearings prepared by the International Observation Mission of the Committee on International Control over the Situation with Human Rights in Belarus:
Day 1 – http://en.prava-by.info/archives/2466
Day 5 – photos on Licviny-INFA
Over the course of the process, you can also follow on Twitter the International Observation Mission in Belarus: https://twitter.com/ #!/IOMission.
Photo essay by Alaksiej Lapitski from the fifth day of the hearing November 16 to review the criminal case # 1-978-11 with respect to human rights defender Ales Bialiatsky can be seen here.
By source hrwatch-by.org,
by.prava-by.info
Tags: Ales Bialiatski, criminal case of Ales Bialiatski, human rights defenders, international organizations, law


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It all happened in the small town of Yamhill, Oregon.
67-year old Richard Robert Mershon is being held in the Yamhill County jail on multiple charges.
(SALEM, Ore.) - A 67-year old man was arrested this afternoon on two counts of Attempted Murder, and one count each of Assault in the First Degree, Unlawful Use of a Firearm, Menacing, and Harassment.
According to the Yamhill County jail roster, he has been charged with Murder as of this report.
Last Friday night at about 9:00, after Yamhill Police Officer Travis Vancleave was dispatched to a report of a fight in progress, involving a firearm at Zippy's Pizza, in Yamhill.
The suspect, Richard R Mershon, was reported to have gotten into an argument with a man that led to a physical fight. The physical fight quickly turned into a shooting, by a man that had been drinking.
Male victim number one told Police he had witnessed the suspect push a pregnant female, and she may have fallen down. The woman was apparently an employee of Zippy's Pizza, who had been trying to help give the suspect a ride home because he was intoxicated.
Mershon then became aggressive and "just started swinging" when the first male victim intervened and tried to take away the suspect's keys.
During the struggle, the suspect was quoted as saying "I'm going to shoot you!" to the first victim, removing a firearm from his waist and pointing it at the male victim number one's chest.
The first male victim said he thought he was "dead" and didn't know how he had not been hit when the gun went off. He also added he didn't know why or how he was still alive. He said he heard two shots go off before he fled the scene and then one or two more after he left.
The man later stated that, during the fight, the suspect fired his gun two or three times, "about a foot from my chest" and didn't know how he wasn't shot.
A second victim, 27-year old David Trivelpiece, was walking across the street with two other men when the first couple shots were fired and he ran to help. Another struggle ensued, now between Trivelpiece and the suspect.
Trivelpiece sustained a gunshot wound to the left side of his neck and was laying on the ground when Officer Vancleave arrived on scene.
When Officer Vancleave arrived, he saw the suspect, identified as Richard Mershon, standing next to his vehicle, holding a 9mm semiautomatic pistol in his right hand. David Trivelpiece (victim two) was lying motionless on the ground directly next to where the suspect had been standing before turning around to address the police officer.
According to the Probable Cause statement, Mershon began walking towards Officer Vancleave, holding the firearm out and away from his right side with the barrel pointed towards Olive Street.
"He was covered in blood and complied with my commands to drop the firearm and then was placed into hand restraints," said Officer Vancleave.
The officer then secured the firearm, cleared it and found it loaded with a total of four rounds, three rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. Police found two spent 9mm shell casings at the scene.
"Other witnesses at the scene reported hearing gun shots after victim number two (David Trivelpiece) approached the suspect. They told me that victim number two needed medical attention and had been shot by the suspect," said Officer Vancleave.
"After detaining the suspect, I was able to assess victim number two, who was semi-conscious, having difficulty breathing and was semi-alert, asking for help."
The suspect appeared to have suffered a non-life threatening gunshot wound and was transported for medical treatment.
David Trivelpiece was transported to OHSU with life threatening injuries and remains hospitalized. As of the date of this report, he still has a bullet lodged in the spine near his neck and is suffering from paralysis on his left side and limited mobility on his right, according to Police.
The suspect, Mershon was released from the hospital today, and immediately taken into custody.
This investigation is ongoing. The City of Yamhill Police Department is investigating this incident with the assistance of the Yamhill County Major Crime Response Team, with members consisting of the Yamhill County District Attorney's Office, the Oregon State Police, the Newberg-Dundee Police Department, the McMinnville Police Department, the Carlton Police Department, and the Yamhill County Sheriff's Office.
Sources: Yamhill County Sheriff's Office; Yamhill Police Dept.


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About Booked All Night
FORTUNATE ENCOUNTERS BY CATERINA PASSARELLI-COVER REVEAL
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Sitting at the wrong table turned my life upside down. I was supposed to be on a date with one man but made a huge mistake—a mistake I keep bumping into all over New York City. Clark Chambers is arrogant, straightforward, devastatingly handsome, and takes what he wants. And right now his sight is set on me. But he only wants friends with benefits. And I'd rather eat dirt than agree to that. After an "enough is enough" moment, I turn to the Universe for help & ask for a special sign. And it's just my luck … looks like rabbits & romance really do mix!
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Former TV News Producer turned Romance author, Caterina Passarelli has always had a love for words. From real-life Detroit crime to fictional love stories around the globe, she hopes to take her readers on a fast-paced adventure. Caterina is the author of five titles in multiple genres: Romantic Comedy, Contemporary Romance and Romantic Suspense. When she's not writing about alpha males and strong, sarcastic women, she is the CEO of an online fitness coaching company. Caterina is the fur mom to her three-year-old rescue dog, Piper, who she spoils uncontrollably. She loves hearing from her readers on her Facebook page!
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Posted by M at 9:30 AM
Labels: Caterina Passarelli, Cover Reveal, Fortunate Encounters
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Gold project | ISAM Holding
page-template-default,page,page-id-15589,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,vertical_menu_enabled,side_area_uncovered_from_content,footer_responsive_adv,qode-child-theme-ver-1.0.0,qode-theme-ver-13.1.2,qode-theme-bridge,qode_advanced_footer_responsive_1000,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-5.4.5,vc_responsive
Guinea's Main Indicators
Geographic situation: Western Africa
Area: 246.000 km2
Population: 10.9 millon inhabitants (2012)
Income per capita: 1100 USD (2011)
GDP: 11,53 billion USD (2011)
GDP growth rate: 4 % (2011) – 6% (2012)
State budget: 1120 million USD (2011 +35%)
(Gross Fix): 22% of GDP (2011) Inflation: 16% (2011)
The mining property A-2013/696/MMG/SGG, object of this analysis and known as the «SALADOU CENTER», is 750 km on the North-East away from the capital of Guinea, Conakry. It has an area of 51 km2, and is comprehended in Hoja Kalama 1 area: 200.000 (NC-29-XVI).
According to the Useful Minerals Charter of the Republic of Guinea with a 1: 500,000 scale, based on the information provided by CPDM, DNRGH, EGED, OZGEO, ORG, DNG, OSRG, BRGM, GC, GP, BGR, designed and funded by GEOPROSPECTS Ltd (V. Mamedov, Moscow 2006), concession areas are found within the "A" classification and they are defined as DEPOSITS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE FOR USEFUL MINERALS RESOURCES (genetic type, composition, and morphology of mineralized bodies, importance).
GOLD PROJECT A2017/1771/MMG/SGG
To arrive at the concession area, it is necessary to travel around 800 km from the capital of Guinea, Conakry by roads. It is not possible to circulate over the 100 km/h due to roads conditions and heavy vehicle traffic.
After crossing the Sankarami river, by canoe, and after about 5km, it is necessary to take a detour to the southeast towards the village of Saladou where the gold mines are located.
Guinea has tropical weather with two seasons: a dry season (November to March) and a rainy season (April-October).
At Fouta Djallon, in January, noon temperatures go from 30 to 35ºC, while the night temperatures can vary between 8 to 11ºC. The rainfall varies between 1,500 and 2,300 mm per year and the annual average temperature is 25ºC.
There doesn't exist any given concrete evidence of the consequences of seasons on the performance of exploration operations carried out in the North Saladou concession area.
GEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
According to the Useful Minerals Charter of the Republic of Guinea, concession areas are found within the "A" classification and they are defined as DEPOSITS OF GREAT.
It has been recently discovered by the geologists of CPDM, that gold mineralization is associated with hydrothermal processes and it is similar to the saprolites that were found on Siguiri, North Lefa Gold, Kouroussa, etc.
Geomorphologically, the region is part of the "Glacis of Siguiri" bounded on the east by the Niandan chain, on the south by the "Glacis ironclad of Senko", on the north by the "Plateau de Mandinga" and by the "Entaille the Bakoy this limit corresponds with Mali and Ivory Coast.
AREAS RICH IN GOLD
Guinea is a country with extensive GOLD ores. There are great companies dedicated to primary industrial Gold Mining, in addition of the thousands of small artisans working on gold panning. The richest areas concerning gold are located in the northeastern part of the country.


