Fresnel lens.

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Fresnel Lens.

frischmilch:

Electric #6, 2009. Thomas Kneubühler. [From the series Electric Mountains]

When I first came to Canada, I remember driving on the highway passing a mountain full of lights. It looked to me like a surreal landscape, almost like an installation or a land-art project. Later I found out that this mountain was illuminated by 500 000 watts of lights and was used for night skiing. I was stunned.

(via manymany, elt)

“Airborne toxic event”

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BASF’s (“The Chemical Company”) Southfield, Michigan site.

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This is a really interesting article about WalMart’s corporate culture told through the lens of Julie Roehm’s experience as a mid-level marketing exec there.

via Businessweek

“BASF is developing chemicals from bacteria and fungi instead of processing oil derivatives, cutting back on smokestacks that belch carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

…the landscape of BASF’s Ludwigshafen headquarters, a 4 square-mile complex dominated by interconnecting pipes, chimneys and plants. The hydrophobins he’s researching can be used for shoe waterproofing or cosmetics that are easier to apply.”

via

“In 1947, Lewis Mumford published a remarkable essay titled simply “Social Effects.” In it, he presented four scenarios of possible social futures in the atomic age. The first three result in nuclear war; yet the fourth scenario, in which war never comes, is actually the most chilling of all, for it describes a world in which the preparation, anticipation, and adjustments necessary for atomic war have completely destroyed the civilized impulse. Cities are abandoned, and populations are dispersed first into linear cities and then underground… Enforced underground habitation inevitably results in psychological dysfunction, and people resort widely to sexual promiscuity, drugs, and senseless violence. In the end, a world that has for decades known a nuclear-enforced “peace” is destroyed by anarchy and disease.

It does not take too great an intuitive leap to recognize much of Mumford’s prediction in our own dysfunctional society today, replete as it is with epidemics of drug use, divorce, and suicide;…and the horrifying recurrence of insanely pointless mass murders in public places. While many point to a loss of religious faith and engage in political wars over “family values,” one must consider that there may be another, darker source behind at least some of these ills in the form of a decades-old nuclear threat.

While it is, of course, difficult to establish a causal relationship between the nuclear arms race and current social crises, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton has written that the sense of doom and futurelessness engendered by the arms race has brought on “cultural disarray” in our society. As well, this futurelessness threatens not only our biological continuity as individuals and as a species but has also made us only too aware that nothing we make or do may survive, thus “eliminating the substrate of what we call culture…

 [This suggests] that there may be a subconscious awareness of futurelessness incorporated into much of the postwar built form itself.”

via Sprawl as Strategy: City Planners Face the Bomb by Michael Quinn Dudley