randomosity

My apo­lo­gies if this soun­ded like I was chal­len­ging Jared Dia­mond to a wor­doff ;-)   Michele just pointed me to wonderfully candid article

explaining why office workers should appreciate their surroundings and pity the poor fools that consider the coffee shop their workplace. While I number amongst those blighted souls and blogged last year on why I like the mobile life, Sathnam Sanghera's ode to office bliss, raises some notable and worthy points.
I was particularly struck by Sanghera's anecdotal reference to people working at home starting to form groups so they can work at home together. Man is indeed a social animal. I like working in a public space, even if I am not interacting directly with other people. I like having them around. By that I don't mean to objectify others by any means, as having people in your immediate proximity can often run counter to productivity. But, everyone has their own levels of tolerance, and I sense that Sanghera is accepting this broad stratum of individual workspace demands. He highlights a study by Benjamin Markham¹ that underlines the fact that workplaces end up being counterproductive by being too quiet. The silence itself becomes a distraction.
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1. Sorry, but I can't find the source for his reference [↩]

Eamonn poin­ted me to press release on a rather jar­ring new TV chan­nel offer­ing in Ger­many. Etos TV Mourn­ing Chan­nel is a 24/7 broad­cast of video obit­u­ar­ies, short videos of the deceased as well as doc­u­ment­ar­ies on cemeter­ies and on funeral prac­tise. My first reac­tion was one of amazement — one that a broad­caster would pro­pose such a chan­nel and two that any­one could be expec­ted to tune in. Although, not some­thing I would expect to find myself watch­ing, on reflec­tion, there is much more to this story.
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Social Network/ing Week at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto kicked off tonight with a fas­cin­at­ing key­note by Cornell’s Jon Klein­berg. ‘The Geo­graphy of Social and Inform­a­tion Net­works,’ was one of the most fas­cin­at­ing applied math­em­at­ical lec­tures I can say to hav­ing ever atten­ded (and before I go too far I will stress that the math was made very, very approach­able for a layper­son such as myself). His intro­du­cer indic­ated that he inven­ted algorithmic soci­ology and although this soun­ded rather pre­sump­tu­ous (an Al Gore and the Inter­net sort of thing?), I can’t help but be quite will­ing to give this some cre­dence after listen­ing to this present­a­tion.
Klein­berg opened with a quote from Jim Gray, that “the emer­gence of cyber­space and the world wide web was like the dis­cov­ery of a new con­tin­ent.” Klein­berg was quite delib­er­ate in this jux­ta­pos­i­tion of the geo­graphic with the tech­no­lo­gical and he then teased this into a fur­ther merge with the social. But he ques­tioned whether maps are actu­ally an appro­pri­ate meta­phor for some­thing as aphys­ical as social net­works — but chose to let this stand on the need to have some com­mon vocab­u­lary with which to be able to relate.
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Bill Turkel pos­ted another great thought piece today on the Import­ance of Infra­struc­ture. This post is, as his oth­ers always are, very eru­dite, well phrased and pro­voke one to think. In this case, his fram­ing ques­tion seems to be whether one can really envir­on­ment­ally engin­eer innov­a­tion. His post sug­gests that let­ting the right people play in the right sand­box, with the right toys can yield aston­ish­ing res­ults. He addresses the nature of how we con­struct per­sonal space in order to bol­ster pro­ductiv­ity, cre­ativ­ity and all those good things.

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It’s always amus­ing and often telling to com­pare where we are now to where we thought we’d be. Whether through sci-fi nov­els, advert­ise­ments for the house of the future, or in this case prints from an exhib­i­tion at the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France (bnf), facets of the future­think can provide a par­tic­u­larly pris­matic view of past pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. Paleo-Future Blog has a nice col­lec­tion of images of life in the year 2000 from the BnF. Nat­alie has weighed in on how pres­ci­ent these illus­tra­tions actu­ally are.
One thing that springs to my atten­tion is the sense that the future was going to free us from con­tact with the ground. Flight seems to make so much more pos­sible.
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One of the most fas­cin­at­ing stores in Paris and well worth a visit is Colette. The loc­a­tion is prime - along rue Saint-Honoré near the Place du Marche Saint-Honoré. Colette car­ries a won­der­fully eclectic invent­ory of things amaz­ing. cater­ing to a diverse cli­entèle from the curi­ous, the tour­ist to the glit­ter­atti, the hand-picked items in store are dis­played cre­at­ively and offer the finest of the trend­i­est.
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There is a great dis­cus­sion at Bri­co­leur­b­an­ism on the absence of people-scaled spaces in Toronto’s urban streets­cape. The dis­cus­sion takes as a start­ing point con­struc­tion hoard­ing on two sides of the street near Bloor that inad­vert­ently cre­ated a humane street scale not unlike that found else­where in the world.
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A great online his­tor­ical tour of the Uni­ver­sity of Guelph cam­pus is now avail­able. It doesn’t fea­ture whizz­bang flash effects or imple­ment AJAX func­tion­al­ity. Instead, it deliv­ers a smooth and effect­ive tour in a simple and com­pel­ling fash­ion with simple html. It’s pleas­ingly lo-tech, well executed and a great example of match­ing tech­no­logy to needs.
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I have long wanted to jot down some thoughts about some of my favour­ite places in Paris. Mean­ing to even­tu­ally present these as an appro­pri­ately geor­e­fer­enced set with appro­pri­ate nav­ig­a­tion, for now I thought I would add them as simply blog entries. When I thought about where to start, it took me all of a second to ecide to begin with one of my abso­lutely favour­ite spots: The Lux­em­bourg Gardens.