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You probably know by now that so-called Black Friday deals never actually end on Black Friday, right? If you avoided the retail stores and skipped their doorbuster markdowns, you can still get a ton of online deals on Cyber Monday, all within the comforts of your armchair.
The best part about Cyber Monday is that you don't even need to leave your house or tussle with the crowds and traffic.
But like with any online shopping site, Cyber Monday also has virtual queues and lines. Similar to brick-and-mortar shopping, it's on a "first come, first served" basis. If you're not early or quick enough, you might miss out on an item you specifically want.
This is precisely what happened to many disgruntled Cyber Monday shoppers of this particular retailer. Staying up late just to snag a deal is one thing but walking away from your computer empty-handed is way, way worse.
Many frustrated Cyber Monday deal hunters who waited for Walmart's gaming console deals to open but came out empty handed are now taking their frustrations to social media.
These shoppers were specifically hoping to snag one of the hottest video gaming deals around, probably the best deal of the season - the $199 1TB PlayStation 4/Red Dead Redemption 2/Controller bundle - but apparently, it sold out in mere seconds!
How come? These shoppers did everything right, after all. They burned the midnight oil and they managed to put the prized item in their Walmart online shopping carts before midnight, right before the deal began.
However, in this case, these early birds did not get the early worm, so to speak, since the deal inexplicably sold out as soon as it began.
Now, these angry bargain hunters are all crying foul. Was the demand that high or worse yet, was something else at work?
To vent their frustrations, shoppers have tons of theories floating out there. Some are saying that Walmart's stock of that particular PS4 bundle was extremely low that they were, of course, gone in a flash.
Another explanation is that shopping bots got them all, to be sold by unscrupulous individuals for a profit later. From launch day iPhones to hot video game consoles, these scalpers can strike anywhere and they tend to ruin the shopping experience for everyone.
But some are suggesting something even more sinister - that in some sort of retail conspiracy, Walmart never had that online deal in the first place.
Was the bundle a "loss leader" that was designed to lure shoppers to the site? We may never know. Walmart has not offered an official explanation to its Cyber Monday snafu yet.
Due to their understandable frustrations, customers even tweeted directly at Walmart's Twitter account for answers.
Walmart promised earlier that it will have thousands more Cyber Monday deals this year than in 2017 with more available deals on electronics, toys, and home items but alas, it looks like the guy who's in charge of the PS4/Red Dead Redemption 2 bundle didn't get the memo.
How about you? Were you frustrated with sold-out Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals this year? What was your experience? Drop us a comment!
We all know there can be some incredible deals leading up to Christmas. Black Friday and Cyber Monday especially offer huge savings that are difficult to turn down. But many people might not be aware that there are some deals that come after Christmas that can be even bigger money savers.
Here are some of those deals that you might get now, and some to wait until after Christmas to take advantage of.


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Russian Southern Military District received six Ka-52 attack helicopters
Posted On Tuesday, 27 November 2018 10:41
The army aviation of the Russian Southern Military District has received six Ka-52 reconnaissance strike helicopters, Vadim Astafyev, the district's press service chief, said.
A Ka-52 attack helicopter at the MAKS 2017 airshow
"In accordance with the plan of retooling the troops of the Southern Military District two military units in the Rostov region and the Krasnodar territory have received six new Ka-52 strike helicopters," Astafyev said.
Airlifters delivered the helicopters from the manufacturing plant to the home airfield in parts. They will be assembled on the spot soon. All the air staff, engineers and technicians have been retrained to handle Ka-52 at the Russian Defense Ministry Center of combat training and retraining of the army aviation staff.
Ka-52 reconnaissance helicopter gunships (Hokum-B by NATO classification) are designed to destroy armored hardware, troops and low-speed air targets. The helicopter can engage in combat in any time of the day and weather conditions. The crew comprises two men sitting side-by-side in a single cockpit. The set of Ka-52 armaments comprises unguided and precision weapons, including antitank guided missiles. The helicopter is armed with a 30mm gun. Ka-52 can operate in any weather, hot climate, mountains and the Arctic.


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BTS enters NFT market in joint venture with Upbit
Kate Park
November 4, 2021, 5:07 a.m. ·2 min read
Hybe, the South Korean agency behind K-pop megastar BTS, announced today that it plans to set up a joint venture with Korean crypto exchange Upbit to enter the non-fungible token (NFT) business.
Hybe will buy a 2.5% stake in Dunamu, a blockchain-based fintech startup that runs cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, for $423.1 million (500 billion won). At the same time, Dunamu will acquire newly issued Hybe shares, a 5.6% stake, in a Seoul-headquartered music agency for $592.4 million, according to the regulatory filing.
The joint venture company will create NFT photocards that will be traded on Hybe's global fan-to-artist communication app, Weverse, said CEO of Hybe Si-Hyuk Bang, and chairman of Dunamu Chi-Hyung Song, in a joint statement during the company's briefing on Thursday.
Hybe's BTS NFTs will include moving images, voices of artists and more, Bang explained. On top of that, global fans will be able to exchange their digital photo cards in virtual spaces, Song said.
Hybe and its subsidiaries unveiled further plans to extend the BTS brand deeper into the digital sphere. In addition to the NFT JV, there will be a BTS video game, and a "webtoon" business.
Hybe is one of the most successful companies manufacturing pop bands at the moment and they are riding the wave. In the briefing, Lenzo Yoon, CEO of Hybe America, said that Hybe and Universal Music Group are preparing to unveil a global girl group debut, too. Separately, Hybe Japan will announce a boy band in Japan, Hyunrock Han, CEO of Hybe Japan, said.
South Korean K-pop giants are bracing for the arrival of NFTs to extend their revenue potential by turning their existing IP into digital assets.
South Korea's four biggest entertainment companies, Hybe, JYP, SM and YG, have been competing to tap into the new tech. JYP Entertainment partnered with Dunamu to set up a K-pop-based NFT platform in July, while SM announced its launch to build a cryptocurrency and blockchain platform in 2019.
BTS label Big Hit Entertainment inks broad partnership with streaming tech company Kiswe
At 113, NAACP evolves for relevance on racial justice agenda
As the NAACP turns 113, look for its voice to grow louder on issues like climate change, the student debt crisis and the ongoing response to the coronavirus pandemic — while keeping voting rights and criminal justice reform at the forefront of its priorities. The nation's oldest civil rights organization's birthday next month comes as it undergoes a restructuring to reflect a membership and leadership that is trending younger, to people in their mid-30s. As a result, it is adding endeavors like
Early indications Alberta has reached and surpassed the peak of Omicron wave: Kenney
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney announces that some data shows Alberta has reached and surpassed the peak of the Omicron wave of COVID-19, but that does come with a word of caution.
Large quantity of guns used in Toronto crimes come from U.S.: Police
Following the news of a teenage boy shot dead by a 13-year-old in Toronto's East York Area, Toronto Police Staff Supt. Lauren Pogue said on Friday that a lot of the guns being used to commit crimes in the city are coming from the United States. She also gave an update on the work being done by the city's anti-gun violence task force.
Man convicted of manslaughter in random fatal shooting in Surrey
A man arrested nearly two years ago in connection with a fatal shooting in Surrey, B.C., has been convicted of manslaughter. On Thursday, Robert Tomljenovic was found guilty of manslaughter and robbery with a firearm in the shooting death of Pritpal Singh, 21, according to the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team. Singh was found dead on the front lawn of a residence in the 8800-block of 138A Street in Surrey, B.C., in the early hours of April 7, 2020. Police identified and arrested Tomeljenov
Lithuania's parliament allows letters 'x', 'w' and 'q' in ID documents
The bill, passed in a vote of 82 to 37 with three abstentions on Tuesday, will come into force if it is signed into law by President Gitanas Nausėda.View on euronews
Duane Smith acclaimed to fourth term as chair and CEO of Inuvialuit Regional Corporation
Duane Smith has been acclaimed chair and CEO of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation (IRC) after the only other candidate in the race withdrew. Patrick Gruben submitted his withdrawal in writing to Todd Orvitz, the returning officer, on Jan. 19, and the election, scheduled for Jan. 26, was cancelled. This will be Smith's fourth term at the helm of the IRC. Smith was born and raised in Inuvik, and has been the IRC's chair and CEO since 2016. The 42 directors of the six community corporations in th
Montreal health agency unable to analyze COVID-19 tests in time, throws out thousands
When Lauren Aghabozorgi got news that she had been in contact with somebody with COVID-19 on Jan. 2, she immediately went into isolation. But a couple of days later, she decided to confirm she had reason to quarantine. So she headed out for a PCR test at a nearby clinic in northern Montreal. "As I was waiting for results, which I never got, I completed an isolation of about 10 days at home," she said. Aghabozorgi attended online classes, but stayed inside. She didn't even go to get groceries, de
U.S. charges Texas man for threatening Georgia election officials
The U.S. Justice Department on Friday announced it has charged a Texas man with making violent threats against Georgia election and government officials. The indictment marked the first case brought by a federal task force formed in response to a wave of intimidation that has engulfed election administrators since the 2020 presidential vote. The matter is one of "dozens" of such cases under federal investigation, said Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the department's criminal division.
N.S. facilities for people with disabilities grappling with Omicron
The eight provincially-funded facilities for people with physical and intellectual disabilities in Nova Scotia are grappling with the effects of the latest wave of COVID-19, the head of a care group said Thursday. Joyce d'Entremont, CEO for Mountains and Meadows Care Group, said the coronavirus is currently in all facilities to some degree, ranging from a few confirmed cases among staff or residents to full-blown outbreaks. She said Omicron has been hitting harder than previous waves of COVID-19


