Web sites to read, and an interesting paper

Our blog taskmaster, Christian, told me that my day for posting was going to be the 6th of every month, and that if I failed...well, let's just say he pointed me to this site and told me to be afraid.

So here I am, with an easy three hours before end-of-day.

Let's get started with a couple of blogs you should be reading (other than ours, of course). The action starts after the jump.

Bldgblog

Geoff Manaugh, recently relocated to Los Angeles (future of cities or anomaly? Discuss.) brings a distinctly science-fiction bent to thoughts about cities and architecture. Here's an excerpt from his wonderful post about using microbes to solidify dirt into rock as a way of shoring up eroding landscapes:

So the idea here would be to give "statue disease" to the Earth itself: wherever the planet is wounded, it turns itself to rock – or bone, as the case may be – saving us from earthquakes.

But what amazing architectural structures might result if the world was swept by statue disease! The crowds of Paris, frozen hard as rock in an epidemic of Gothic statuary, webbed together in one vast church of bone. All of Rome becomes a sculpture gallery.
Discovering that you, too, are infected, you deliberately seek out a crowd of others, wearing hospital gowns, and you join together in a group to form huge gymnastic shapes – knowing that your joints will soon fuse, becoming an artwork that will outlast Manhattan.

Future archaeologists will burst into tears as they scrape away layers of the Gobi Desert, revealing ten million human statues in an abandoned Beijing...

Lovely.

Pruned

Alexander Trevi does kind of the same literary treatment on the world of landscape. A sample, you ask for? A sample you get, from a post on the Kumbh Mela Festival in India:

So: how much electricity can be generated from 60-70 million ecstatic people walking, parading, running, crossing pontoon bridges, or simply splashing about? How many kilowatts can a teeming mass of people, roughly equal to the population of France, concentrated into an area the size of three Central Parks produce?

Say, for instance, a network of perambulatory channels is grafted onto Allahabad, the Ganges, and Yamuna, something resembling a High Italian Baroque fountain, or if one were to prefer something vernacular, a Mughal fountain, but in either case, unabashedly flamboyant in design and engineering, crazily interlooping, fractal, and stampede-proof.

It's a water feature writ large. The Maha Kumbh Mela Fountain.

Oh, and hey, let me also hip you to this recent paper, interesting not for what it found but for what it studied: biodiversity in urban parks. The link goes to flackery from Penn State where the researcher, Robert Loeb, works. Loeb did population analyses on all the plants in the big parks in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington DC to see how many plants the parks had in common (and yes, I know you landscape fans out there obsess about Fredrick Law Olmstead's work in Boston and NYC. About which I'll just say, okay, okay, I get it, he's good. Sheesh.) No live link to the actual article that I could find, but I got them to send me a PDF. Salient bits from the abstract:

The combined vascular flora for the ten parks contains 147 families, 599 genera and 1391 species, 490 of which are non-native. Fewer than 1% of the total number of species were present in all ten parks and less than 2.5% were present in nine or ten parks, indicating that a common urban park flora does not exist.

Why do I care? Because parks are, in the end, tiny little pieces of landscape. If they don't have much in common, even when they're relatively close together-as these chunks of northeast corridor are, in the end-what does that say about how much we're chopping up what ought to be contiguous environment?

For a far better take on this concept, check out Harvard prof Richard T.T. Foreman's book Land Mosaics, which digs deep into the idea. And while you're over at Amazon, maybe also pick up Foreman's Road Ecology, which will make you feel guilty every time you drive a car past something natural and beautiful, because you're pretty much killing it. Stupid human.

Okay, go read those. I'll see you back here in 30.