There are a pleth­ora of won­der­ful gar­dens in Paris, but the Lux­em­bourg is a favour­ite for a vari­ety of great reasons:

• Con­veni­ent
• Adja­cent
• Sus­tan­tial
• Gor­geous
• Clean
• Safe

The gar­dens and the Pal­ais de Lux­em­bourg date the sev­en­teenth cen­tury and the con­struc­tion of the palace and sur­round­ings for Marie de Medici. The garden is sur­roun­ded by a wall and the garden/park itself is inter­sec­ted by ped­es­trian aven­ues or crushed stone. It is centred on a fountain/large grassy area (I can’t remem­ber which guise it is in right now). There are polite city forests and won­der­ful statu­ary sur­round­ing the main prom­en­ades.

What I like most par­tic­u­larly about the gar­dens are the won­der­ful seats. They can be dragged to any place one desires and come in three fla­vours. There are the stand­ard upright, like a stand­ard chair type (really great in com­bin­a­tion with oth­ers for your feet), slightly reclined ones and the best: full reclined spa­cious metal lounges that are not unlike a Parisian ver­sion of an Adiron­dack deck chair. Get­ting to the garden early enough means you get your pick of both chair and spot and you can find a won­der­fully sheltered spot close to the wall around the cent­ral water, and spend the day read­ing, writ­ing and simply tak­ing in the ambi­ance of this very spe­cial envir­on­ment.
The cent­ral ‘plaza’ area always had this won­der­ful, huge wad­ing pool in which chil­dren ren­ted little sail­ing boats and pushed them about. Just a really nice ‘park’ kind of thing to do. How­ever, if I am to believe Google Maps (after the Kat­rina thing I am ever so slightly skep­tical), it looks as though this area has been filled in and is just a grassy area now. Maybe its a sea­sonal, annual thing…I sure hope that is the case.
The area around the Lux­em­bourg also makes it superbly situ­ated. In the Latin Quarter, near the Sor­bonne and the Pan­theon, it is also near the entrance to the Cata­combs (about them in a fur­ther entry). There are all sort of won­der­ful eat­ing oppor­tun­it­ies in the area, many of which re great takeaway food that you can return to the park with. I really like this little Japan­ese yakatori place, a three minute walk from my seat in the park.
On a more somber note, the wall to the north­east is the site where Mar­shall Michel Ney (the Bravest of the Brave) was executed in 1815 for his part in Napoleon’s return to power. This tragedy is not without its con­tro­versy, both due to the cir­cum­stances of Ney’s court mar­tial as well as the per­sist­ent rumours that he was able to escape to the United States fol­low­ing Napoleon’s second abdic­a­tion and lived out his days as a rural school mas­ter.
The Lux­em­bourg Gar­dens are eas­ily accessed, both by foot walk­ing south from the Seine hav­ing crossed the Pont Neuf, or via the Lux­em­bourg Metro sta­tion which depos­its you right at the north­east gate of the park.

In my research into nine­teenth cen­tury Cana­dian drink­ing habits, I very quickly learned that the tem­per­ance folks had a spe­cial enmity for the cus­tom of treat­ing. The cru­sade against this spe­cial social prac­tise informed much of the pamph­let­eer­ing and peti­tion­ing of legis­lat­ive bod­ies. You can see the threat: if you have a lot of friends, and the mem­bers of group want to main­tain the respect of their peers, the rounds just keep on com­ing. It was often the exuber­ant nature of the bar that so threatened the well being of the aver­age Cana­dian. The warm sur­rounds of the tav­ern, the good com­pany of friends and the intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing influ­ence of alco­hol. The tem­per­ance folks figured that they might be able to some­how beat this cus­tom out of Cana­dian bar beha­viour. There are how­ever some cus­toms that simply do per­petu­ate and cer­tainly treat­ing is one of them.

So lets take that into the inter­net age…not con­strained by the need to be phys­ic­ally present, the Frog Pub chain has intro­duced TextToP­int. You can now pur­chase a round for your friends online. Its pretty simple. You pay for the round online and are provided with a simple code that can be text’d to your bud­dies and they can redeem it from their ‘gen­ial host.’ Bril­liant. Good for the pub. What will the tem­per­ance folks say???