Category: fun things

An editorial aside

On December 31, 2000, I was in New York City. I went there because I wanted to attend the New Year’s Eve festivities at Times Square; having watched the spectacle on TV for years, I felt it was time I experienced it for myself. Time and time again, people warned me not to go. “I’ve been there; it’s horrible,” someone would say. “You can’t see anything, you can’t hear anything, the crowds are crazy. You’d have a much better time if you just stayed home.” And each time I replied, “I believe you. I want to go anyway.”

I hate crowds, yet there were bound to be close to a million people there. I hate the cold, and it was well below freezing—a major snowstorm had just blown through. I hate noise and chaos; the scene was likely to include both. In spite of all these things, I went, even knowing for certain in advance that it would be unpleasant, and knowing I could choose not to go.

Sure enough, the experience lived up (or down) to my expectations. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of noisy people crowding on all sides and extremities numb from the cold, my bladder was painfully full as I stood there for more than six hours in what can only be described as complete discomfort. I couldn’t see or hear what was happening on the stage several blocks ahead, and when the ball dropped and the police barricades were moved aside, I could not have been less interested in staying to celebrate. Warmth, food, and a lavatory—not necessarily in that order—were foremost on my mind. Later, when the people who had warned me off in the first place asked if I’d do it again, I said, “I’ve done it once; I don’t need to do it a second time. But if I could go back in time and choose again whether or not to do it the first time, I’d choose the same experience.” Why? Because no description of an experience can ever really tell you what it’s like. If you want to know, you have to find out for yourself.

Seeing for Yourself

The kind of knowing you get from experience is qualitatively different from what you get by reading about something or hearing a story. This is why people travel instead of just reading travel books. However much you may trust other sources of information, they can’t provide what your own senses can. And just as some foods are worth eating even though they don’t taste good, some potentially unpleasant experiences are worth having.

From Descartes, who said, “I think, therefore I am,” through phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, who tried to create a rigorous science of experience, philosophers have time and again reaffirmed the importance of one’s own experience in understanding the world. Yet it is a tacit principle of modern western culture that only pleasant experiences are worth pursuing, that any experience you can’t reasonably expect to enjoy should be avoided if possible. This attitude effectively puts the evaluation of experiences in other people’s hands, but other people will never experience things exactly the way you will. You may enjoy an experience someone else does not, and even if you don’t, you may appreciate the value of collecting that knowledge for yourself.

For years I listened to people’s stories about their vacations to Hawaii, though I’d never visited there myself. Some of them told me it’s a wonderful place, full of beauty and culture; others told me it’s overcommercialized, touristy, and generally a waste of time. And the fact is, they’re all right—each from a different point of view. No two people can have exactly the same experience of the same thing, place, or event. There are too many variables, not the least of which is the attitude with which you approach an experience. Your background, tastes, expectations, and many other factors will influence your interpretation of any experience. I eventually visited Hawaii myself, satisfied my curiosity, and formed my own opinions. I thought it was lovely, by the way (which is not to say that it wasn’t also touristy, expensive, and so on). But that’s what it was like for one person, with one background, at one time. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary.

It’s Just a Sensation

While any experience, good or bad, can trivially be called a “learning experience,” I don’t necessarily have learning in mind when I think of experiencing things I may not like. I think, more generally, about approaching new experiences with equanimity (to the extent possible), trying to detach myself from an immediate value judgment. When I practice t’ai chi and my legs hurt, I try to think: “It’s just a sensation. Not everything that’s painful is necessarily bad.” And even things that are bad usually have some positive value. I had malaria once and it was terrible; I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I can’t pretend I liked it, but I do have a story now that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, and I have a piece of knowledge that most Americans don’t have: I know what malaria actually feels like, while others just know the clinical list of symptoms.

There are some experiences I choose not to have—for legal, moral, or philosophical reasons. I avoid experiences I consider likely to cause harm to myself or anyone else; I also avoid some experiences about which I simply have no curiosity at all—not everything can be interesting to everyone. Nor do I value every experience equally—for example, I certainly cannot say I have no regrets. I can, however, say that even my stupidest and most selfish choices have, at least indirectly, resulted in some eventual good.

The Decade of Risk

When I turned 30, I gave a little speech at my birthday party. Among other things, I declared that the following 10 years would be my “decade of risk.” I didn’t mean that I planned to take up sword swallowing or start investing in pyramid schemes. Rather, I meant that I would try to be more open to experiences that didn’t fit into my world view, that could change me in unexpected ways, that lacked assurances of enjoyment but offered the potential for enlightenment, in some small way. In short, I would seek to have more experiences for their own sake. In retrospect, I fared reasonably well, just as I did in my forties—my “decade of wealth and influence.” (Now in my fifties, I’m inclined to make things easier on myself. Can this be my “decade of consistent frozen yogurt consumption”?)

There are plenty more interesting things to experience and report. In the meantime, get out there and experience things. Try it, you’ll like it—or maybe not—but you’ll know something you didn’t know before.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on May 30, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on July 10, 2004.

Image credit: ​Wikipedia user Chensiyuan [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Polar bear capital of the world

When I was in college, I went hiking with a group of friends in Riding Mountain National Park, located in southwestern Manitoba. We decided to hike quite a distance into the park before making camp for the night. Having had some camping experience, I looked forward to the adventure, but for one fact: the certain presence of black bears.

We took the necessary precautions, making plenty of noise as we hiked into the park, and making sure that our food was carefully put away after our evening meal. That night we had no problems, and it seemed like we were in the clear. As we hiked back out of the park, some members of our group with more backcountry experience went farther ahead on the trail. Suddenly they returned with stunned looks on their faces. They had seen a bear cross the trail in front of them, much too close for comfort. The rest of us were relieved that we hadn’t come face to face with a bear, but there was a certain excitement to the rest of our hike, knowing we had come so close to doing so.

The only other national park in Manitoba, Wapusk National Park, is also home to bears; in this case, polar bears. Not far from the town of Churchill, visitors to Wapusk (Cree for “White Bear”) can have their own near-bear experience, while safely out of reach of these mighty predators.

