And so the way the knocker-upper would do it is they would go around with this really long, fine cane and just reach up to the upper floors of buildings and lightly tap on their customer’s window panes until they woke up.
This is amazing and feels so inherently human! We're always redefining ourselves and creating 12 ft ladder for 10ft walls
So really this three-handed clock is a relic of that brief moment in time between the old and new, when there was an acceptance that standard time was kind of required in some ways but local time was still preferred and you were just in this weird interregnum where both of those things were equally dominant.
Reminds me of how some places have daylight savings and some don't. Time is always such a trippy concept to explore to me because it's so subjective especially for me as a ND person who can struggle with time blindness
Arbor House has employed one strategy that I don’t think is great from an accessibility standpoint, which is to deliberately slow down the elevators.
This reminds me of the debate a couple years ago about the elimination of plastic straws. So often it feels like accessibility and sustainability are in opposition to one another
And I think one thing we have learned is that we have gone too far in that direction, and we need to figure out ways to create more permeability between our indoor and our outdoor spaces.
I definitely found myself instinctively recoiling at the idea hospital's should let in more bacteria, but then I felt rather silly for thinking that. I've always associated hospital with sterile and so it initially seems unthinkable we could have a balance
Yeah, well so one study to start to quantify this comes from North Carolina, and they studied several dozen homes there, and they found that on average, the homes housed 2,000 different types of microbes. So that is mostly bacteria, but it does also include some fungi, and it’s actually more diverse inside our homes than outside them, and that’s because the microbes are coming from a couple of different sources. So the vast majority of bacteria in our homes, at least, are coming from us. So we now know that our bodies are covered with and full of microbes, and when we move around a space, we are shedding them constantly, so that’s a large part of what’s in our homes.
That's kind of horrifying but it's also weirdly beautiful. Even inside my tiny apartment I'm living amongst a forest of sorts
There are literally thousands of bacteria and microbes in our homes that are in large part still mysterious.
Oh yeah, I had a friend do a science project on this year's ago, and they discovered the remote had more bacteria than the toilet!
she notes that even before the pandemic hit, we humans spent about 90 percent of our time indoors on average — however we think of ourselves, people are in fact largely an indoor species.
Oh absolutely!! My doctor once told me that almost all people in the US are some degree I'd vitamin D deficient
But Olmsted did not foresee that the entire planet would become a park
I think the category of park is very interesting, because we use it for playgrounds and central park and Yosemite interchangeably. It's a fair point though, rather ironically our last "wild" bits of land aren't actually wild, because they can't be. They're preserved for us and protected and constantly inhabited by humans.
He complained to his superintendents when his parks appeared “too gardenlike” and constantly demanded that they “be made more natural.”
I find this fascinating and intriguing. I can kind of imagine the scale, from manicured garden to utter wilderness, but I'm curious as to where his ideal park would fall. Perhaps it's because I'm not much of a visualizer but I don't have much clue as to how that balance could be achieved
The plot (later expanded to 840 acres) was occupied by several settlements, most prominently Seneca Village, one of the city’s few middle-class black communities. There were also graveyards, which were never exhumed.
I find it horribly unsurprising that the land they wanted wasn't actually deserted. It seems pretty rarely in history was land actually "barren" or devoid of people, but if they're marginalized people, they are so easily disregarded