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Tag: Electricity
Gold Fault Laser
[Image: Drawing courtesy Geothermal Futures Lab].
In the general chaos of renovating a house here in Los Angeles, I missed this lecture and reception on Friday night, launching a semi-fictional "Geothermal Futures Lab" at SCI-Arc.
It involves installing a gold-plated laser somewhere deep in the San Andreas Fault to extract geothermal energy from the landscape. Think of it as a kind of gonzo version of the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth.
The press release, from architect Mark Foster Gage, is a great example of a solipsistic inventor's imagination at full blast—featuring "geothermal resonance technologies," nano-gold foil-wrapped laser components, an "experimental phenolic cured resin foam," and so on.
The functioning of the equipment would also rely, at least partially, on existing "metal deposits along the strike-slipping continental plates," bringing to mind both the naturally occurring nuclear reactors in Gabon and the giant Earth-battery cells circulating beneath the forests of central Canada: landscapes whose geochemistry lends them to these sorts of giant, speculative energy installations.
Or see Norway's extraordinary Hessdalen lights, a geologically electrified valley that seems ripe for a Mark Foster Gage-like architectural-energy proposal.
In all these cases, of course, what's also worth noting is that, as fantastic as this sort of facility might seem—whether it's a lab extracting electrical energy from the San Andreas Fault, as Foster Gage suggests, or one positioned above geochemical differentials in the Canadian soil—as soon as the power it supplies can be made available through the national grid, it would immediately pass from some sort of absolutely bonkers sci-fi vision of the near-future to, frankly, something utterly mundane. It would simply be where the power comes from, and people would shrug it off as a mere utility (if they think about it at all).
But what this also means is that we might already, right now, be missing out on seeing the truly otherworldly nature of our own power-generation facilities, which have all too easily disappeared into the infrastructural background of the modern world. Science fiction is already here, in other words, we just tend to refer to it as infrastructure. See, for example, Crescent Dunes or PS10. Or, for that matter, take a harder look at oil.
[Images: Drawings courtesy Geothermal Futures Lab].
In any case, here's a sample from the project text, obligatory typos and all:
The exhibited technology capitalizes on the unique tungsten-saturated substrate of the San Andres fault through the use of a visible-light Q-switched Nd:YAG lasers, tuned to extract sustainable magno-electrical energy from a +678 degree Kelvin supercritical water deposits located adjacent to a stable magma chamber 4.4km beneath the Earths surface. This supercritical water, that behaves both as liquid and gas, is vaporized through 3,780 Kelvin bursts which at peak power induce a supercritical matter state releasing energy in exponential excess of its matter equivalent. The presence of heterogeneous frequency fields in metal deposits along the strike-slipping continental plates supercharges the pockets of supercritical water with magnetic nuons which are forced upwards with velocity µ as a result of the pressure gradient along the vertical faults. Due to the variable decay rate of metals in the presence of such high trajectory nuons, the prototype laser resonance mechanism itself is encased in an experimental phenolic cured resin foam (Cas no. 000050-00-0 with a normal specific gravity of 120 kg/m3) which insulates the process from outside magnetic interference. For rapid nuon decay protection the foam resin is additionally coated with the same seven µm micrometer nano-gold foil used to encase existing NASA satellites. This thick film of gold nano-molecules particles gives the machine its striking gold aesthetic appearance.
A nuon-resistant radiant machine buried in the San Andreas Fault, extracting energy from the friction between tectonic plates? With lasers? Yes, please.
The exhibition itself is up until March 4; stop by SCI-Arc to see more or check out the project's website.
(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: San Andreas: Architecture for the Fault. Thanks to Wayne Chambliss and Eva Barbarossa for the heads up!)
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on January 29, 2018 Categories BLDGBLOG, San Andreas FaultTags California, Canada, Crescent Dunes, Cyclonopedia, Design, Earth, Electricity, Energy, Events, Gabon, Geochemistry, Geology, Geothermal, Giant Electrochemical Cells, Hessdalen Lights, Infrastructure, Landscape, Los Angeles, Mark Foster Gage, Norway, Oil, Oklo, San Andreas Fault, SCI-Arc, Science Fiction, Seismicity, Solar Power2 Comments on Gold Fault Laser
Some midweek reading material…
[Images: Muons beneath the Alps; via and via].
I'm pretty much obsessed with muons—subatomic particles that have been used to map the interiors of archaeological ruins—so I was interested to see that muons have now also been put to work mapping the bedrock beneath glaciers in the Swiss Alps. It is the "first application of the technique in glacial geology," Eos reports. Even better, it uses underground railway infrastructure—the Jungfrau rail tunnel—as part of its experimental apparatus.
[Image: Mountain, written by Robert Macfarlane].
Robert Macfarlane has written a movie called Mountain, narrated by Willem Defoe. Macfarlane also recently joined Twitter, where he has rapidly accumulated nearly 28,000 followers.
The world's sand is running out—indeed, "it's scarcer than you think," David Owen writes for The New Yorker. As highlighted on Twitter by @lowlowtide, the piece includes this great line: "The problems start when people begin to think of mutable landforms as permanent property." Sand, and the peculiar economies that value it, has gotten quite a bit of attention over the past few years; among other coverage, a long feature in Wired two years ago is worth checking out.
Researchers at Penn State have figured out a way to generate electricity from the chemical mixing point where freshwater rivers reach the sea. "'The goal of this technology is to generate electricity from where the rivers meet the ocean,' said Christopher Gorski, assistant professor in environmental engineering at Penn State. 'It's based on the difference in the salt concentrations between the two water sources.'"
Hawaii is experiencing an unusually intense barrage of high tides, known as "king tides." "For the people of Hawaii, alarm bells are ringing," Adrienne LaFrance writes for The Atlantic. "King tides like this aren't just a historic anomaly; they're a sign of what's to come… Scientists believe Hawaii could experience a sea-level increase of three feet by the year 2100, which is in line with global predictions of sea-level change and which would substantially reshape life on the Islands. That's part of why scientists are enlisting volunteers to help photograph and describe incremental high tides across Hawaii." Read more at The Atlantic.
[Image: Courtesy Places Journal/Zach Mortice].
Over at Places, landscape architect Zach Mortice takes a long look at what he calls "perpetual neglect" and the challenge of historic preservation in African-American burial grounds. Badly maintained—and, in some cases, almost entirely erased—black cemeteries reveal "that the racism and inequality that plague African Americans in life are perpetuated in death," Mortice suggests. This is "nothing less than a preservation crisis for black burial grounds across the country."
I recently discovered the existence of something called Betonamit. Betonamit is a "non-explosive cracking agent," essentially a "non-toxic" powder that can be used for the slow-motion demolition of buildings and geological forms. "When mixed with water and poured into holes 1 1/4″, 1 3/8″ or 1 1/2″ diameter, it hardens and expands, exerting pressures of 12,000 psi. Reinforced concrete, boulders, and ledge[s] are fractured overnight with no noise, vibration, or flyrock." I'm imagining a truck full of this stuff overturning on a crack-laden bridge somewhere, just an hour before a rainstorm begins, or a storage yard filled with crates of this stuff being ripped apart in the summer wind; a seemingly innocuous grey powder drifts out across an entire neighborhood for the next few hours, settling down into cracks on brick rooftops and stone facades, in sidewalks and roadbeds. Then the rains begin. The city crumbles. Weaponized demolition powder.
In any case, I actually stumbled upon Betonamit after reading a few blog posts on that company's in-house blog. Atlas Preservation has a handful of interesting short articles up documenting their preservation work, including what might be the oldest gravestone in the United States and the challenges of open-air cemetery preservation. Let's hope no one goes wandering amongst the tombs with a bucket of Betonamit…
The BBC went into horror-movie mode earlier this month, asking, "what would happen if we were suddenly exposed to deadly bacteria and viruses that have been absent for thousands of years, or that we have never met before? We may be about to find out. Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life." The headline is straight-forward enough, I suppose: "There are diseases hidden in ice, and they are waking up."
[Images: Courtesy Waxwork Records].
Fans of John Carpenter's (excellent) 1982 film The Thing might be interested to hear that the original score has been remastered and released on vinyl. The final product is visually gorgeous—and temporarily sold out. Keep your ears peeled for further pressings.
A retired F.B.I. investigator has newly dedicated himself to tracking down lost apple varietals of the Pacific Northwest. They are not extinct; they have simply disappeared into the background, both ecologically and historically. They are trees that have "faded into woods, or were absorbed by parks or other public lands," but the apples that grow from them can still be enjoyed and cultivated.
If you are interested in apples and their history, meanwhile, don't miss the late Roger Deakin's superb book, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees.
[Images: Courtesy Public Domain Review].
Blending into the natural landscape is the subject of a fascinating piece over at Public Domain Review about the early wildlife photographers, Richard and Cherry Kearton. In order not to scare away their subject matter, the Keartons constructed artificial trees, put on short, deliberately misleading performative displays for wildlife, and carved masks that would help camouflage them against the woodlands.
There's more—always more!—to link to and read, but I'll leave it at that. For other, ongoing links, I am also on Twitter.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on May 31, 2017 May 31, 2017 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Adrienne LaFrance, Apples, Betonamit, Burial Grounds, Camouflage, Cemeteries, Cherry Kearton, Climate Change, Demolition, Disease, Electricity, Ennio Morricone, Flooding, Glaciers, Graveyards, Hawaii, Infrastructure, John Carpenter, King Tides, Landscape, Mountains, Muons, Penn State, Permafrost, Preservation, Richard Kearton, Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin, Sand, Sea-Level Rise, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Thing, Tides, Trees, Wildlife Photography, Willem Defoe, Zach Mortice
A Voice Moving Over The Waters
[Image: The Jim Creek Naval Radio Station from Popular Mechanics].
For a variety of reasons, I've been looking at a variety of large terrestrial antenna sites built for communicating with submarines. This is the field of Very Low Frequency (VLF) and Extremely Low Frequency radio transmission (the latter wonderfully abbreviated as ELF).
This is a topic already explored here several years ago, of course, with the Project Sanguine antenna field in Wisconsin, for example, and the Cutler array up on a peninsula in Maine. But a few other examples came up that I thought I'd post.
One is the example you see above: the Jim Creek Naval Radio Station in the woods of Washington State, as featured here in an old issue of Popular Mechanics. The Jim Creek facility is basically an entire valley in the Pacific Northwest, denuded of its trees and then strung with the harp-like cables of a mega-antenna. This antenna then broadcasts "the voice that crosses the Pacific," as Popular Mechanics describes it, including U.S. military ships and submarines.