Good Fur Business

The area around Churchill is the ancestral home of the Chipewyan and Cree peoples who lived and hunted there before the first European explorers arrived in the 1600s. Located near the mouth of the Churchill River where it meets Hudson Bay, the town of Churchill began as a trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and was named for one of its governors, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough and an ancestor of Winston Churchill.

Churchill was well situated to become a hub for the fur trade, with its access to Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean on the one hand, and the availability of trading partners among the native population. Also unique to the location is that it sits at an ecotone, or the meeting of two different ecoregions. To the north is the tundra landscape of the Arctic, and to the south, the boreal forests, which extend down into the southern part of the province.

Bay City Rulers

In 1741, the Hudson’s Bay Company replaced its initial log fort with one built of stone, the Prince of Wales Fort, in recognition of the growing hostility between the French and English. This fort was overtaken by a French force in 1782 and burned to the ground. Soon after, a new fort was built farther upriver.

As the fur trade eventually declined in the area, a new means of trade was envisioned by backers of a rail line to be built from Winnipeg in the south up to Churchill in the north. This railroad would enable grain and other agricultural products to be transported from the southern prairies to the port at Churchill, in reality the closest seaport in the region. The Hudson Bay Railway was completed in 1930, and stretched for 1,180 miles (1,900 kilometers) from south to north. To this day, the railroad remains the only overland way to reach Churchill; there are no roads to the town, but an airport now exists to bring visitors to the area by air.

Days of Tundra

Although the fur trade initially drew the Europeans to Churchill, the town of almost 900 residents now relies on its local wildlife for another kind of economic activity: ecotourism. Churchill calls itself the Polar Bear Capital of the World, and with good reason. Every October and November, large numbers of polar bears gather near the town, waiting for the ice to form on Hudson Bay, which will allow them to reach their primary source of food: seals.

Many tourists come yearly to see the polar bears in their natural habitat, and during the “Bear Season” months, the town is bustling with activity. Polar bear viewing has become so popular that potential visitors must often book their trips a year ahead of time. Travelers to Churchill may arrive by air, but many make the journey by rail, which takes almost two days from Winnipeg.

While in Churchill, visitors have many choices for lodging, meals, and tour operators, but one of the best known is the Frontiers North Adventures. This company takes its guests into Wapusk National Park to view the polar bears in Tundra Buggies, enormous heated vehicles equipped with washroom facilities and an outdoor viewing deck. For those who want an immersion experience, the company also maintains the Tundra Buggy Lodge, a mobile hotel that is set up each year near the polar bear groupings. Guests are housed in sleeper cars, and can spend the night out on the tundra, ready to see the bears in action the next morning.

Feeling the Heat

While Churchill has long offered the unique opportunity to see polar bears in the wild, global climate change has dramatically affected both the local polar bear population and the town itself. In recent years the ice that forms on the Bay has arrived later and disappeared earlier, shortening the hunting season for the bears, and threatening their ability to feed themselves and raise healthy offspring.

In addition, the rail line to Churchill has been affected, with floods washing out the line in 2017 (which has only recently been restored), and its path across the permafrost becoming less stable with warming trends in the climate. The town relies on this vital means of transport for supplying goods and resources, and without it, the cost of living could become too onerous for many residents. A further complication is the closure of the port of Churchill in 2016, cutting off yet another access point for shipping and receiving goods (and eliminating a key employer in the town).

The Northern Sights

For those who are able to get to Churchill, polar bears are not the only wildlife worth watching there. During the summer months, Churchill is an excellent location for watching migrating Beluga whales, and bird enthusiasts come in the spring and summer to view the local species on display. Also on display, weather permitting, are the spectacular northern lights of the Aurora Borealis.

While it can be scary to encounter large predators, such as black bears and polar bears in their natural habitat, under the right circumstances, such as those present in Churchill, visitors can have this exhilarating experience and live to tell the tale.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on September 18, 2006.

Image credit: Frontiersnorth [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Taking storytelling to new heights

The story of Lemuel Gulliver, as told by satirist Jonathan Swift in his book Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (also known as Gulliver’s Travels), has been a favorite of mine since childhood. One image that has always stuck with me from the story was the description of how the tiny residents of Lilliput lashed the much-larger Gulliver to the ground, and how Gulliver eventually pulled himself free from these restraints.

I remembered this scene years later when a friend sent me an intriguing video; in it, a curious little girl wakes up, gets dressed, and sets out to see the world around her. However, this “little girl” is actually a giant marionette, and her movements are determined by people pulling her strings from below and above. But, unlike Gulliver, these men and women dressed in crimson livery are not pinning her down, but instead seem to be freeing her, making her appear amazingly lifelike and real.

I later learned that the events I was watching were part of a larger production called The Sultan’s Elephant, which took place at various points around London in early May of 2006. This four-day, large-scale performance was created by Royal de Luxe, a street theater company based in Nantes, France. Seemingly well known everywhere but in North America, Royal de Luxe has been presenting highly creative street theater pieces in France and around the world for 40 years.

Giant Fans

Founded in 1979 by current director Jean Luc Courcoult, Didier Gallot-Lavallée, and Véronique Loève, Royal de Luxe staged a series of popular street theater productions in the 1980s, several of which they took on tour to various parts of Europe, Africa, and South America. In 1989, Royal de Luxe moved its operations from southern France to Nantes, a city in western France, and in 1993 embarked on a new phase of its history, when it presented the first of its “giant” pieces.

Featuring a doleful-looking gargantuan figure named Le Géant (the giant), the piece was called Le Géant Tombé du Ciel (“the giant falls from the sky”), and to date has been followed by numerous other giant-related shows including: another version of the first show (Le Géant tombé du Ciel: Dernier Voyage); Retour d’Afrique (“return to Africa”), which introduced the giant’s son, Le Petit Géant (“the little giant”); Les Chasseurs de Girafes (“the giraffe hunters”), again featuring the little giant; The Sultan’s Elephant, which introduced the giant’s daughter, La Petite Géante; and The Hidden Rhinoceros, which debuted in Santiago, Chile, in January 2007. The most recent additions to the giant crew were a giant grandmother, and a giant dog, Xolo, and various productions involving the five giant characters have been mounted in Iceland, Portugal, England, Germany, Mexico, Chile, France, Belgium, Ireland, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. (This article in the Atlantic features beautiful photos of some of these productions.)

