for - sustainable architecture - a new stone age - the return of stone - meme - a new stone age

story details - Title: Why the time is ripe for a return to stone as a structural material - Author: Steve Webb - Date: 2023, May 29 - source: https://www.ribaj.com/intelligence/stone-as-a-structural-material-embodied-carbon-sustainability

meme - new stone age

summary - Stone buildings have lasted millenia. Compared to steel, concrete and CLT, post-tensioned stone has the least embodied energy of all. - Could we also modernize ancient animal and human powered labor to create a low carbon stone building industry? -

2022 haben Kreuzfahrtschiffe in Europa mehr Stickoxide ausgestoßen als der gesamte Autoverkehr Punkt der CO2 Fußabdruck einer Kreuzfahrt ist höher als bei einer vergleichbar weiten Flugreise mit hotelaufenthalt Punkt die Republica informiert über die katastrophalen Emissionen von Kreuzfahrtschiffen. https://www.repubblica.it/green-and-blue/2024/01/29/news/navi_crociera_inquinamento_ambiente-422001318/

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Here Toussaint states that he refuses to let Vaublanc convince 'property' owners in St. Domingue to regress back to the use of enslavement. Toussaint also says that it he and other Blacks have gratitude to France and will not try to hide the fact they will all fight should, the "enemy of liberty" slavery return.

Elias, J. (2021, July 28). Google postpones return to work until October, will require vaccinations. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/28/google-postpones-return-to-work-until-october-will-require-vaccinations.html

The Atlantic. ‘The Most Likely Timeline for Life to Return to Normal’. Accessed 2 March 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/02/pandemic-daily-life-normal-summer-fall/618108/.

Schwartz, K. D., Cortens, D. E., McMorris, C., Makarenko, E., Arnold, P., Van Bavel, M., … Canfield, R. (2020, December 15). COVID-19 and Student Well-being: Stress and Mental Health during Return-to-School. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/mqpvn

Newall, P. W. S., Walasek, L., & Ludvig, E. A. (2020, November 11). Risk communication improvements for gambling: House-edge information and volatility statements. https://doi.org/10.1037/adb0000695

‘Critical moment’ as students return to university. (2020, September 5). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54040421

Liu, Zihan, Drake Van Egdom, Rhona Flin, Christiane Spitzmueller, Omolola Adepoju, and Ramanan Krishnamoorti. ‘I Don’t Want to Go Back: Examining the Return to Physical Workspaces During COVID-19’. Preprint. PsyArXiv, 21 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/un2bp.

Covid-19 has decimated independent U.S. primary care practices—How should policymakers and payers respond? (2020, July 2). The BMJ. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/07/02/covid-19-has-decimated-independent-u-s-primary-care-practices-how-should-policymakers-and-payers-respond/

Savage, M. (2020, May 10). A return to work is on the cards. What are the fears and legal pitfalls? The Guardian | The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/09/coronavirus-return-to-work-employment-law-logistical-nightmare

Larremore, Daniel B., Kate M. Bubar, and Yonatan H. Grad. Implications of test characteristics and population seroprevalence on ‘immune passport’ strategies (May 2020).https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42664007

Jack Phillips and ROI. This page describes the Phillips Return on Investment model. The model as presented here is an alternative to Kirkpatrick's model. There's a bulleted list of the components of the model as well as a nice graphic that briefly describes the levels. There is an explanation about how to apply the model, though I think more information would be needed for real world practice. Rating 4/5

With the marginal note from Nathaniel in mind, this binary is really interesting (and necessary) to unpack. I've had to read a lot of Foucault lately, so I'm thinking with him through a lot of my other readings right now. But his use of episteme, in some ways, breaks down that binary. By treating an episteme as the "epistemological unconscious" of an era (meaning that some knowledge and some assumptions are so inherent at a specific time and place that society doesn't even know it's happening), Foucault seems to suggest that opinion and knowledge can uniquely shift and intertwine in each epoch (again, within a culture that doesn't even know it's happening).