[Image: The antenna field at Jim Creek, via Wikipedia].
Briefly, although it's technically irrelevant, it is nonetheless interesting in this context to read about the so-called "Hessdalen lights," a phenomenon that appears to be caused by natural electrical currents moving through a remote Norwegian valley.
The scientific explanation for these "lights" is incredible.
Back in 2011, New Scientist reported, a scientific team "analyzed rock samples from Hessdalen and found that it is a valley of two halves: the rocks on one side of the Hesja river are rich in zinc and iron, those on the other are rich in copper. Then, during the 2012 mission someone mentioned an abandoned sulphur mine in the valley. 'For me it was news,' says [head scientist Jader Monari from the Institute of Radio Astronomy]. 'We found zinc and iron on one side and copper on the other. If there is sulphur in the water in the middle, it makes a perfect battery.'"
By a weird fluke of geochemistry, the entire valley is a natural electrical cell! Now imagine a valley somewhere—in Washington State, say—acting as a giant natural radio transmitter: a geological radio station broadcasting signals out to sea.
In any case, here is the Jim Creek facility on Google Maps.
Two other quick things to mention: as a commenter pointed out here a few years ago, there is a spectacular naval-communications facility located on a peninsula in Western Australia called the Harold E. Holt Naval Communication Station.
[Image: Harold E. Holt Naval Communication Station, via Google Maps].
As described by the Australian government, the facility "consists of one central tower surrounded by two concentric circles each of six smaller towers ranging from 304 to 387 meters in height and is 2.54 km in diameter. It communicates over immense distances with submerged submarines in the Indian and Pacific Oceans."
According to this commenter, the station "has an eerie suggestion of sacred geometry[:] pentagons and symmetrical shapes, all concentric. It is said that under the array, light bulbs held in the hand will glow." This is not impossible; recall the work of artist Richard Box.
Indeed, seen on Google Maps, the facility is breathtaking. Be sure to zoom out to get a sense of how isolated this place is. Here is a view of the antennas from the nearby beach.
Finally, there is something called ZEVS. ZEVS is a secretive, Soviet-era electromagnetic facility and submarine-communication antenna array that allegedly exists somewhere beneath the forests of the Kola Peninsula.
There's not a ton of information about it online, but I'm also just lazily Googling things at the moment and have undoubtedly missed something; if you have more details, by all means please feel free to share.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on May 4, 2017 May 4, 2017 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Antennas, Australia, Cold War, Electricity, ELF, Extremely Low Frequency, Harold E. Holt Naval Communication Station, Hessdalen Lights, Infrastructure, Jim Creek, Kola Peninsula, Landscape, Maine, Norway, Project Sanguine, Soviet Union, Submarines, Western Australia, Wisconsin, ZEVS
[Image: Work by Diana Scherer, used to promote an event coming up on December 14th, in Wageningen, Holland, where the artist will be speaking].
The work of German-born artist Diana Scherer explores what she calls "the dynamics of belowground plant parts." She uses plant roots themselves as a medium for creating patterns and networks, the purpose of which is to suggest overlaps between human technological activity and the embodied "intelligence" of living botanical matter. "This buried matter is still a wondrous land," she writes.
The results are incredible. They feature roots woven like carpets or textiles, imitating Gothic ornament with floral patterns and computational arabesques underground.
[Image: "Ornament with Thistle" by Daniel Hopfer; via Wikimedia].
Compare Scherer's work, for example, to traditional Gothic plant ornament—that is, geometric shapes meant to imitate the movements and behaviors of plants—but here actually achieved with plants themselves.
Scherer calls this "root system domestication," where, on the flipside of an otherwise perfectly "natural" landscape, such as an expanse of lawn grass, wonderfully artificial, technical patterns can be achieved.
[Images: All images by Diana Scherer, from "Harvest: Exercises in Rootsystem Domestication"].
The idea that we could grow biological circuits and living rootkits is incredible, as if, someday, electronic design and gardening will—wonderfully and surreally—converge.
You simply step into your backyard, exhume some root matter as if harvesting potatoes, and whole new circuits and electrical networks are yours to install elsewhere.
[Image: From "Harvest: Exercises in Rootsystem Domestication" by Diana Scherer].
After all, the soil is already alive with electricity, and plants are, in effect, computer networks in waiting.
Scherer's work simply takes those observations to their next logical step, you might argue, using plants themselves as an intelligent form-finding technology with implications for the organic hardware of tomorrow.
For more images, click through to Diana Scherer's website, and, for those of you near Wageningen, consider stopping by the artist's live Q&A on December 14th. Someone please commission a landscape-scale work from Scherer soon!
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on December 11, 2016 December 12, 2016 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Art, Bioelectronics, Diana Scherer, Electricity, Electronics, Gardening, Landscape, Life, Plants, Roots, Science, Soil BatteriesLeave a comment on Rootkit
The Dam Industry's Chernobyl
There's an alarming new piece up at The New Yorker looking at two potential dam failures, in Iraq and Zambia, and the extraordinary effects these disasters would have. The collapse of Iraq's Mosul Dam, for example, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers calls "the most dangerous dam in the world," "could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless." The collapse of Zambia's Kariba Dam, meanwhile, and the resulting megaflood would be "the dam industry's Chernobyl": "three million people live in the flood's path; most would die or lose their crops or possessions. About forty per cent of the electricity-generating capacity of twelve southern African nations would be eliminated." (Spotted via @waltonwater)
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on February 3, 2016 December 27, 2016 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Africa, Chernobyl, Collapse, Dams, Disasters, Electricity, Floods, Hydrology, Hydropower, Infrastructure, Iraq, Mosul, Mosul Dam, ZambiaLeave a comment on The Dam Industry's Chernobyl
Hot Rock, Lost Rock, Router
[Image: Keepalive by Aram Bartholl, from the artist's Flickr page].
This past summer, Aram Bartholl installed a project called Keepalive in the woods of Neuenkirchen, Germany. Keepalive was a hollow boulder that contained "a thermoelectric generator which converts heat directly into electricity."
Visitors are invited to make a fire next to the boulder to power up the wifi router in the stone which then reveals a large collection of PDF survival guides. The piratebox.cc-inspired router which is NOT connected to the Internet offers the users [an opportunity] to download the guides and upload any content they like to the stone database. As long as the fire produces enough heat the router will stay switched on.
First, a chamber was cut into a large rock; the router was then installed inside it.
Next, the chamber was sealed with a piece of metal, and the rock itself was strapped to a delivery truck, to be dropped off in its new home in a wooded meadow.
[Images: Keepalive by Aram Bartholl, from the artist's Flickr page].
Finally, a small campfire was started—and, lo and behold, the secret documents made their electromagnetic way to a nearby iPhone, as if conjured into digital existence through the most primitive means of a campfire.
It's a kind of library in waiting.
While the actual, technical realization of the piece leaves something to be desired—by which I simply mean that there is just a large metal plate hiding the cavity inside of which the router is stored, which is visually disappointing—I love the idea that a better-hidden version of this might actually serve a real survivalist purpose someday.
Out on the remote periphery of the city, where you and your family agree to meet should there ever be an earthquake, a hurricane, or an act of terrorism or war, a cached collection of digital files waits utterly hidden from view, sealed inside a boulder with no visible exterior signs. When the Big One hits, out to your hot rock you go.
Of course, in real life, you'd doubtless lose track of the thing and spend two agonizing weeks lighting fire after fire after fire under every boulder in the region, desperately checking your dying phones to see if the digital documents appear… and they never do…
Think, for example, of the genuinely weird—and seemingly half-fictional—story of "Rocky II," artist Ed Ruscha's lost geological sculpture in the California desert.
As the Guardian explains, "Rocky II" is a "little-known and unexhibited work by the American artist Ed Ruscha: an artificial rock made out of resin and named 'Rocky II' after the Sylvester Stallone movie. A BBC crew filmed Ruscha during its creation for a 1980 documentary, which also captured him depositing the work somewhere in the Mojave desert, where it has apparently remained ever since, indistinguishable from all the other rocks around it."
Ruscha's rock is apparently more than just forgotten, it is seemingly nonexistent: "'Rocky II' is so mysterious it neither appears on the call for information about missing artworks listed on the artist's website, nor in the catalogue listing all his known works—almost as if its existence has been intentionally obscured."
In any case, surely Bartholl's Keepalive could also be used as an interesting geological tool for espionage, merely a different kind of spy rock, tucked away at a campsite somewhere, waiting for a foreign agent to come along and light a fire.
A few minutes later—invisibly, unexpectedly to anyone but the agent—a tiny router inside the rock whirs to life in the heat and an electromagnetic cache of classified files begins streaming.
(Originally spotted via @curiousoctopus).
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on January 30, 2016 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Aram Bartholl, Art, Campfires, Ed Ruscha, Electricity, Espionage, Geology, Survivalism1 Comment on Hot Rock, Lost Rock, Router
Electronic Plantlife
[Image: A rose-circuit, courtesy Linköping University].
In a newly published paper called "Electronic plants," researchers from Linköping University in Sweden describe the process by which they were able to "manufacture" what they call "analog and digital organic electronic circuits and devices" inside living plants.
The plants not only conducted electrical signals, but, as Science News points, the team also "induced roses leaves to light up and change color."
Indeed, in their way of thinking, plants have been electronic gadgets all along: "The roots, stems, leaves, and vascular circuitry of higher plants are responsible for conveying the chemical signals that regulate growth and functions. From a certain perspective, these features are analogous to the contacts, interconnections, devices, and wires of discrete and integrated electronic circuits."
[Image: Bioluminescent foxfire mushrooms (used purely for illustrative effect), via Wikipedia].
Here's the process in a nutshell:
The idea of putting electronics directly into trees for the paper industry originated in the 1990s while the LOE team at Linköping University was researching printed electronics on paper. Early efforts to introduce electronics in plants were attempted by Assistant Professor Daniel Simon, leader of the LOE's bioelectronics team, and Professor Xavier Crispin, leader of the LOE's solid-state device team, but a lack of funding from skeptical investors halted these projects.