These shows all feature enormous human and animal figures, built primarily by company member François Delarozière, and although rigorously choreographed, give a sense of spontaneity, as the figures move about in their surroundings and interact with bystanders. They all follow a simple story, since according to director Courcoult, it should be one that children can understand. The company reveals few details before a show opens, wanting to surprise its audience and to increase the chance that viewers will just “happen” upon the spectacle. Indeed, Courcoult finds it preferable that viewers don’t see everything that takes place, just participating in the performance as it happens.

Taking it to the Streets

When Royal de Luxe made its debut in the UK with The Sultan’s Elephant, a project that took four years of planning, this randomness was ensured by the diverse settings in which the events of the performance occurred, including Waterloo Place, the St. James’ neighborhood, Trafalgar Square, and Horse Guards Parade. These settings served the purpose of the story, for which the French name of the show provides a helpful outline: La visite du sultan des Indes sur son éléphant à voyager dans le temps, or “Visit from the Sultan of the Indies on his Time-Traveling Elephant.” The sultan of the story is looking for La Petite Géante (the little girl giant), who landed in Waterloo Place in a gigantic space rocket inspired by the works of Jules Verne. In fact, Jean-Luc Courcoult created the show in honor of the centenary of Verne’s death, and it was first performed in Nantes and Amiens, Verne’s places of birth and death respectively.

While I’m sure the elephant in the show was truly impressive—an intricate machine powered by hydraulics and motors, and weighing 42 tons—based on the video I saw, I think I would have found the little girl giant more fascinating. As she moves around doing ordinary things (getting dressed, licking a lollipop, sleeping), all the wires and people around her seem to fall away, and it’s as if you are watching a real giant girl do these things. It tickles me to know that on her sojourn in London she also did not-so-ordinary things, such as “sewing” cars onto the road, and stopping to take a pee out in the open.

In an article for 3 Quarks Daily that was published soon after the London performance, Elatia Harris reflected on the history of Royal de Luxe, and The Sultan’s Elephant in particular, and described the ending of the little girl giant’s time in London:

Then, on the afternoon of the fourth day, a Sunday, it was time to go. At Horseguard’s Parade, Little Girl Giant was helped into her goggles and her Lindbergh-era aviator’s cap, and climbed back into her ornate 19th Century rocket…Little Girl Giant took one more look around London, then the hatch went down and the engines were fired. There came an enormous explosion under the fuselage—the hellfire in broad daylight that is a Royal de Luxe specialty, and a mighty effort at a lift-off into another dimension. Of course, the rocket went nowhere. But when the hatch was opened, Little Girl Giant had gone—hurtling through time without her rocket. So the sultan was launched once again on a fathomless quest, his bearings to be taken in dreams.

A Giant Good-Bye

It’s clear that the minds behind Royal de Luxe want to fire the imaginations of spectators, reminding them of childhood dreams and reveries. In an interview with Jean-Christophe Planche from 2005, Jean Luc Courcoult even remarked on this, responding to how people react emotionally to the shows, saying “I have seen adults crying as the giant leaves…I don’t believe they are crying because he is leaving but because of the loss of their imagination.”

Although spectators might have been saddened by the disappearance of the giant after each performance, they might be sadder still to know that the era of the giants has passed. Courcoult has announced that a performance in Liverpool in October 2018 would be the last outing for the giant characters, and that the company next plans to launch a new show that will involve a silverback gorilla.

As I have fond memories of the image of Gulliver and the Lilliputians from my childhood, so those who were lucky enough to see the giants of Royal de Luxe in their full glory will have incredible memories to look back on. But unlike my childhood reminiscences, those who watched the giants invade cities from Liverpool to Santiago will have memories of fairy tales fully realized, in real life and larger than life.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 11, 2007.

Image credit: doctorow / gruntzooki / Cory Doctorow from London / Toronto [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Starting your own country

Although my friends and acquaintances have a wide range of political leanings and opinions, I’ve never met anyone who agrees with and supports every single government policy and regulation—in this country or any other. The very nature of democratic government makes this virtually impossible, and I think it’s fair to say that every legislator could produce a long list of things they might wish to be different. We all accept certain laws and taxes in exchange for the considerable benefits government provides in the way of economic structures, a justice system, education, public works, national security, and so on. For most of us, that’s a reasonable trade.

But what if you could tailor a government to your exact specifications? Exercise strict control over the currency, imports and exports, immigration policies, defense programs, foreign relations, and everything else? What if you could tailor laws to support those things you care about most and disallow the things you’re against? What if, in fact, you had your very own country, in which you—along with, perhaps, your family, friends, or business associates—ran the whole place from top to bottom?

Numerous individuals and groups have attempted to do just that: start their own tiny countries. None of the attempts to do so in the past century has resulted in an entity that’s actually recognized as a country by the world’s other sovereign nations. But a number of so-called micronations around the world are run as though they’re autonomous nations, their residents and leaders holding onto a faint hope that one day they may finally be legitimate members of the international community. In many cases, they even issue stamps, coins, and passports, and have a national anthem. Wikipedia lists over 80 former and current micronations. There’s also a book called How To Start Your Own Country by Erwin S. Strauss, which delves into many of the issues you’d have to deal with if you decided to try.

Finding a New World

The first problem you’ll notice if you’re contemplating starting your own country is that all the world’s land is already spoken for. There’s no unclaimed territory left, and for this very reason, existing countries tend to be extremely protective of their real estate. So you could declare your apartment, farm, or private island to be an autonomous territory (as others have in fact done), but seceding isn’t that easy. If the jurisdiction from which you’re trying to separate doesn’t change its laws to accommodate you—and crucially, if it has more guns and soldiers than you do—you’re pretty much out of luck. A few groups have attempted to create land for their micronations by building artificial islands of one kind or another or by declaring a ship floating in international waters to be their territory. Apart from the logistical and financial issues of such an approach, there’s still that pesky problem that if no other nation recognizes your new entity to be a country, then for all practical purposes, it isn’t.

