If you’ve ever seen someone stumbling through the street, you may have thought to yourself, “this person’s off their rocker!” The origin of the phrase is unclear, but perhaps I could provide some insight through a different type of “rock”. It’s hard to believe that the survival of every human depends on rocks—the rocks in your inner ear. Without these rocks, it would be really hard to wake up in the morning and brush your teeth for work (which for some, may be a blessing in disguise). If someone crashed into your car, and the rocks in your ear were knocked loose, you would most definitely be dazed and confused. In general, it would be quite uncomfortable attempting to discern the location of your body or your surroundings or really anything at all. These almighty, glorious and life-saving rocks, called otoconia, live in the inner ear of all humans and fortunately, they allow us to understand that our head is in motion.
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This week, I’d like to talk a little bit about concrete, a material that I think has (unfairly) come to be associated primarily with Brutalism, and the divisive, often deeply annoying pro and anti-Brutalism constituencies (c.f., this old joke, accurate only when extended to both sides of the divide). The only thing I’ll really note on that point is that not all concrete architecture is an example of Brutalism; see, for example, Notre Dame du Raincy, a reinforced concrete church designed by Auguste and Gustave Perret, and one of my favorite buildings. (Almost every element of the exterior and interior is concrete, down to the grill work on the windows.)
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Recently, I’ve been wondering why in some countries we drive cars on the right side of the road while in others we drive them on the left. There must be a good reason for this difference in practice because it appears to achieve the same result just in a mirror image: when we travel on the right side of the road we drive from the left side of the car and when we travel on the left side of the road we drive from the right side of the car. Seems like a ‘tomato’, ‘tomahto’ kind of thing. So I looked it up. Here’s a brief outline of the history.
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We all know that traditional phone calls can sound pretty bad. The other person’s voice sounds tinny and weak, as if they were speaking to you from a metal box submerged 15 feet in motor oil. At least that’s how I’ve always thought of it. For years, nobody really complained about this, though, because a decrease in voice quality seemed a small price to pay for the miracle of being able to speak to anyone you want anywhere in the world at any time. Then came the popularization of smart phones and applications like Skype and FaceTime. “You sound really clear!” That’s what people usually say the first time I give them a FaceTime Audio call. But why is there such a big difference between traditional phone calls placed over the phone network and data-based apps that use the data network?
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Previously, I’ve written some tidbits here involving the mechanisms of movement in organisms (see Bug Nuisances, The Mauthner Cell, and Wrasse Research) and I want to continue that trend with some peculiar creatures dwelling in the ocean deep: Ascidians of the subphylum Tunicata, also known as “sea squirts.”
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This past Monday, I drove up to Lake Forest College to interview an urban archaeologist. Lake Forest, the North Shore suburb that houses the school, is a fantastical place; the streets are all mazy, narrow dead-ends flanked by twenty-foot hedges, apparently designed to baffle and intimidate outsiders in equal measure. Brief glimpses of the massive houses penned inside the foliage are enough to verify that Chicago’s old industrial class, like the members of the meatpacking Armour family, collectively chose the suburb as a retreat in the late 19th century. A particularly opulent stretch of Lake Drive (next to, well, the lake) runs past breakwater and bridges to the gates of the cemetery where John Hughes is buried. (I felt a bit like Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink; if anyone had stopped to talk to me, the smell of their wealth might easily have scared me into silence.)
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