Thanks to independent research money from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation in 2012, Professor Berggren was able to assemble a team of researchers to reboot the project. The team tried many attempts of introducing conductive polymers through rose stems. Only one polymer, called PEDOT-S, synthesized by Dr. Roger Gabrielsson, successfully assembled itself inside the xylem channels as conducting wires, while still allowing the transport of water and nutrients. Dr. Eleni Stavrinidou used the material to create long (10 cm) wires in the xylem channels of the rose. By combining the wires with the electrolyte that surrounds these channels she was able to create an electrochemical transistor, a transistor that converts ionic signals to electronic output. Using the xylem transistors she also demonstrated digital logic gate function.
Headily enough, using plantlife as a logic gate also implies a future computational use of vegetation: living supercomputers producing their own circuits inside dual-use stems.
Previously, we have looked at the use of electricity to stimulate plants into producing certain chemicals, how the action of plant roots growing through soil could be tapped as a future source of power, and how soil bacteria could be wired up into huge, living battery fields—in fact, we also looked at a tongue-in-cheek design project for "growing electrical circuitry inside the trunks of living trees"—but this actually turns vegetation into a form of living circuitry.
While Archigram's "Logplug" project is an obvious reference point here within the world of architectural design, it seems more interesting to consider instead the future landscape design implications of technological advances such as this—how "electronic plants" might affect everything from forestry to home gardening, energy production and distribution infrastructure to a city's lighting grid.
[Image: The "Logplug" by Archigram, from Archigram].
We looked at this latter possibility several few years ago, in fact, in a post from 2009 called "The Bioluminescent Metropolis," where the first comment now seems both prescient and somewhat sad given later developments.
But the possibilities here go beyond mere bioluminescence, into someday fully functioning electronic vegetation.
Plants could be used as interactive displays—recall the roses "induced… to light up and change color"—as well as given larger conductive roles in a region's electrical grid. Imagine storing excess electricity from a solar power plant inside shining rose gardens, or the ability to bypass fallen power lines after a thunderstorm by re-routing a town's electrical supply through the landscape itself, living corridors wired from within by self-assembling circuits and transistors.
And, of course, that's all in addition to the possibility of cultivating plants specifically for their use as manufacturing systems for organic electronics—for example, cracking them open not to reveal nuts, seeds, or other consumable protein, but the flexible circuits of living computer networks. BioRAM.
There are obvious reasons to hesitate before realizing such a vision—that is, before charging headlong into a future world where forests are treated merely as back-up lighting plans for overcrowded cities and plants of every kind are seen as nothing but wildlife-disrupting sources of light cultivated for the throwaway value of human aesthetic pleasure.
Nonetheless, thinking through the design possibilities in addition to the ethical risks not only now seems very necessary, but might also lead someplace truly extraordinary—or someplace otherworldly, we might say with no need for justification.
For now, check out the original research paper over at Science Advances.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on November 25, 2015 December 27, 2015 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Archigram, Bioluminescence, Biotechnology, Computing, Electricity, Electronics, Landscape, Plantlife, Technology2 Comments on Electronic Plantlife
Subterranean Lightning Brigade
[Image: "Riggers install a lightning rod" atop the Empire State Building "in preparation for an investigation into lightning by scientists of the General Electric Company" (1947), via the Library of Congress].
This is hardly news, but I wanted to post about the use of artificial lightning as a navigational aid for subterranean military operations.
This was reported at the time as a project whose goal was "to let troops navigate about inside huge underground enemy tunnel complexes by measuring energy pulses given off by lightning bolts," where those lightning bolts could potentially be generated on-demand by aboveground tactical strike teams.
Such a system would replace the use of GPS—whose signals cannot penetrate into deep subterranean spaces—and it would operate by way of sferics, or radio atmospheric signals generated by electrical activity in the sky.
The proposed underground navigational system—known as "Sferics-Based Underground Geolocation" or S-BUG—would be capable of picking up these signals even from "hundreds of miles away. Receiving signals from lighting strikes in multiple directions, along with minimal information from a surface base station also at a distance, could allow operators to accurately pinpoint their position." They could thus maneuver underground, even in hundreds—thousands—of feet below the earth's surface in enemy caves or bunkers.
Hundreds of miles is a very wide range, of course—but what if there is no natural lightning in the area?
Enter artificial military storm generators, or the charge of the lightning brigade.
Back in 2009, DARPA also put out of a request for proposals as part of something called Project Nimbus. NIMBUS is "a fundamental science program focused on obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the lightning process." However, it included a specific interest in developing machines for "triggering lightning":
Experimental Set-up for Triggering Lightning: Bidders should fully describe how they would attempt to trigger lightning and list all potential pieces of equipment necessary to trigger lightning, as well as the equipment necessary to measure and characterize the processes governing lightning initiation, propagation, and attachment.
While it's easy enough to wax conspiratorial here about future lightning weapons or militarized storm cells—after all, DARPA themselves write that they want to understand "how [lightning] ties into the global charging circuit," as if "the global charging circuit" is something that could be instrumentalized or controlled—I actually find it more interesting to speculate that generating lightning would be not for offensive purposes at all, but for guiding underground navigation.
[Image: Lightning storm over Boston; via Wikimedia/NOAA].
Something akin to a strobe light begins pulsing atop a small camp of unmarked military vehicles parked far outside a desert city known for its insurgent activities. These flashes gradual lengthen, both temporally and physically, lasting longer and stretching upward into the sky; the clouds above are beginning to thicken, grumbling with quiet rolls of thunder.
Then the lightning strikes begin—but they're unlike any natural lightning you've ever seen. They're more like pops of static electricity—a pulsing halo or toroidal crown of light centered on the caravan of trucks below—and they seem carefully timed.
To defensive spotters watching them through binoculars in the city, it's obvious what this means: there must be a team of soldiers underground somewhere, using artificial sferics to navigate. They must be pushing forward relentlessly through the sewers and smuggling tunnels, crawling around the roots of buildings and maneuvering through the mazework of infrastructure that constitutes the city's underside, locating themselves by way of these rhythmic flashes of false lightning.
Of course, this equipment would eventually be de-militarized and handed down to the civilian sector, in which case you can imagine four friends leaving REI on a Friday afternoon after work with an artificial lightning generator split between them; no larger than a camp stove, it would eventually be set up with their other weekend caving equipment, used to help navigate through deep, stream-slick caves an hour and a half outside town, beneath tall mountains where GPS can't always be trusted.
Or, perhaps fifty years from now, salvage teams are sent deep into the flooded cities of the eastern seaboard to look for and retrieve valuable industrial equipment. They install an artificial lightning unit on the salt-bleached roof of a crumbling Brooklyn warehouse before heading off in a small armada of marsh boats, looking for entrances to old maintenance facilities whose basement storage rooms might have survived rapid sea-level rise.
Disappearing down into these lost rooms—like explorers of Egyptian tombs—they are guided by bolts of artificial lightning that spark upward above the ruins, reflected by tides.
[Image: Lightning via NOAA].
Or—why not?—perhaps we'll send a DARPA-funded lightning unit to one of the moons of Jupiter and let it flash and strobe there for as long as it needs. Called Project Miller-Urey, its aim is to catalyze life from the prebiotic, primordial soup of chemistry swirling around there in the Cthulhoid shadow of eternal ice mountains.
Millions and millions of years hence, proto-intelligent lifeforms emerge, never once guessing that they are, in fact, indirect descendants of artificial lightning technology. Their spark is not divine but military, the electrical equipment that sparked their ancestral line long since fallen into oblivion.
In any case, keep your eyes—and cameras—posted for artificial lightning strikes coming to a future military theater near you…
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on August 9, 2015 December 31, 2015 Categories BLDGBLOGTags DARPA, Electricity, Geology, GPS, Military, Navigation, Power, Subterranean, Technology, Tunnels, UndergroundLeave a comment on Subterranean Lightning Brigade
[Image: From "Means to an End" by Dillon Marsh].
There are a few projects by the young South African photographer Dillon Marsh that seem worth a look.
The first are his photos of "electricity pylons… criss-crossing the landscape around the city of Cape Town," called "Means to an End."
Marsh is by no means the first photographer, artist, writer, architect, etc., to look at electricity pylons, but the resulting images are pretty stunning.
Meanwhile, Marsh has a variety of other series available for view on his website, but another one I want to feature briefly here is called "Limbo."
[Image: From "Limbo" by Dillon Marsh].
In Marsh's own words, "'Limbo' is a series of photographs showing trees that have died, but not yet fallen. All these trees were photographed in various suburbs of the Cape Flats area of Cape Town, including Bridgetown, Bonteheuwel, Ruyterwacht, Windermere, and The Hague."
The results perhaps recall the "Rise" filter, as well as the square format of Instagram, but, for me, that doesn't take away from their visual or conceptual interest.
[Images: From "Limbo" by Dillon Marsh].
Oddly, these actually remind me of the trees in Hackney, a borough of London where I briefly lived more than a decade ago; the branches of almost every tree along the streets that I walked each morning to the local bus stop had been cut—or hacked, as it were—by the Council, apparently out of a mathematically impossible fear of liability should the branches someday fall and hit a car, a pedestrian, or a baby in a stroller, lending the neighborhood an even drearier feel of grey-skied Gothic horror than it would have had already on its own.
Somewhere between portraits and landscape photography, these two projects of Marsh's go well together, depicting the starkly exposed branching peculiar to these two types of structures.
They are also both in Marsh's "Landscape Series" of photographs, a series that, in his words, seeks "to find things that are out of the ordinary, picking them out of the landscape where they might otherwise blend in. I choose objects that can be found in multitude within their environment so that I can depict a family of objects in a series of photographs. By displaying each project as such, I feel I am able to show both the character of the individual members, and the characteristics that make these objects a family."
I'll do one more quick post about Marsh's work, showing my favorite series of all.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on March 12, 2013 December 29, 2015 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Culture, Dillon Marsh, Electricity, Energy, Infrastructure, Landscape, Photography, Plantlife, Trees4 Comments on Branch
The Archigram Archive