Those details aside, you’ve got to convince enough people to inhabit your country to make it viable. You’ll need a government and security forces, naturally, but also some means of providing all the goods your population will need. If your nation can’t produce enough food, clothing, transportation, and so forth from its own resources, you’ll need to import it—and to do that, you’ll have to have a source of income. Income could, of course, come from exported goods and services, but you’ll still need resources of some sort and a reasonably large labor pool. Oh, and unless you want your citizens to go abroad for their schooling and medical care, you’d better have a well-thought-out educational system and at least one hospital. Add to that courts to punish crimes and resolve disputes; infrastructure for electricity, water distribution, waste processing, and communications; and a transportation system, just to name a few of the many obvious features your nation will require, and you can begin to see why more people don’t start their own countries.

Minor Victories

And yet, despite all these complications and many more, a few micronations have managed to survive for decades without being invaded and shut down by another country. Here are a few prominent examples:

• Sealand: During World War II, Britain built a large gun platform in the North Sea, just outside its territorial waters, to defend itself from German aircraft. They abandoned it after the war, and in 1967 it was occupied by Paddy Roy Bates and several of his associates. Bates declared the platform a sovereign nation called the Principality of Sealand and named himself Prince Roy I. In 1987, Britain extended its territorial waters past where Sealand sits, but although the British government doesn’t officially recognize Sealand, they haven’t tried to take it over either. Bates died in 2012 and his wife died in 2016. His son, Michael, is now nominally the ruler, though he doesn’t live on Sealand. But one or more caretakers apparently do still live on the platform; the nation’s primary activity and source of income appears to be selling coins, stamps, and titles of nobility.
• Principality of Hutt River: This farm in Western Australia, formerly known as Hutt River Province, claims to have seceded in 1970 after a long-running dispute involving wheat quotas. It was led by the farm’s owner, Leonard George Casley (or Prince Leonard I to his subjects), for 45 years until 2017, and died in 2019. The principality is now ruled by Casley’s youngest son, Prince Graeme. Like all micronations, it’s not officially recognized as a sovereign state and its legal status is quite ambiguous, despite some evidence that Australia at one point regarded its secession as legal. The Principality of Hutt River has about 20 residents, but has issued passports to thousands of people around the world.
• Molossia: The Republic of Molossia comprises a small patch of land in Nevada and another in California, referred to as the Desert Homestead Province. It was founded in 1977 and still has only 34 citizens (“including dogs”), but it nevertheless claims to be working toward eventual recognition as a true nation.
• Talossa: The Kingdom of Talossa was created in 1979 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and originally consisted of the bedroom of its then-14-year-old founder. Today, Talossa claims an area of 13km² (5 square miles) and a population of 255—not to mention its very own language.

Not in My Ocean

Other attempts, though, have been less successful. Such was the case with a micronation called the Republic of Minerva. In 1971, a Las Vegas millionaire named Michael Oliver decided to create his own island by dumping barges full of sand onto a shallow reef in the Pacific Ocean, not far from Fiji. The newly formed Republic of Minerva declared independence in letters sent to all the nearby nations, which soon gathered to sort out what they thought about suddenly having a new neighbor. The result of that meeting was a small military force sent by Tonga to evict the Minervans. Tonga annexed the new island, but now it’s apparently fully submerged, so its status as a micronation is entirely moot.

But not all micronations are truly attempts to create geographically distinct, sovereign countries. Many people have declared some piece of land to be a micronation for comedic or artistic reasons, as a form of political protest, or to generate publicity—without ever truly intending to make it a permanent, sovereign nation. And some micronations (such as Wirtland) have no territory at all, but exist only on the internet; some of these serve as virtual real estate in role-playing games, while others are themselves simulations of real societies in some fashion or another. Real or virtual, micronations feed that common but quixotic urge to make and live by one’s own rules. One of them might eventually succeed, but sooner or later, a citizen of even the most idyllic micronation is bound to feel that something better can be created. Nanonations can’t be far behind.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on September 20, 2006.

Image credit: Ryan Lackey from San Francisco, CA, US [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Ship-shape design

When I lived in San Francisco I saw cargo shipping containers in use fairly regularly—sometimes being hoisted by cranes in the busy Port of Oakland, other times filling the decks of gigantic freighters passing through the Golden Gate. They were such a common sight that I almost stopped noticing them, although if I did, they made me think of the immense scale of the global economy, and provoked curiosity about what kind of goods they might be carrying. I didn’t think of shipping containers themselves as very interesting. But for the past few decades, many architects and builders have looked at shipping containers as not only a means to transport goods, but as a source of building material. Whether intended for private homes, schools, markets, or multi-unit complexes, repurposed shipping containers have become a unique way to bring exciting design and environmental concern into everyday life.

Shipping News

The use of modern shipping containers first developed in the mid-fifties in Denmark, Canada, and the United States. These containers soon became invaluable, as their use streamlined the transportation of goods between ports and inland destinations via railroad cars and large trucks. They were created to be easily stackable and made sturdy to withstand wind and water, and these same attributes are what make shipping containers so attractive to architects and builders.

In addition to their sturdiness and flexibility, shipping containers have other benefits. Designers looking for more environmentally friendly construction methods can practice recycling by using decommissioned containers from shipping companies. These containers are also much cheaper than standard building materials (sometimes by as much as half), and with their use, buildings can be assembled in much less time, with lower labor costs.

Another advantage to shipping containers is that they are easy to transport, having been designed expressly for that purpose. This can facilitate their use in disaster situations, allowing repurposed containers to arrive quickly in areas where temporary housing is desperately needed. It also means that containers can be worked on in one location, and then easily transferred to the actual building site in another area when needed.

Contain Yourself

While building with shipping containers may make economic and environmental sense, who would want to live or work in a windowless metal box? Designers have gotten around this limitation in a variety of ways, most notably by incorporating containers into larger construction projects, cutting and shaping the existing containers as necessary. Some of the first and most well-known projects of this kind were built by the Container City company in London. Container City I is located at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s Docklands district, and comprises 12 work studios and three live/work apartments. Amazingly, it only took two days to install in 2001 (after being built off-site for five months), and 80% of it is made from recycled material. Following the success of Container City I, Container City II was built adjacent to it in 2002. Notable for its ziggurat shape and bright colors, Container City II hosts 22 studios on five floors. Container City now offers their services on other projects such as schools and office buildings, taking these projects from feasibility studies, through design, fabrication, and installation.

