Vertical Farms...radical?

New, ambitious design for vertical farms report from the website globe.net

Dickson Despommier of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University told his students to "forget about money, space and time, and design a building that will feed and hydrate 50,000 people a year." I wanted individuals to eat 2,000 calories a day and drink water created by evapotranspiration" he said.

The result?

It is estimated that one vertical farm with an architectural footprint of one square city block and rising up to 30 stories (approximately 3 million square feet) could provide enough nutrition (at 2,000 calories/day/person) to comfortably accommodate the needs of 10,000 people employing technologies currently available.

My first response: very typically a modernist approach to nature -- subdue and control. Put nature in a totally human controlled environment and try to control it so it serves only our needs. The arrogance that humans will always find a way to push nature's limits to growth...3 billion more people? No problem! Just farm into the sky!

My second response: maybe it's not such a bad idea... a natural ecosystem is also made up with layers and levels. Nutrients are cycled and everything gets reused. Is it so bad to make an artificial ecosystem with many more layers? Is this really the modernist perspective? Or are we moving from a modernist perspective to one that incorporates nature into our basic thinking?

...who knows?


My question would be...where in the world would they find so much good soil without recking current ecosystems, and how are they going to get enough sunlight into the building for 30 stories of plants?

I am the sunk cost

Recently, my work place has been trying to save every pence because they've gone way over budget for this year, and it's not even half way through the fiscal year.

My supervisor couldn't even order some name tags for a conference because of the budget cuts. So I've had to come up with innovative ways to make materials we need for our displays etc. The most recent project was to make brochure holders out of cardboard and other "waste" material.

Common sense would dictate that it's absolutely insane that I would be paid so much to make brochure stands! It's probably only $5 to buy them...but they have to pay me way more in wages to make them.

But I realised today why it is actually rational (or at least reasonable) that I should make the stands.

I'm the sunk cost in this equation! My wages are already set aside because they have to employ me until my term ends. That means my wages cannot be reclaimed no matter what they do..it's not like they can buy the brochure stands and tell me to stop working for 2 hours, i.e. my wages are 'sunk' in economic terms.

Maybe wages shouldn't be sunk at all. I think it happens in both pay by the hour and pay by the month systems....I wonder if this kind of absurdity happens in successful businesses like microsoft?

Why the night?

"Why is it more dangerous at night than in the day?" My friend asked me this question the other day...and we couldn't reach a satisfactory answer.

May it's because ...
1. It is darker, so less visibility, so when bad people do bad things, they are less likely to be seen
2. it's traditionally been that way
3. ghosts and bad spirits come out at night making people do bad things (:P)

Although the most plausible is probably because most respectable jobs are in the morning (because there used to be no lights, so people couldnt' work at night), so people who were awake and moving around at night didn't have a respectable day job. So gradually these people gave the night a bad name?

Maybe one way to make crime rates at night go down is to put more respectable jobs at night. Especially now, when lots of business has to be done with people half way around the globe, working at night doesn't seem to be such a bizzare idea.