[Image: From an "ongoing speculative proposal exploring the implications of cones of vision and their interaction with an existing neoclassical 'temple' on the River Thames in Henley, Berkshire," by Archigram/Michael Webb].
As of roughly 16 hours ago, the Archigram Archival Project is finally online and ready to for browsing, courtesy of the University of Westminster: the archive "makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available free online for public viewing and academic study."
The newly launched site includes more than 200 projects; "this comprises projects done by members before they met, the Archigram magazines (grouped together at no. 100), the projects done by Archigram as a group between 1961 and 1974, and some later projects." There are also brief biographies of each participating member of the collaborative group: Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb.
[Image: "Proposal for a series of inflatable dwellings as part of an exhibition for the Commonwealth Festival, located in the lodge of Cardiff Castle," by Archigram/Ron Herron].
Even at their most surreal, it feels as if Archigram did, in fact, accurately foresee what the architectural world was coming to. After all, if Chalk & Co. had built the things around us, there would be electricity supplies in the middle of nowhere and drive-in housing amidst the sprawl; for good or for bad, we'd all be playing with gadgets like the Electronic Tomato, that perhaps would not have given the iPhone a run for its money but was a "mobile sensory stimulation device," nonetheless. We might even live together on the outer fringes of "extreme suburbs," constructed like concentric halos around minor airports, such as Peter Cook's "Crater City," an "earth sheltered hotel-type city around central park," or "Hedgerow Village," tiny clusters of houses like North Face tents "hidden in hedgerow strips."
There would be temporary, inflatable additions to whole towns and cities; pyramidal diagrid megastructures squatting over dead neighborhoods like malls; dream cities like Rorschach blots stretched across the sky, toothed and angular Montreal Towers looming in the distance; plug-in universities and capsule homes in a computer-controlled city of automatic switches and micro-pneumatic infrastructure.
At its more bizarre, there would have been things like the Fabergram castle, as if the Teutonic Knights became an over-chimneyed race of factory-builders in an era of cheap LSD, reading Gormenghast in Disneyworld, or this proposal "for technology enabling underwater farming by scuba divers, including chambers, floats and tubes for walking and farm control." After all, Archigram asked, why live in a house at all when you can live in a submarine? Why use airplanes when you can ride a magic carpet constructed from shining looms in a "'reverse hovercraft' facility where a body can be held at an adjustable point in space through the use of jets of air"?
[Image: "Speculative proposal showing use of the 'Popular Pak', a kit of architectural parts for 'tuning-up' existing buildings, applied to an invented suburb," by Archigram/Ron Herron].
It might not be architects who have realized much of this fever dream of the world to come, but that doesn't mean that these ideas have not, in many cases, been constructed. Archigram spoke of instant cities and easily deployed, reconfigurable megastructures—but the people more likely to own and operate such spaces today are Big Box retailers, with their clip-on ornaments, infinitely exchangeable modular shelving, and fleeting themes-of-the-week. Archigram's flexible, just-in-time, climate-controlled interiors are not a sign of impending utopia, in other words, but of the reach of your neighborhood shopping mall—and the people airdropping instant cities into the middle of nowhere today are less likely to be algorithmically trained Rhino enthusiasts from architecture school, but the logistics support teams behind Bechtel and the U.S. military.
Another way of saying this is that Archigram's ideas seem unbuilt—even unbuildable—but those ideas actually lend themselves surprisingly well to the environment in which we now live, full of "extreme suburbs," drive-in everything, KFC-supplied army bases in the middle of foreign deserts, robot bank tellers, and huge, HVAC-dependent wonderlands on the exurban fringe.
The irony, for me, is that Archigram's ideas have, in many ways, actually been constructed—but in most cases it was for the wrong reasons, in the wrong ways, and by the wrong people.
[Image: Proposal "fusing alternative and changing Archigram structures, amenities and facilities with traditional and nostalgic structures," by Archigram/Peter Cook].
In any case, what was it about Archigram that promised on-demand self-transformation in an urban strobe of flashing lights but then got so easily realized as a kind of down-market Times Square? How did Archigram simply become the plug-in units of discount retail—or the Fun Palaces of forty years ago downgraded to Barnes & Noble outlets in the suburbs? How did the Walking City become Bremer Walls and Forward Operating Bases, where the Instant City meets Camp Bondsteel?
Archigram predicted a modular future propelled by cheap fuel, petrodollars, and a billion easy tons of unrecycled plastic—but, beneath that seamless gleam of artificial surfacing and extraterrestrial color combinations was a fizzy-lifting drink of human ideas—as many ideas as you could think of, sometimes imperfectly illustrated but illustrated nonetheless, and, thus, now canonical—all of it wrapped up in a dossier of new forms of planetary civilization. Archigram wasn't just out on the prowl for better escalators or to make our buildings look like giant orchids and Venus Flytraps, where today's avant-bust software formalism has unfortunately so far been mired; it wasn't just bigger bank towers and the Burj Dubai.
Instead, Archigram suggested, we could all act differently if we had the right spaces in which to meet, love, and live, and what matters to me less here is whether or not they were right, or even if they were the only people saying such things (they weren't)—what matters to me is the idea that architecture can reframe and inspire whole new anthropologies, new ways of being human on earth, new chances to do something more fun tomorrow (and later today). Architecture can reshape how we inhabit continents, the planet, and the solar system at large. Whether or not you even want inflatable attics, flying carpets, and underwater eel farms, the overwhelming impulse here is that if you don't like the world you've been dropped into, then you should build the one you want.
In any case, the entire Archigram Archival Project is worth a look; even treated simply as an historical resource, its presence corrects what had been a sorely missing feature of online architecture culture: we can now finally link to, and see, Archigram's work.
(Note: Part of the latter half of this post includes some re-edited bits from a comment I posted several months ago).
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on April 19, 2010 December 30, 2015 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Archigram, Architecture, Archives, Bechtel, Construction, Culture, Design, Electricity, Energy, Extreme Suburbs, Fabrication, History, Landscape Futures, Military Urbanism, Plug-In City, Science Fiction, Urban Speculation, Walking City7 Comments on The Archigram Archive
Shining Path
One of many things that we'll be looking at tonight in the Blackout seminar that I've been teaching over at Pratt in Brooklyn is organically generated electricity—things like virus batteries, biogeobatteries, sediment batteries, and more.
[Image: From Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige (2006)].
By way of getting there, though, we'll be taking a very brief look at Christopher Nolan's under-rated film The Prestige—specifically the scene in which we see a hillside covered in giant incandescent light bulbs, none of which appear to be plugged into anything but soil and all of which are powered wirelessly by a generator located over 12 miles away.
The geological form of the mountain plateau becomes a shining grid framing our two featured characters.
Although The Prestige does not suggest that this is what's happening in this scene, what if the soil itself was powering these light bulbs? What if soil could be turned into a landscape-scale, distributed electrical device?
Awesomely, as Nature reported just two months ago, there is growing evidence to back up "a suggestion within the geophysics and microbiology communities that bacteria can grow tiny 'wires' and hook up to form a biogeobattery—a giant natural battery that generates electrical currents."
[Image: From Popular Science].
Then Popular Science picked up on the story:
Scientists have known that bacteria can create electricity when mixed with mud and seawater, and have even built microbial fuel cells around the little buggers. Now they have begun figuring out just how bacteria create electrical networks that serve as long-distance communication, at least on the microbial scale—the distances ranged up to 2 centimeters. Yet those few centimeters equal roughly 20,000 times the body size of individual bacteria.
Imagining soil itself—the ground all around us—as a giant electrical transmission network is astonishing. And, again, while there is no mention of anything like biogeobatteries and their ilk in The Prestige, the very idea that perhaps someday we could plug light bulbs directly into the soil—an organic battery coextensive with the living surface of the earth—amazes me.
[Images: From The Prestige (2006)].
And biogeobatteries are not even the only option here; there are also virus batteries.
MIT reported back in 2006 that a team of researchers had "harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small 'nanowire' structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries. By manipulating a few genes inside these viruses, the team was able to coax the organisms to grow and self-assemble into a functional electronic device." The resulting virus batteries are tiny, but they could vary in scale "from the size of a grain of rice up to the size of existing hearing aid batteries."
The future design possibilities are bewildering. Could deposits of virus-impregnated soil be used as electricity-storage devices in rural, off-the-grid areas?
[Image: From Nature].
After all, bacteria might already be "wiring up the soil," Nature suggested three years ago. Indeed, "bacteria can sprout webs of electrical wiring that transform the soil into a geological battery," meaning that "the earth beneath our feet might act as a gigantic circuit built by microbes to power their metabolic systems." And you can build a soil battery yourself:
The researchers filled plastic columns with wet sand infiltrated with a nutrient compound (lactate), and allowed S. oneidensis to grow in this "fake soil." Only the top of the column was in contact with air. Electrodes inserted at various heights up the columns revealed that, after about ten days, electrical charge was coursing up the column… threaded by a web of filaments between the bacterial cells.
I'm reminded here of the work of Philip Beesley, which often uses self-fertilizing yeast-packs, gels, and seeds to create living geotextiles. In fact, a Beesley Battery doesn't seem at all very off: a living mat woven through the soil, generating and storing electricity based on pre-existing bacterial activity in the ground.
You infect the soil with a genetically-modified virus patented by MIT and electrical currents start to flow…
[Image: From Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006)].
Perhaps someday, then, we could simply show up somewhere, in the middle of the night, surrounded by pine forests and hills, and just crouch down, push a light bulb two or three inches into the earth—
[Image: From The Prestige (2006)].
—and watch as everything around us starts to glow.
Author Geoff ManaughPosted on April 14, 2010 December 11, 2016 Categories BLDGBLOGTags Batteries, Biogeobattery, Biotechnology, Christopher Nolan, Electricity, Infrastructure, Landscape, Light, Philip Beesley, Soil, Soil Batteries, The Prestige, Virus Battery9 Comments on Shining Path
Mountain Monuments
Art + Environment, Landscape Futures, and a Million Reasons to Visit Reno
Where does your taco come from?
Skywalker Village
The business card and the garden smuggler
The Rentable Basement Maze
New Local Worlds in Section
The Bat Spiral
Low-Poly Tectonics
Moss on
Cody on
Mark on