On a smaller scale, there are private homes designed using multiple containers. Zigloo Domestique, built using eight containers, was created by designer Keith Dewey in Victoria, British Columbia. Mike and Shawn McConkey built their dream home out of three shipping containers on a piece of land in unincorporated San Diego County.

On the larger end of the scale, shipping containers have also been used to create enormous public marketplaces, like the open-air Seventh Kilometer Market in Odessa, Ukraine. Covering 170 acres, the market is made up of hundreds of shipping containers, with an estimated 150,000 customers a day. The Dordoy Bazaar in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, is constructed out of an estimated 30,000 shipping containers, and draws customers and merchants from Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and China.

Yes Cargo

Because of the growing interest in container homes, there are now numerous companies selling pre-made container homes, ready to be delivered and installed at your chosen location. These usually consist of one or two containers, but there are many different configurations that are possible. You can see some current options on the Curbed and Dwell websites, including one house that you can order from Amazon.

With its economic, environmental, logistical, and practical benefits, shipping container architecture provides a compelling alternative to conventional building methods, and seems poised to continue to gain in popularity in the coming years.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on May 21, 2007.

Image credit: Philippe Alès [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The quest for the perfect tulip

In his 1850 novel The Black Tulip, French author Alexandre Dumas (père) describes a competition, initiated by the Dutch city of Haarlem in the 1670s, in which 100,000 florins (150 florins being the average yearly income at the time) would be given to the first person who could grow a black tulip. Although Dumas’s story is fictional, it is based on a real phenomenon that took place in the Netherlands in the early 17th century.

Between 1634 and 1637, the Netherlands (then called the United Provinces) saw the rise and fall of many fortunes due to an intense period of tulip trading. Now described as tulipomania, or simply tulip mania, it involved the wild overvaluation of certain types of tulip, leading to the eventual crash of the inflated market.

In Rare Form

First cultivated in the East, tulips were brought to Europe from the Ottoman Empire during the 16th century (the name tulip is derived from the Turkish word for turban). Soon after their introduction, tulips became popular in various countries, but nowhere so much as in the Netherlands. There are many theories as to why the Dutch developed such an avid interest in tulips; in his book The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan suggests that the bleakness of the Dutch landscape may be one reason colorful tulips were so quickly embraced. He observes that “what beauty there is in the Netherlands is largely the result of human effort…” making the cultivation of beautiful blooms an attractive pastime.

Another reason for their popularity was their relative rarity. While tulips can be grown simply from seed, there is no guarantee that the resulting flowers will resemble their parent plants at all. The only way to obtain a particularly prized bloom is to grow one from an offset, which Pollan describes as “the little, genetically identical bulblets” found at the base of a tulip bulb. The process of cultivating offsets was a lengthy one, adding to the scarcity of tulips. In addition, the most valued tulips of the time were ones said to be “broken,” that is those tulips with bright flame or feather-like patterns on their petals. The most famous of this type of tulip was the Semper Augustus, a white flower marked by brilliant red strokes. These tulips produced fewer offsets, making them even rarer; although it was not known at the time, the “broken” effect was caused by a virus that weakened the plant.

Gone to Seed

The genesis of tulipomania is usually ascribed to the 1593 arrival in Leiden of Carolus Clusius, a plant collector and gardener. Bringing with him some tulip bulbs he had acquired while working as the director of the Imperial Botanical Garden in Vienna, Clusius proceeded to cultivate beautiful specimens from them, attracting attention from his new neighbors. However, Clusius was reluctant to part with his bulbs, refusing to sell to eager buyers. Frustrated by his refusal, thieves helped themselves to his garden, stealing many bulbs and selling the seeds they gained from them. These seeds were eventually distributed throughout all the Dutch territories, leading to the increased propagation and variation of tulips. Those lucky enough to grow a particularly beautiful bloom from seed could profit greatly from the sale of its offsets, making tulip cultivation an increasingly lucrative vocation.

As the taste for certain types of tulip became more focused, prices for the most valued bulbs rose dramatically among the upper classes. At first limited to collectors and the wealthy, the large amounts of money to be made soon inspired people of more limited means to sell everything they had to cash in on the trade. At the market’s highest point, single bulbs sold for thousands of florins, the most famous being a Semper Augustus bulb that sold for 6,000 florins (or 40 times the average yearly income).

As more people entered the trade, eventually the sale of real bulbs gave way to windhandel, or wind trade, meaning the future production of bulbs was bought and sold. This increasingly risky venture couldn’t last. The tulip bubble burst in February 1637 when the fear of oversupply and dramatic price increases in early 1637 caused prices to drop precipitously.

Back Petal

While the story of tulip mania often gets told as a cautionary tale and as an analogue to more modern forms of market inflation and decline, such as the dotcom bubble, historian Anne Goldgar thinks this description is overblown. In her book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, Goldgar finds that tulip speculation in reality was not as frenzied as the way it is commonly portrayed. She blames the writer Charles Mackay, whose book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds from 1841 used satirical songs from 1637 as the basis for his depiction of the craze for tulips, which had a tendency to exaggerate the facts of the situation. Far from being irrational, Goldgar argues that there were valid reasons for treating tulips as a valuable commodity, and that the subsequent rise and fall of the market was not as precipitous, and did not personally bankrupt, hordes of unlucky investors.

Dutch Treat

Although this volatility in the tulip market was unsettling at the time, out of that early trade came an enduring business for the Netherlands. Now the tulip is a beloved symbol of the country, and plays an important role in economic and cultural activities. It seems unlikely that anyone at the time the tulip came to the Netherlands could have predicted the enormous effect this flower would have over a nation’s history and economy. It is a vivid reminder that when human nature meets Mother Nature, interesting results are sure to follow.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 6, 2007.

