Tag: images

Ramen Shirts

Are you so ramen-obsessed that you feel the need to publicly declare your allegiance to Menya Musashi’s tsukemen over rival Tokyo chain Setagaya’s? Of course you are. Now, Uniqlo has come to your rescue. The clothing chain just released a collection of tees with graphics honoring Japan’s top ramen shops, so you can now wear the logo of your favorite “world-renowned Japanese ramen shop” in a $15, 100% cotton design.

Architecting NYC

New York Magazine asked some of New York City’s distinguished architects how they would improve the city and save it from climate change.

While Mark Foster Gage dreams of infilling the East River with green space, Charles Renfro envisions “a citywide network of rooftop parks” inspired by his own work on the High Line. Green space would not only absorb stormwater and heat but, when elevated, it would be flood resistant by nature.

Many architects played with some overarching plan of connection or integration. Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture wants to protect NYC bikers by integrating the Citi Bike system with a low lying bike bridge they call “the El Bike Lanes.” Norman Foster’s plan involves an extension of Madison Square Park into a “series of off-traffic islands” done in the same style.

Rafael Viñoly reinvents the NYC street plane all together into a “matrix of elevated circulation patterns.” On the other hand, Family New York’s Oana Stanescu and Dong-Ping Wong look to the skyscrapers. They believe the NYC skyline should be a place for everyone, not just a wealthy ghost town.

Edge effects

The different shapes or letters were thus chosen for research purposes, the goal being to learn which ones produced the best “edge effects” for plants and wildlife on the ground. If the S shape allowed more efficient access to sunlight, in other words, well, then S shapes would be used in the future to help stimulate forest recovery due to their particular pattern of sunlight.

Home Business Jargon

Like everyone, I like to leave as much client drama, work stress, and general responsibility at the office as possible. But there’s something about business jargon I can’t let go of. My partner and I have found a use for these ridiculous phrases while navigating our day-to-day post-work edginess. We use it as a polite code to communicate our anger and frustration. It’s truly helped us avoid many conflicts and stuff our issues so far down we’ll only remember them in 10 years when he buys a Porsche or I fall in love with my ceramics teacher Amy.

“HOW ABOUT WE STREAMLINE THIS PROCESS” When your partner isn’t moving as quickly as you’d like or doing something the way you do, suggest that you work together to streamline the process, but really just take over and do it your way until your partner slowly backs away from the dishwasher, Ikea furniture, gift wrap, remote control or thank you notes.

Dutch Agriculture

The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country. It’s bereft of almost every resource long thought to be necessary for large-scale agriculture. Yet it’s the globe’s number 2 exporter of food as measured by value, second only to the United States, which has 270x its landmass. How on Earth have the Dutch done it? That copious output is made all the more remarkable by the other side of the balance sheet: inputs. 20 years ago, the Dutch made a national commitment to sustainable agriculture under the rallying cry “2x as much food using 50% as many resources.” Since 2000, van den Borne and many of his fellow farmers have reduced dependence on water for key crops by 90 %. They’ve almost completely eliminated the use of chemical pesticides on plants in greenhouses, and since 2009 Dutch poultry and livestock producers have cut their use of antibiotics by 60%.

The way in which the Netherlands uses architecture to feed the world is best seen from above. Dutch agriculture is defined by vast landscapes of greenhouses which dominate the architectural landscape of South Holland. In total, the country contains greenhouses in an area 56% larger than the island of Manhattan.

2019-10-12:

1 proposition for the future of the countryside can be found in the Netherlands. On the Hook of Holland, a vast sea of greenhouses surrounds vernacular Dutch farmhouses, alive with high-tech, innovative food production. Despite its small size, and dense population, the Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of food. Such an accreditation would not be possible using conventional farming methods. But the Dutch countryside is far from conventional. In place of plowed furrows and green grazing fields, there are extraordinary greenhouse complexes with climate-controlled farms, some spanning over 1 km2.

2022-05-09:

Over the past 60 years, greenhouse production has been focused on yield. If you compare a field in Spain with greenhouses in the Netherlands, we are more sustainable because we are using agricultural land more optimally. If you want the same yield in Spain, you need 20x as much land. But the best part of the story is because we grow under controlled conditions, we can use biological controls. There are hardly any pesticides used in greenhouse production, but it’s also more efficient with water. The 80 kilograms per meter in the Netherlands is achieved with 4x less water than the 4 kilograms of tomatoes in Spain.

but there’s a claim hydroponics don’t “taste” good:

Soil is fundamental for preserving an ecosystem, and for delivering flavor and nutrition. There is a lot of complex biology in soil, including fungal and bacterial networks, which enable the plant to absorb these micronutrients. When you farm hydroponically, it’s a very inert environment where you are growing from a substrate and you’re adding 5 inputs. It’s very hard, almost impossible, to argue that a plant grown in a hydroponic environment has access to the same nutrition as a plant grown in healthy soils.