text:
Иван Ильич Алексеев («Кум», «Дядя Ваня»; 24 марта 1870, Брянск — 1 октября 1944, Ворошиловград) — большевик, революционер, государственный и профсоюзный деятель.

Биография
Родился 24 марта 1870 года в семье рабочего-столяра в Брянске Орловской губернии. С 17 лет работал в деревянной мастерской Брянского Арсенала, затем на заводе Бежица. В 1898 за организацию стачки был арестован и затем административно выслан из Орловской губернии. С 1899 работал в Луганске, слесарем на Патронном заводе, с 1904 на Паровозостроительном заводе Гартмана, где организовал первый профсоюз. Сблизился с К.Ворошиловым, в период Первой русской революции 1905—1907 — активный стачечник.

Большевик с 21 марта 1917 года, был избран в состав Луганского Совета рабочих депутатов, возглавлял продовольственный комитет. В апреле 1917 на общезаводской конференции избран членом первого совета рабочего контроля, в августе — депутатом Луганской городской Думы (№ 6 в партсписке большевиков). Луганский окружной комиссар продовольственных дел.

В марте-апреле 1918 года — нарком продовольствия Донецко-Криворожской Республики. Участвовал в походе 5 Армии к Царицыну, затем вернулся в Луганск. В ночь на 6 ноября 1918 года был арестован контрразведкой Белой армии и до января 1919 находился в тюрьме. После занятия Луганска Красной армией 21 января 1919 года был введен в состав Военно-революционного комитета, занимался продовольственным снабжением предприятий города. В апреле-мае 1919 участник Луганской Обороны от войск Деникина. После отступления Красной армии с Украины работал в отделе военных заготовок в Тамбове.