Image credit: Alice Achterhof alicegrace [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

The lazy way to make a perfect cup of coffee

There are those who believe half the pleasure of a great cup of coffee comes from the ritual of making it. The details of the ritual vary from person to person and place to place, but the desired effect is the same: a perfect cup of hot, rich, fresh coffee. “Perfect,” of course, is quite subjective. Among people who take coffee seriously, there is a great deal of disagreement as to what types of bean, roast, and grind make the best coffee, how concentrated the grounds should be, whether the coffee should be infused into the water by dripping, steeping, or steaming, and many other details. Regardless of the precise outcome, however, coffee purists often insist that if you want coffee done right, you must make it by hand, with a great deal of care and attention to detail.

I certainly count myself among those who cherish a perfect cup of coffee. And yet, I’ve never been much for ritual. All things being equal, I’d prefer to have my coffee with as little effort as possible, but I draw the line at those trendy machines with the prefilled plastic pods (you know, Keurig K-Cups, Nespresso, and the like)—the beans are not freshly ground, there’s too much waste, it’s too expensive per cup, and you have too little control over the final product. Fortunately, technology allows me to have my café and drink it too, thanks to a breed of coffee maker known as a superautomatic.

Coffee Making 101

First, a few background concepts about coffee brewing. The standard American method for making coffee is to allow hot water to drip through a filter full of ground beans and then into a carafe sitting on a hot plate. You’ll get eight or ten cups of coffee this way in about five minutes. While operating the coffee maker itself is usually just a matter of flipping a switch, that doesn’t include measuring and pouring the water, inserting the filter, measuring the ground coffee, or disposing of the used grounds. (Add another step or two if you grind your own coffee beans—which you should.) The end result is a relatively dilute coffee whose taste rapidly deteriorates as it ages and evaporates. The person who drinks the first cup often has a much better experience than the one who drinks the last cup.

By contrast, espresso is made one or two cups at a time by forcing steam into a much finer grind of coffee and through a metal filter that allows slightly larger particles of grounds through than a paper filter would. This normally results in a stronger coffee, mainly because less water is used; if you kept forcing steam through the grounds for a longer period of time, the coffee would become increasingly weak, eventually reaching the strength most North Americans consider normal. (Think of the Americano, which is just espresso diluted with hot water.) Making espresso (and its milk-added cousins cappuccino and latte) is normally an exacting manual procedure, but one that results in a fresher cup because the coffee never sits around in a carafe becoming bitter.

I’ll Have a Digital Cappuccino

A superautomatic coffee machine uses the pressurized steam method of coffee production to make a single cup of coffee at a time, but without any of the manual steps. With the press of a single button, the machine grinds beans stored in an internal hopper; tamps them down into the filter assembly; squirts steam through them into your cup, then ejects the used grounds into a holding bin. The whole process takes about a minute, and it produces a wonderfully rich, creamy coffee. Most superautomatics allow you to adjust a wide variety of settings, such as the coarseness of the grind, the amount of ground coffee per cup, and the volume and temperature of the coffee. With various combinations of settings, you can get a tiny cup of ultra-concentrated espresso, a large mug of American-style coffee, or anything in between. (My personal preference is Swiss-style café crema, which is stronger than American but weaker than espresso, served in a demitasse cup with a golden foamy finish.)

My wife’s favorite feature of our first superautomatic was its automatic milk frother. This is not simply a wand that squirts steam into a container of milk (though you can do that too if you want). Instead, you drop a small hose into a container of milk, press a button, and the machine sucks in the cold milk and delivers hot frothed milk from a nozzle right into your coffee cup. The frother enabled us to make an excellent cappuccino by pressing exactly two buttons. (Due to reasons, our current superautomatic lacks a frother, but we’ll think about that again the next time we’re in the market for a new model.) Depending on the model and manufacturer, superautomatics have a variety of additional features. Some have a built-in cup warmer, an internal water filtering system, or a second steam pump so that they can brew coffee and steam milk at the same time. Programmable digital models feature an alphanumeric display and one-touch access to popular features, to save your delicate fingers from having to physically move levers or knobs to adjust settings.

You Can Put a Price on True Happiness

Superautomatics don’t come cheap. A good mid-range model, with a digital display and most of the bells and whistles, will run in the neighborhood of US$1,500. A high-end consumer machine can go for as much as $6,000 (which, by the way, is a bargain compared to commercial models); on the other end of the spectrum, if you’re willing to forgo a few of the more esoteric frills, you can find a good basic unit for as little as $500. Unsurprisingly, superautomatics are a frequent cause of buyer’s remorse, which means some good bargains on lightly used machines can often be found on eBay or at dealers with money-back guarantees.

The best-known manufacturers of superautomatic coffee machines are Saeco, Jura, De’Longhi, and Miele, all of which offer a wide selection of models in various price ranges. However, don’t expect to find a great selection of such machines on display at your local Wal-Mart. High-end kitchen stores like Sur la Table and Williams-Sonoma carry superautomatics; apart from that, your best bet is usually an online retailer (such as Seattle Coffee Gear) with a good return policy. Also be prepared to get picky when it comes to coffee beans. Shiny, oily beans are to be avoided; a dark but dry bean such as Illy will make your superautomatic purr.

I Love the Java Jive and It Loves Me

You may be thinking: My generic $25 drip coffee maker works just fine. Why should I spend such an outrageous amount of money on a fancy coffee machine? Sure, the coffee from these machines may be excellent, but is it really worth the difference in price? Speaking for myself, the answer is yes. The combination of outstanding coffee and one-button convenience is worth quite a lot to me, and I’ve never regretted buying either of the two superautomatic coffee machines I’ve owned. Needless to say, superautomatics are not for everyone. If you don’t drink much coffee or can’t tell the difference between instant and fresh-brewed, a superautomatic is a frivolous investment. On the other hand, if you are—or aspire to be—a coffee connoisseur, this marvel of engineering may lead you to wonder what you ever found so endearing about your beloved French press or copper coffee pot.

Since I bought my first superautomatic, my contributions to the Starbucks empire have fallen off dramatically. My kitchen may not have quite the ambiance of a local coffee shop, but the wireless network is faster and the coffee is better. That digital biscotti maker is still a dream, but I always know where to get a good cup of Joe.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on April 8, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on June 7, 2004.

