[Image: "Constant time slices" reveal buildings buried in northwestern Argentina; image from, and courtesy of, the Journal of Archaeological Science, "Detecting and mapping buried buildings with Ground-Penetrating Radar at an ancient village in northwestern Argentina," by Néstor Bonomo, Ana Osella,...
Spreading Ground
In Richard Mabey's excellent history—and "defense"—of weeds, previously mentioned on BLDGBLOG back in December, he tells the story of Oxford ragwort, a species native to the volcanic slopes of Sicily's Mount Etna. Exactly how it arrived in Oxford is unknown, Mabey explains, but it was as likely as not...
Crashing Through Dark Matter Walls
[Image: An otherwise unrelated image from NASA, an artist's rendition of the heliosphere and magnetic fields]. The Earth is "constantly crashing through huge walls of dark matter," New Scientist explains, "and we already have the tools to detect them." This dark architecture in space consists of so-called...
Operation Deep Sleep: or, dormant robots at the bottom of the sea
[Image: An otherwise unrelated photo of lift bags being used in underwater archaeology; via NOAA]. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is hoping to implement a global infrastructure for storing mission-critical objects and payloads at the "bottom of the sea"—a kind of stationary,...
Desert Traverse
This autumn—October 12-19, 2013—High Desert Tests Sites aims "to take in everything from Joshua Tree, California, to Albuquerque, New Mexico," through a weeklong open event in which "artists and audience alike [will] traverse the desolate desert roads and explore the hidden gems, both old and new,"...
San Andreas: Architecture for the Fault
[Image: Lebbeus Woods, from San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake, Quake City (1995)]. I thought I'd upload the course description for a studio I'll be teaching this spring—starting next week, in fact—at Columbia University's GSAPP on the architectural implications of seismic energy and the possibility...
Test Room
[Image: The World Trade Center towers, photographer unknown]. Amongst many other interesting moments in Siobhan Roberts's new biography of Alan Davenport, the "father of modern wind engineering," is the incredible story of a room in Eugene, Oregon. In August 1965, Roberts explains, "ads in the local...
Fence Phone
[Image: Barbed wire, via Wikipedia]. One more radio-related link comes via @doingitwrong, who mentions the use of barbed-wire fences as a kind of primitive telephone network. "Across much of the west," C.F. Eckhardt explains, "...there was already a network of wire covering most of the country, in...
Project Sanguine and the Dead Hand
[Image: One of the stations of Project ELF, via Wikipedia]. Further exploring the radio-related theme of the last few posts, Rob Holmes—author and co-founder of mammoth—has pointed our attention to something called Project Sanguine, a U.S. Navy program from the 1980s that "would have involved 41 percent...
The previous two posts have led to a number of interesting links, including several comments over at Reddit that seem worth reproducing here. There, a commenter named clicksnd "used to be in a special forces Signal Detachment (as a server guy) and got awesome cross training from our radio section. One...
Antarctic Island Radio
[Image: Deception Island, from Millett G. Morgan's September 1960 paper An Island as a Natural Very-Low-Frequency Transmitting Antenna]. Yesterday's post reminded me of an interesting proposal from the 1960s, in which an entire Antarctic island would be transformed into a radio-conducting antenna. Signals...