После окончательного освобождения Донбасса находился на различных ответственных должностях в Луганске: контролер инспекции СНХ Донецкой губернской РКИ (январь-ноябрь 1920 года); член правления Луганского райпотребсоюза (декабрь 1920—1923); организатор и первый директор Луганского филиала Всеукраинского кооперативного «Украинабанка» (июнь 1923 — октябрь 1925).

С октября 1925 по март 1926 — Председатель Луганского городского Совета.

С июля 1926 — председатель правления Луганского городского банка, с марта 1928 — сотрудник «Укрпайбуд», с июня 1930 года — директор строительного техникума. Летом 1932 по болезни вышел на персональную пенсию, однако с октября 1936 возглавлял бюро жалоб при горсовете. В период Великой Отечественной войны с января 1942 по июнь 1944 находился в эвакуации в г. Фрунзе. Умер 1 октября 1944 года в Луганске.

Бессменный депутат Луганского Совета с 1917 до конца жизни, старейший из наркомов ДКР. Как заслуженный деятель и революционер, был похоронен в Сквере Революции в центре города, его именем названы улица и квартал.

Семья
Жена — Вера Афанасьевна (1891?-1970).
Сыновья Иван и Борис — инженеры, дочь Анна — химик, после окончания учёбы остались жить и работать в Харькове. Младшая дочь Муза (1918 г. р.) — известная луганская журналистка.

Источники
 Федоровский Ю. Судьбы наркомов // Коммунист Донбасса. — 2000. — № 5 (4 февраля).
 Жаровный В. Ударник революции // Вечерний Луганск. — 2004. — № 23 (10 июня).

Большевики
Главы Луганска
Народные комиссары Донецко-Криворожской советской республики
Революционеры России
Участники Гражданской войны в России (красные)
Похороненные в Луганске

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Homonoea longimana är en skalbaggsart som först beskrevs av John Obadiah Westwood 1842.  Homonoea longimana ingår i släktet Homonoea och familjen långhorningar.

Artens utbredningsområde är Filippinerna. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.

Källor

Långhorningar
longimana