Image credit: De’Longhi Deutschland GmbH [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

For most of us, the one app we couldn’t possibly live without is a web browser. You can do almost anything in a browser these days…but are you browsing with one hand tied behind your back? It’s easy to get into inefficient browsing habits, but you might be surprised at what a little know-how about this everyday tool can do for your efficiency and happiness.

Take Control of Your Browser, by veteran tech writer Robyn Weisman, helps you discover your browser’s hidden talents, increase browsing speed, solve many common problems, and configure settings and extensions for maximum efficiency. If you’re troubled by ads, frustrated by ineffective searches, or confused by inscrutable error messages, this book will help you overcome your problems. Beginners will find lots of practical how-to advice, and even power users will learn tips and tricks for better browsing.

This book, like all Take Control titles, comes as an ebook, and you can download any combination of formats—PDF, EPUB, and/or Kindle’s Mobipocket format—so you can read it on pretty much any computer, smartphone, tablet, or ebook reader. The cover price is $14.99, but as an Interesting Thing of the Day reader, you can buy it this week for 30% off, or just $10.49.

The sound and the fury

Today’s article was going to be a pretty straightforward technological exposition. I was going to describe a procedure that can improve hearing in ways that conventional hearing aids cannot, mention some of the limitations and risks involved, and pretty much leave it at that. Then I got an email from a friend wondering if I was planning to cover the political issues cochlear implants raise for the Deaf community. Um…political issues? I hadn’t known there were any. But after a bit of research, I discovered that the controversy surrounding this procedure is at least as interesting as the procedure itself, which has been called everything from a miracle cure to genocide.

Can You Hear Me Now?

First, a bit of background. There are many different types and causes of deafness. Some kinds of hearing loss can be compensated for very adequately with just a bit of amplification—namely, a hearing aid. However, if there is a defect or damage in the inner ear, a hearing aid may do no good. Our perception of sound results from the vibrations of tiny hairs lining the cochlea, a spiral, fluid-filled organ in the inner ear. When the hairs move, the hair cells convert the movement into nerve impulses, which are then sent to the brain for decoding. If the vibrations never reach the cochlea, or if the hair cells themselves are damaged, no neural stimulation occurs and deafness results.

However, if most of the underlying nerve fibers themselves (and the neural pathways to the brain) are intact, they can be stimulated electrically, producing a sensation interpreted by the brain as sound. A cochlear implant places a series of electrodes inside the cochlea to do just that; a wire connects these electrodes to a small receiver with its antenna placed under the skin. Outside the skin, a device that looks somewhat like a hearing aid picks up sounds with a microphone, digitizes them in such a way that they produce meaningful signals for the electrodes, and transmits them via radio waves to the receiver. The net result is the perception of sounds picked up by the microphone, but because this apparatus completely bypasses the eardrum and middle ear, it’s really an artificial ear rather than a hearing aid. The technology was developed by Dr. Graeme Clark at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s; the first implant was performed in 1978.

Although any number of technological innovations have occurred in the decades since, cochlear implants are still by no means perfect. They vary greatly in their effectiveness, depending on a large number of variables. And the effect they produce, while auditory in nature, is not identical to what would be experienced with a fully functional ear. In addition, patients with cochlear implants require months or years of training to associate their new perceptions with sounds as they are usually known. In the most successful cases, implant recipients can eventually understand someone talking on the phone—but there is no guarantee of that level of hearing. Still, tens of thousands of people around the world have received the implants, and the procedure is rapidly gaining in popularity.

You Will All Be Assimilated

To a hearing person such as myself, all this sounds very rosy and optimistic. Of course, the surgery is rather delicate and carries with it the usual risks associated with putting holes in one’s head; plus, the cost of the procedure and rehabilitative therapy is quite high. But these are not the primary concerns of the Deaf community. Although the controversy has diminished greatly in recent years, cochlear implants—particularly for children—were strongly opposed by many deaf people for some time because of a fear that they would destroy the Deaf culture in general and the use of sign language in particular.

On the surface, this argument may seem sort of silly to hearing persons. But the Deaf community has a unique culture and language that they rightly consider quite valuable; the thought of losing such a culture to technology is understandably offensive. One of the key beliefs of the Deaf community is that deafness is simply another perfectly valid way of life, not a problem that needs to be fixed. So the intimation that deafness is a “disease” for which cochlear implants are a “cure” smacks of assimilationism: “You must all be like us.” (The 2000 documentary film Sound and Fury examines the controversy over cochlear implants in detail as it follows members of two families through their decisions about whether or not to undergo the procedure.)

Even detractors of cochlear implants allow that this must be an individual decision, and that implants may be a reasonable choice for people who have lost hearing later in life (and who therefore may not have integrated themselves into the Deaf community). But when it comes to implants for children, the story is different. If a deaf child does not receive an implant, he or she is likely to learn sign language easily and adopt the Deaf culture. With an implant, the child is more likely to be treated as a hearing child. However, the imperfect nature of “hearing” provided by the implants may make it difficult to learn spoken English; meanwhile, because the parents have little incentive to raise the child as a deaf person, the child may never learn sign language. The result is that the child has less ability to communicate than if the implant had not been performed. In addition, if the child has partial hearing, the implant may eliminate any possibility of later using a conventional hearing aid by impeding normal functioning of the cochlea.

On the whole, decades of experience with cochlear implants in thousands of children have not borne out these worries, so resistance to implants in children is decreasing somewhat. Conventional wisdom holds that someone with a cochlear implant is still deaf, and many people with implants—children and adults alike—continue to learn and use sign language, participating actively in the Deaf culture. If cochlear implants, in a roundabout way, can promote both bilingualism and biculturalism, that may be their most compelling advantage.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on October 14, 2004.

Image credit: BruceBlaus [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Split-second thinking

The whole notion of time fascinates me endlessly—speaking metaphorically, of course. Numerous articles here at Interesting Thing of the Day have involved time or timekeeping in one form or another. In one of these articles, about analog clocks, I made what I thought was a commonsense and uncontroversial remark:

…time itself is continuous, not an infinite series of discrete steps…. Units like seconds, minutes, and hours are just a convenient, arbitrary fiction, after all—they don’t represent anything objectively real in the world.