I think about this split quite often. As someone with two degrees largely focused on literature, and seeking one focused on rhetoric, I find myself lost in the (messy and often blurred) boundaries between the two fields. The later assertion from Mill, "For poetry, utterance is the end, not, as in rhetoric, the means to an end" (996) seems to hold true even today. Literature is rarely seen as social action, let alone socially engaged. I wonder how damaging (or not) this is as we attempt to think about "our disciplinary identity crisis less as a crisis of identity and more as an opening of alterity" (Muckelbauer).

This is probably why I am so intrigued by Muckelbauer's argument that "we might even conceive of rhetoric as, in a certain way, disengaging from the entire problematic of 'fields,' disconnecting from both 'interdisciplinary studies' and work in the 'rhetoric of x' genre (indicating, perhaps, an ontological rhetoric)."

But what does this look like? How does this happen? The end of this intro seem to give some hope -- "Literary theorists, too, began to acknowledge...the wider scope afforded by a rhetorical approach to discourse" (998, emphasis mine). But how often is literature viewed as discourse? And is this a reciprocal engagement?

When the return-interval describes the expected recurrence frequency for a single site/region, we must expect many more occurrences over a wider area. This is explained by maths and mathematics (the Binomial distribution and probabilities). Then a small change in the probabilities (probability density function) can lead to a large increase in the number of observed events. Furthermore, the definition of climate change is indeed a changing probability density function (climate is weather statistics), which means that a past 500-year event is no longer a 500-year event, but perhaps a 100-year event. In other words, this is not surprising and is in accordance with mathematical reasoning. Actually, it is to be expected, especially since a warming leads to a higher evaporation rate and more moisture in the atmosphere. The fact that the return intervals are estimated for single sites/regions means that we can expect a dramatic increase in similar extreme weather events in the future. We can gauge this development by studying the number of record-breaking events: see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008EO410002/pdf

The River Lethe was one of the rivers of Hades in Greek mythology. Exposure to its waters was held to lead to loss of memory, or, more intriguingly, a state of "unmindfulness" and oblivion. From this origin, it has re-appeared throughout western culture, from Dante to Tony Banks's first solo album (River Lethe in popular culture, Wikipedia).

By providing the alternative spelling of Leith, Alasdair Roberts 'doubles' this meaning with the Water of Leith, a river that runs through Edinburgh, and co-locates ancient Greek and contemporary Scots mythology.

The idea of eternal return is bound up with memory, with cultures being compelled to repeat and confront the missteps of the past. So the oblivion of forgetfulness provided by the endless Lethe provides a form of antidote or escape.

In interview with Tyler Wilcox in 2009, Alasdair Roberts referred to the

specifically Jungian references to the "sermons seven" and mandalas... it's like a quest song against conflict and towards individuation. I know a lot of people with strong political or religious convictions whose musical and artistic practice is guided by that – in some ways I envy that kind of certitude, but I suppose my thing is always about flexibility, multiplicity, confusion wanting to reflect the turmoil of reality... always trying to remember that the oar in the ocean is a winnowing fan on dry land.'

The concept of eternal return has a chequered history through philosophy and culture, but Alasdair Roberts is invoking the particular use of the term by the religious historian Mircea Eliade. The Wikipedia entry) says that Eliade's eternal return is "a belief, expressed... in religious behaviour, in the ability to return to the mythical age, to become contemporary with the events described in one's myths".

Thus, through the medium of song, we are taken back to become contemporary with, among other things, the Crusades and the falls of Jericho and of Babylon.

From Alasdair's interview by Tyler Wilcox in 2009:

the first song in some ways explores the idea of “eternal return” – I was reading Mircea Eliade on the subject, and Nietzsche obviously wrote about it – I became obsessed with the idea and the various ways in which it could be configured. There’s obviously the classic image of the ouroboros serpent… but I was also think about it in terms of the myth of progress – when what we think of as progress is actually destruction. Like Kekulé’s ring, Benzene. And the fact that I personally constantly return to Song as a form of “expression” or creation rather than, say, improvisation or composition.