A reader wrote in to suggest that I wasn’t up to date on my quantum physics, according to some theories of which time is indeed quantized, or fundamentally composed of very tiny but indivisible units.

At first, I had a hard time getting my head around this notion, and after considerable research…I still have a hard time getting my head around this notion. Although I try to keep generally abreast of the latest developments in the world of science, I can’t claim to do anything more than dabble in theoretical physics, and complex equations simply make my eyes glaze over. Nevertheless, it’s not only true that many scientists take the notion of quantized time for granted, there was also a fairly major uproar in the early 2000s when a young upstart from New Zealand published a paper that dared to challenge this notion with a theory that says, in effect, that there’s no such thing as an indivisible moment in time.

Second Thoughts

To understand what it would mean for time to be quantized, think of a unit of time, such as a second. You can divide that in half, getting two shorter periods of a half-second each. You can go much smaller, too, dividing a second into a thousand parts called milliseconds, a million parts called microseconds, a billion parts called nanoseconds, a trillion parts called picoseconds, and so on. A trillionth of a second is, to me, such an unimaginably short period of time that I’d be happy to consider it, for all practical purposes, indivisible—an “atom” of time, as it were. But that’s nothing. A trillionth of a second is a decimal point, 12 zeroes, and a 1. Some scientists say that meaningful distinctions in time can be made down to 10^–44 second, or 44 zeroes after the decimal point before you reach that 1. But the question is: how low can you go? Is there some point, some number of zeroes, beyond which time cannot be divided any further?

One of the fundamental notions of calculus, and of physics, is that one can determine a moving object’s exact position at some instant in time. That there should be such a thing as an “instant” is taken as a given. An instant effectively doesn’t have duration; that would imply that a moving object changes its position between the start of that instant and its end—in other words, that its position can’t be known precisely. However, seemingly it can, or at least that operational assumption has served calculus well all these centuries. But is the notion of an instant merely a convenient fiction, or does it in some sense represent reality?

Among scientists studying quantum theory, and particularly among those working on the quixotic task of unifying general relativity with quantum physics, the question of whether time is truly continuous or not is of particular interest. Some scientists say that, as far as general relativity goes, time is continuous, but that in order to create a Grand Unified Theory, we might have to accept that it can be treated as a succession of temporal quanta (or chronons), in much the same way that light can be treated as either a wave or a particle. Others say that time is not merely a fourth dimension, but is itself three-dimensional, so from our point of view time is continuous, but from a point of view that encompasses time’s other dimensions, it’s quantized.

But all kinds of mysterious things happen in the quantum realm. What about the macro world we’re all familiar with?

Time for a Kiwi

In 2003, a then-27-year-old student from New Zealand named Peter Lynds published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Foundations of Physics Letters that caused a great deal of controversy. Lynds claimed, essentially, that the whole notion of an instant is flawed, because if there were such a thing, a moving object measured and observed at that instant would appear to be static, and thus indistinguishable from a genuinely static object measured at that same instant. Since the two measurements clearly represent objects with different states, Lynds argued, it must be the case that there really aren’t any instants, only intervals (though those intervals might be very tiny). If true, this means that a moving object’s position can only ever be approximated—whether at the macro level or at the quantum level. And for this very reason, most of Zeno’s paradoxes turn out not to be paradoxical after all. Lynds went on to claim that time doesn’t flow because flow presumes an ongoing series of instants, that there is no “now” as such, and that our perception of time is just an odd consequence of the way our brains are wired.

The term “snapshot” is frequently used to describe the instant of time at which an object’s position might be determined, but I think it actually helps to make Lynds’s point. If you’re taking a picture of something that’s moving, you need a fast shutter speed to “freeze” the action, and the faster your subject is moving, the faster the shutter speed has to be. But if you set your shutter to, say, 1/4000 of a second and the photograph shows an arrow in mid-flight, with no blurring to suggest motion, that still doesn’t mean the arrow didn’t cover any distance during that tiny portion of a second the shutter was open. Of course it did. It’s just that the distance was sufficiently small, given the resolution of the camera and the human eye, to create the illusion of being frozen. So even if your hypothetical “shutter speed” is a zillionth of a second long, so that your measurement appears to give an exact, fixed location, that, too, is merely an illusion. The object in fact occupies more than one position during that time. Nothing mysterious about that at all.

Instant Controversy

When I heard Lynds’s idea, I thought it made perfectly good sense, and what I couldn’t comprehend was how scientists claimed, with considerable fervor, that they either couldn’t understand it or thought it was wrong-headed. I confess that I have not followed the debate about Lynds’s paper very closely in the years since its publication, and that I can understand only part of what I’ve read. However, it seems to me that many criticisms tend to mention either or both of two facts. First, critics note that Lynds was uncredentialed—he only had six months of university study at the time, so who was he to gainsay PhDs with years of experience? And second, if he were correct, that would mean that calculus as we know it must be essentially wrong or at least incomplete. And we all know it’s right. Right?

As to the matter of Lynds’s erstwhile lack of an advanced degree, all I have to say is: if he’s correct, that doesn’t matter, and those who say otherwise take themselves, and their formal education, way too seriously. As for the supposed assault on calculus, well, Lynds implies that calculus is not exactly wrong so much as very slightly inaccurate. Calculus as it stands appears to be right, but then, so are Newton’s laws of physics. Except they aren’t always: Newtonian physics breaks down both at the quantum level and when objects approach the speed of light. It seems to me—and again, I’m speaking as a nonmathematician here—that the very same thing could be true in this case. Calculus can be right at one level, and the absence of quantized time can be right at another level.

Of course, those are not the only criticisms, and the debate between Lynds’s supporters and detractors has gone through so many rounds of rebuttals and rejoinders that I can no longer keep track of who thinks what. But on the whole, the debate has made me feel even more secure in my personal, nonscientific belief that time is continuous, and I’m not going to doubt that for one instant.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 21, 2006.

Image credit: Illymarry [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons