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This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. It looked for a while like the coal mining era was over in the Clearfork Valley of East Tennessee, a pocket of mountainous land on the Kentucky border. A permit for a new mine hasnt been issued since 2020, and the last mine in the region shuttered two years ago. One company after another has filed for bankruptcy, with many of them simply walking away from the ecological damage theyd wrought without remediating the land as the law requires. But theres going to be a new mine in East Tennesseeone of a few slated across the country, their permits expedited by President Donald Trumps declaration of an energy emergency and his designating coal a critical mineral. Trump was only hours into his second term when he signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency that directed federal agencies to identify and exercise any lawful emergency authorities available to them to identify and exploit domestic energy resources. The administration also has scrapped Biden-era rules that made it easier to bring mining-related complaints to the federal government. The emergency designation compresses the typically years-long environmental review required for a new mine to just weeks. These assessments are to be compiled within 14 days of receiving a permit application, limiting comment periods to 10 days. The process of compiling an environmental impact statementa time-intensive procedure involving scientists from many disciplines and assessments of wildlife populations, water quality, and other factorsis reduced to less than a month. The government insists this eliminates burdensome red tape. Were not just issuing permitswere supporting communities, securing supply chains for critical industries, and making sure the U.S. stays competitive in a changing global energy landscape, Adam Suess,� the acting assistant secretary for land and minerals management at the Interior Department, said in a statement. A representative of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Grist that community safety is top of mind, pointing to the administrations $725 million investment in abandoned mineland reclamation. The Department of Interior ruled that a new mine slated for Bryson Mountain in Claiborne County, Tennessee, would have no significant impact and approved it. It will provide about two dozen jobs. The strip mine will cover 635 acres of previously mined land that has reverted to forest. Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC plans to pry 1.8 million tons of coal from the earth over 10 years. The Clearfork Valley, which straddles two rural counties and has long struggled economically, bears the scars of more than a centurys underground and surface mining. Local residents and scientists regularly test the creeks for signs of bright-orange mine drainage and other toxins. The land is part of a tract the Nature Conservancy bought in 2019 for conservation purposes, but because of ownership structures in the coalfields, it owns only the land, not the minerals within it. We have concerns about the potential environmental impacts of the operation, the organization said in a statement. We seek assurance that there will be adequate bonding, consistent and transparent environmental monitoring, and good reclamation practices. Matt Hepler, an environmental scientist with environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices, has been following the mines public review process since the company applied for a permit in 2023. He remains skeptical that things will work out well for Hurricane Creek Mining. Despite Trumps promise that he is bringing back an industry thats been abandoned, coal has seen a steady decline, driven in no small part by the plummeting price of natural gas. The number of people working the nations coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trumps first term, and has continued that slide. What is this company doing differently thats going to allow them to profitably succeed while so many other mines have not been able to make that work? he said. All the time Ive been working in Tennessee theres only been a couple of mines permitted to begin with because production has been on the downswing there, Hepler added. Economists say opening more mines may not reverse the global downward trend. Plentiful, cheap natural gas, along with increasingly affordable wind and solar, are displacing coal as an energy source. The situation is so dire that one Stanford University study argued that the gas would continue its climb even with the elimination of coal-related regulations. Metallurgical coal, used to make steeland which Hurricane Creek hopes� to excavate fares no better. It has seen flat or declining demand amid innovation in steel production. Expedited permits are leading to new mines in the West as well. The Department of Interior just approved a land lease for Wyomings first new coal mine in 50 years. Ramaco Resources will extract and process the material in order to retrieve the rare earth and other critical minerals found alongside it. The Trump administration also is selling coal leases on previously protected federal land. Shiloh Hernandez, a senior attorney at the Northern Rockies office of the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, thinks it is a fools errand. I dont see them changing the fundamental dynamics of coal, he said. Thats not to say that the Trump administration wont cause lots of harm in the process by both making the public pay more money for energy than they should and by keeping some of these coal plants and coal mines that really are zombies. Still, Hernandez said he isnt seeing many new permits, just quicker approval of those already in the pipeline. That said, the Trump administrations moves to streamline environmental review will reduce oversight and the time the public has to scrutinize coal projects. The result is theres just going to be its going to be more difficult for the public to participate, and more harm is going to occur, Hernandez said. Theres going to be less attention to the harm thats caused by these operations. This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/trump-is-fast-tracking-new-coal-mines-even-when-they-dont-make-economic-sense/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
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E-Commerce
As I write these words, a heat wave is sweeping through Europe. Last month, a heat wave swept through the East Coast. Next month, a heat wave might sweep through the Middle East, or South Asia, or North Africa. As temperatures continue to reach record highsand climate change increases the likelihood of heat wavesthe sun has become foe, and shade has become king. Shade can lower the ambient temperature of the air by as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It can cool surfaces by as much as 45 degrees. But where is it? Ten thousand years ago, more than half of the land on Earth was shaded by tree canopies. Today, after millennia of deforestation, agriculture, and urbanization, that number has dropped to just 30%. The problem is particularly dire in cities: A recent map by UCLA and the nonprofit American Forests revealed staggering shade deserts in almost every major urban region in the U.S. According to journalist and author Sam Bloch, this dearth of shade is by design. In his new book, simply titled Shade, Bloch argues that the absence of shade from our lives is not an accident. “Shade has been deliberately designed out of our environments,” he tells me on a recent phone call. “Those decisions may have made sense in the past, but we are rapidly moving into a new world where sun protection is going to be as important as sun access.” Shade as old as time Humans have sought shade for as long as we have lived under the sun. “Forget palm trees and ponds,” Bloch writes. “In ancient Mesopotamia, cities were the real oases.” Four thousand years ago, in places where temperatures could soar up to 130 degrees, Sumerians used city walls for shade. They built deep, narrow streets and packed houses close together. Unlike modern cities, which are laid out along the cardinal directions, Sumerians also oriented their cities diagonally, which offered equal amounts of sun and shade on both sides of the street. In his book, Bloch mentions the work of Mary Shepperson, a U.K. archaeologist who specializes in urban archaeology of the Middle East. After modeling the suns daily and seasonal paths over Mesopotamian cities, Shepperson found that the orientation of streets, their narrowness, and small protrusions like vertical rooftop parapets and horizontal eaves likely made for pleasant, shaded cities. The “wisdom of shade,” as Bloch calls it, was known to the Syrians, Phoenicians, and Persians. Later, it was embraced by the Greeks and Romans, and eventually exported by the Islamic caliphate to modern-day Spain and Portugal. But that is the extent it traveled. Europeans had their own beliefs about what makes a healthy city, and they exported those beliefs to the New World. “In temperate climates, the sun was their friend, not their enemy,” Bloch writes. “They had little use for shade.” How we designed shade out of our cities If shade is as old as time, so are our preconceptions against it. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunted growth. As Bloch points out, our prejudice against shade even shines through in the language we use: When something is dubious, its shady. When we feel offended, we take umbrage. Americans, perhaps more so than others, take particular umbrage at shade. “We think shade is yucky. Its for damp corners and fetid ponds,” Bloch writes. This goes back to the early colonizing days. When Europeans arrived in modern-day America, they brought with them a “deep and abiding fear of forests,” which were considered pagan and unholy. In 1771, an English patrician proclaimed a garden in a street is not less absurd than a street in a garden. Or as the author puts it: “A city dweller who planted trees in their front yard was just another country bumpkin.” Many factors further contributed to the downfall of shade, but perhaps the most significant of them is our ancestors’ fear of tuberculosis. Early research from the 1900s showed that bacteria could be killed with sunlight. This understanding birthed a fixation for sunlight that translated to some of the most famous modernist buildings of the time, including Alvar and Aino Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium in Finland. In the U.S., urban planners introduced zoning that called for “setbacks.” They wrote “solar codes” into urban plans. They widened roads (which also helped cars thrive) and carved out paths for sunlight to reach deep into the streets. “This fear of tuberculosis has driven so much of our urban design,” Bloch tells me. The approach trickled down to buildings, as architects clad office buildings and homes with large expanses of glass. Le Corbusier declared glass the foundational material of modernism. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe famously said, Its up to the engineers to find some way to stop the heat from coming in or going out, about his Farnsworth House. Glass, we know now, is notorious for trapping heat. But it has survived as a material of choice, thanks to another notorious invention: AC. Modern air-conditioning was invented in 1902 by American engineer Willis Carrier, who designed a system to control humidity at a printing plant in Brooklyn, New York. Suddenly, external shading systems like brise-soleils, awnings, sun sailssystems that have been used in European cities for centurieswere dismissed as costly add-ons that could never match the level of comfort provided by cool air being fanned through your house. Case in point: After the Truman administration renovated the White House in the 1950sinstalling mechanical cooling in the processit foolishly took down the stripy summer awnings that once kept it cool. Air-conditioning revolutionized cooling around the world, but as Bloch writes, “it came at a cost.” It distanced us from nature and trapped us inside climate-controlled boxes. It lowered our comfort level and our defenses. Even worse: It exacerbated the heat problem it’s supposed to solve by sucking the hot air from our houses and expelling it in our cities. According to computer simulations from Paris and Phoeni, the waste heat from AC units makes the surrounding air about 2 to 3 degrees warmer. “All this happened when we turned our backs on shade,” Bloch writes. [Photo: Library of Congress] How we can design shade back into our cities So, how do we learn to love shade again? The good news is that there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. In his book, Bloch highlights examples from cities all over the world. In Bologna and Singapore alike, people can walk under miles of covered sidewalks that are carved out of the ground floors of buildings. Italians call them portici (porticoes). In Singapore, they’re known as five-foot ways.” In Sevillewhere seats at the bullring cost two to three times more when they’re in the shadepractically all windows are shaded by roller blinds, or persianas de esparto, which are threaded grass curtains that Sevillanos drape over their balconies. Every spring, the Spanish city also installs toldos over streets and plazas. These “sun sails” have been used for so long (over 500 years) that they have become a proud tool in the city’s shade vernacular. Naturally, every citys “shade tool kit” will vary based on its climate policy, geographic and socioeconomic conditions, and affinity for design-led solutions. Barcelona has set up climate shelters,” while Dallas has been planting thousands of trees. And Los Angeles has been coating its streets and roofs with solar reflective paint. Since the early 2000s, architects have been pushing for more passive houses. But as Bloch writes, the incentives largely benefit the future occupants, whose energy bills are lowered, not the developers, whose bottom lines remain the same whether or not a building is climate-resilient. This “split incentive” problem has notably hampered construction and can only be solved if cities implement stronger building codes and grant developers stronger financial incentives. (Building a passive house typically costs around 10% more.) Perhaps it would help shift our perception of shade if cities classified heat as an environmental hazard, like water or air pollution. The Clean Water Act limited what industries and farms could dump into waterways. The Clean Air Act required power plants and factories to monitor, control, and report their emissions. A similar requirement for heat might help us take more actionable steps toward heat mitigation. “If we ever agree that heat is a threat to our freedom and happiness, then we might also decide that shade, our defense against it, is an inalienable right,” Bloch writes. (Even if studies have shown the cooling benefits of shade, Bloch says there is no single, widely accepted index to measure shade’s thermal impact.) For Bloch, the problem with shade access isn’t necessarily technological but psychological. Some of the experts he interviewed for the book are even calling for a life “after comfort”where architecture is made more porous, and where we can learn to live with heat. Studies have found that people who are forced to deal with heat can tolerate it more than those who can escape it. In the U.S., the ideal indoor temperature ranges between 73 and 78 degrees. In Ouagadougou, Burkina Fasowhere AC is virtually nonexistentstudies say that the Burkinabe people’s ideal temperature is closer to 86. Similar studies have shown that people in Marrakech, Morocco, are more likely to feel comfortable than people in Phoenix, Arizona, despite a similar climate. Bloch knows that the cooling effect provided by shade is never going to replace the icy blast of AC. “Even on a thermodynamic level, it’s not doing the same thing,” he tells me. “But if we can adjust our expectations as to what comfort really is, we might be able to be more tolerant of shade as a viable solution.”
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E-Commerce
In many ways, the case that sent Daniel Elie Bouaziz to prison in 2023 for money laundering felt like just another chapter in Ronnie Walkers storied career. Over the course of his nearly 30 years working as an undercover agent with the FBI, Walker had taken part in countless stings like this: posing as a buyer or dealer, meeting suspects in art-scented lounges or dusty storage units, working to earn their trust. He caught Warhol counterfeiters slapping fake signatures over bogus canvases. He helped recover stolen Rembrandt paintings from a Seattle-area art thief. He spent months earning the trust of Earl MarshawnWashington, the now-infamous printmaker and forger who created and sold thousands of knockoffs. The Bouaziz case stood out only for how little effort it seemed to require. His Palm Beach gallery peddled fakesGeorgia O’Keeffe, Keith Haring, and Banksy among themmarketing inexpensive reproductions as originals, aided by bogus provenance documents and falsified signatures. His con worked well, for a while at least: Pieces could fetch prices into the tens or even hundreds of thousands. Walker knew how that line worked. As a founding member of the FBIs Art Crime Team, hed gone undercover in dozens of operations. Formed in 2004 in response to the looting of Iraqi museums and growing international art trafficking, the Art Crime Team was designed as a specialized unit of agents trained in cultural property law, art history, and international smuggling. It began with just a handful of agentsincluding Walkerand over time helped shape how law enforcement handled everything from Nazi-looted artworks to modern-day forgery rings. Collectively, the team has aided in the recovery of 20,000 pieces, worth in sum about $1 billion. Weve done a lot with a little, says David Bass, a longtime FBI agent who helped launch the Art Crime Team alongside Walker in 2004. Twenty agents may sound like a lot, but its not; its a very, very tiny team. For Walker, sometimes undercover work meant dressing like a disheveled billionaire with too much money to care; other times, it meant channeling a gallery hipster in thick glasses and a fedora. It really comes down to the expectations of the subject on who you are; you feed their expectation to make them feel comfortable, Walker, now 53, tells me on a Zoom call in May from his home office in the Pacific Northwest. (He keeps the location vague, explaining: I have a few people who arent happy with me putting them in prison.) But the sheer volume of fakes in the Bouaziz case was staggering, and reinforced a growing feeling Walker had been carrying for years: that deception had become startlingly easy. It no longer required sophisticated training or access to museum archives. A motivated actor with the right gear could fabricate something convincing enough to fool collectorsor worse, enter the secondary market unchallenged. Walker came to view Bouaziz as a sort of cautionary tale, evidence that barring some kind of drastic action the art world would remain exposed to hucksters and swindlers. As it happens, Walkers retirement was already on the horizon. After nearly three decades in federal law enforcement, he was nearing the end. But something kept tugging at him: a notion that maybe his next act should look less like enforcement and more like protection. I had this realization that this is a very fixable problem, he says. Part of the problem is technology advancements, but the solution is also technological advancement. And so Walker began laying the groundwork for what would become, in some sense, one of the bigger leaps in a life built on calculated setups and risky encounters: He established a nonprofit, called the Art Legacy Institute (ALI), where he now serves as president, to try to get a step ahead of the forgers. (And he wasnt doing it alone: Bass, Walkers former FBI colleague, retired from the bureau last month and immediately joined ALI as vice president of operations.) The idea behind the organization is disarmingly simple: to protect artists before their work gets forged or stolen, rather than after. At the center of ALIs tech-forward push is a partnership with the company Alitheon, whose authentication tool uses optical scanning to create a forgery-proof, touchless fingerprint for each work of art. ALI’s artist-friendly iteration of the platform will be released by the end of the year. Another major initiative is a mobile app and websitedeveloped in partnership with the nonprofit division of Amazon Web Services and expected to be launched later this yearthat will allow artists to document their work at the moment of creation. The tool will also offer support for copyright registration and include basic scanning to help detect possible infringements online. To a casual observer, something like a catalog might seem like a trivial indulgence. But as Walker points out, building one at that level historically has been reserved for the smallest percentage of artists. They’re going after living artists While billions of dollars pass through the legitimate art world each year, a parallel economy hums beneath the surface. According to various estimates, art crime is among the highest-grossing criminal enterprises globally, trailing only drugs and weapons trafficking. Though its difficult to pin down the true scope of art forgeriesdue in part to the opacity of private sales and lack of universal documentation standardsexperts estimate that as much as half of the artwork in circulation may be forged or misattributed. (Theft figures are more concrete: The FBI reckons that between $4 billion and $6 billion worth of art is stolen each year, coming from private homes, galleries, religious institutions, and museums; research suggests that as little as 1.5% of that stolen work is ever recovered.) And the forgery problem is only accelerating. Easily accessible AI models can now produce deceptively convincing works in minutes, often indistinguishable from originals to casual observers. Cheap, high-definition photography and printing allows criminals to scrupulously capture and replicate textures. Walker has also seen a shift in those who are targeted. Increasingly, forgers arent focused solely on long-dead masters like Rembrandt or Rothko; theyre going after living artists, people who are still around to defend their work. On its face, that seems like a riskier move. But with tech speeding up production and distribution, fakes can hit the market faster than experts can intervene. Meanwhile, the collectors of ultracontemporary art tend to flip pieces quickly. They live with a piece for a brief period of time and then put it on the secondary market, often at a profit, Walker says. That churn signals demand, and fraud tends to follow. Consider, for instance, a hypothetical forged painting in the style of a buzzy young artistsay, someone recently featured at Frieze or Art Basel. A scammer could generate the fake using AI, print it onto canvas with a textured varnish, and list it for sale through a small online gallery or private dealer. Given the byzantine nature of the art market, its entirely plausible the piece changes hands twice before anyone considers verification. By that point the original seller has long vanished, and the fake has made its way into an investment portfolio or a museums storage unit. Compounding the problem, many of these transactions happen at lower price points, where scrutiny is minimal and provenance often skipped entirely. People are even gaming the legal system itself. Counterfeiters are preemptively filing fraudulent copyrights and trademarks for items that they didnt create, says Daniel Lachman, founder of Justice for Artists, a digital rights group focused on intellectual property. And a lot of times those get granted. Longtime Seattle gallery owner John Braseth has seen this evolution play out firsthand. Everything is sold at auction now, primarily on the secondary market. Its very hard to track that way, he says. (In the past, most sales happened through galleries, where dealers often kept closer tabs on provenance and collectors.) Online platforms make it easier than ever to sidestep scrutiny. You can actually put anything you want up for sale and you can still have it at your house,” Braseth says. “They auction it off, and they guarantee that itll be delivered, what have you, and they get a nice percentage of the funds. It does not fit the FBI TV profile Its exactly that confluence of speed, scope, and vulnerability that Walkers organization, ALI, was built to confront. ALI operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, backed by private fundraising. Walker says the organization has already reached about 60% of its inaugural funding goal, with the first-year target set at $500,000. The money supports everything from artist outreach to registry development and pilot programs. The nonprofit structure was intentional, Walker notes, because it helps ensure that every decision has to be made about whats best for the artist, not whats best for the bottom line, not whats best for me exiting and buying a Lamborghini. The scale of the challenge is daunting. But Walker, for his part, seems unfazed. When we talk over Zoom, hes sporting a red University of Oklahoma cap and a black hoodie, silver hair peeking out from beneath the brim. (An Oklahoma native, he still carries the faint trace of an accent.) His dog dozes contentedly on the couch behind him. Those who have spent time with Walker confirm that even in person he doesnt exactly project federal-agent energy. He came to visit me one day . . . hoodie on, backpack, recalls Braseth, who collaborated with Walker a few times in the FBI days. He looked just like a techie. It does not fit the FBI TV profile. That understated presence, Braseth adds, is part of what makes Walker so effective: Hes disarmingly charming and very handsome, and he is a kind person. These days, it helps that hes got some cutting-edge tech on his side. You’re not changing the artwork Key to ALIs enterprise is its partnership with Alitheon, a Bellevue, Washington-based tech company that specializes in high-fidelity optical scanning. The companys flagship product, FeaturePrint, uses off-the-shelf cameras (including smartphone cameras) to capture the microscopic surface traits of an object and turn them into a unique numerical code. Unlike other serialization or tracking systems, its touchless, meaning theres no need for barcodes, etching, or chemical markers. For the art world, thats essential: Altering a work, even microscopically, is taboo. “You’re not changing the artwork, Walker says. That is off-limits. (ALI isnt paying Alitheon standard enterprise rates and is essentially getting a nonprofit discount.) Walker met Alitheon CEO Roei Ganzarski in late 2023 while still working for the FBIs Art Crime Team. Hed heard about Alitheons optical authentication technology and reached out, curious but skeptical. You’re talking to someone with trust issues, Walker says. I’ve seen countless gadgets offering to be these magic bullet solutions. After a demo from Ganzarski, Walker did what any good investigator would: He tried to break it. He checked all the patents and ran Alitheons software on every piece of art in his house. He even forged his own work to test its limits. Each time he came away satisfied and sold on the tech. Founded in 2017, Alitheon now has 24 employees and backing from investors including BMWs venture arm and IPD Capital. (Ganzarski declined to give revenue figures but said the company has been growing between 25% and 100% per year since around 2022.) The company holds 57 issued patents and works across five high-stakes sectors: art and collectibles, luxury goods, healthcare, transportation, and defense. Ganzarski says that right away he was drawn to Walkers mission. Heres a guy whos been doing this for 30 years, who could have gone and worked for a gallery or created some profitable consulting company, he says. Instead, he’s taking his well-earned experience and expertiseat high risk many timesand putting it to real purpose. What sealed it for him, though, wasnt just the missionit was the man. Hes humble, deeply knowledgeable, and honestly one of the most compelling people, Ganzarski says, noting that theyve had lunches that stretch on for hours, and I dont even notice the time passing. That impression tracks with those whove known Walker outside the job. You dont realize how interesting he is right away, says artist Eric Jacobsen, who met him years ago at a painting event in Oregon. Hes wicked funny, just very dry, and genuinely curious. Hell sit for hours watching artists worknot saying much, just soaking it all in. That quiet curiosity now powers Walker’s next mission: stopping the forgeries before they even begin. Hes also working on his own budding art collection, which he proudly displays on our Zoom call, running me through a list of names like fdot, Dennis Beall, and Shepard Fairey. “Great art is timeless,” he says. “It speaks to every generation.”
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E-Commerce
When Mark Zuckerberg recently announced his grand plans to build enormous data centers in Ohio and Louisiana, two things stood out. First was the scale of the centers set to power Metas AI ambitions. Zuckerberg said that just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan. While both will cost hundreds of billions. The other was their names: Prometheus will soon pop up in New Albany, Ohio, and will be joined by Hyperion in Louisiana in 2030. Where do these weird names come from? Typically, the process is generally for most naming projects to go through a companys brand team, though that doesnt always happen, says Dalton Runberg, a naming expert who has previously worked for big tech companies. It could depend on the size of the companyat some smaller places, it might just be a function of other marketing people, but any big company is going to have a dedicated brand team, and may even have a dedicated naming person or team. Or they could work with a naming agency, especially for very high-profile brands. One of those agencies that big tech companies bring in to advise on this is Lexicon Branding, whose president and founder, David Placek, says: These are relatively nerdy names, or geek names that geeksand I dont mean that in a derogatory wayare very comfortable with. The question is whether they are for non-geeks. Theyre going to be, for the general public, hard to spell, and the awareness of them will be very, very low. Some nameslike Grok, the AI model developed by Elon Musks xAItap into sci-fi. (The reference is to Robert A. Heinleins 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, where its used to describe deeply knowing something). Others, like Prometheus, rely on mythology. (Prometheus is the Greek god of fire, known for stealing the resource from the gods and giving it to humans.) I think Prometheus was a very deliberate decision on their part, says Placek. The metaphor of bringing the fire of AI to the world and to people, I think, was appropriate. The more inscrutable names are also chosen because they can feel a bit insider-y, says Runberg. Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as separate toand smarter thanthe average person, and so the names technology companies choose often reflect that perspective. If you know the deeper meaning of the word, or which Greek god was the god of whichever thing your product is related to, or whatever other fun fact might end up in a Jeopardy! clue someday, it can feel like it has an added layer of, If you know, you know exclusivity and inspeak, explains Runberg. They feel familiar yet a bit mysterious. But the danger is that those types of names can feel smart, though theyre not always as clever as they think they are. For instance, data centers wont want to catch on fire, particularly when they cost billions of dollars. Still, fire and storms are in vogue among tech. Just look at Anduril, Palmer Luckeys defense companyand also the name of the sword wielded by Lord of the Rings character Aragornor Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded tech firm that takes its name from surveillance orbs popular in the same Tolkien lore. The naming starts to get meta when you look at Palantirs product names, like Gotham, its intelligence product designed for the Department of Defense, U.S. intelligence agencies and other allied military forces, which also happens to be the name of the city Batman inhabits. But the reason that those mythological figures appear more often is because they offer the products linked to them a credibility that theyd otherwise not get. Classical, mythological, or historical names tend to sound and feel powerfuloften being associated with mighty empires or omnipotent gods, says Runberg. Also importantly for a young, disruptive industry like tech, theyre old, adds Runberg. They have a feeling of legacy, which can give your brand a sense of authority or reliability, as if it has been around for a long time. Its sort of borrowing the credibility from a word or name that has existed for hundreds or thousands of years. However, just because theyre old doesnt mean theyre good for tech today. Theyre not great names, admits Placek. Good names help process fluency for the reader, the branding expert says, or has things in it that are familiar to you. One of Placeks best-known non-tech names is Febreze, a new coinage that evokes a little bit of fabric and the breeziness of hanging your laundry out to dry within it. Yet Placek also dabbles with tech names. One of his most recent jobs was to help come up with a new name for an AI product previously called Codeium. His solution? Windsurf, the firm initially due to be bought by OpenAI, whose CEO was then acquired by Google when that deal fell through, with the rest of the company heading to competitors Cognition.
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E-Commerce
In cities across the world, urban design is increasingly oriented around preventing people from resting. Details like seats with bisecting railings, ledges with embedded spikes, and railings instead of benches are just a few ways that hostile architectureor architecture that makes public spaces less accessible, especially to unhoused peopleshows up in city landscapes. Now, a design firm in San Francisco wants to flip that narrative on its head by doing the exact opposite: building a four-mile-long bench. The concept, created by the firm Sitelab Urban Studio, is one of six winners of Market Street Reimagined, an international call for design proposals to rejuvenate San Franciscos downtown Market Street. According to Laura Crescimano, cofounder and principal of Sitelab, the firm previously identified the shocking lack of seating downtown through a project called the Downtown San Francisco Public Realm Action Plan, an effort aimed at bringing urban activity back to the citys financial district post-pandemic. So, when the opportunity to rethink Market Streets design came up, her team realized that there might be a deceptively simple solution. In recent projects, we have seen the removal of fixed benches and an overall preference for movable seating over fixed seatingits less expensive, can be stored overnight, and moved around, Crescimano says. These trends reflect a broader pattern of designing out rest and permanence, which is why we believe bold interventionslike our 4-Mile Bench proposalare needed to reframe seating as essential civic infrastructure. [Image: Sitelab Urban Studio] A 10,000-seat bench The proposal is essentially what it sounds like: a 4-mile-long, bright yellow bench that would make one big loop around Market Street, offering a whopping 10,000 seats for residents and tourists. Given the scale of the project and the business of the street, Crescimano says, the idea is built with modularity in mind, using an off-the-shelf system offered by the company Landscape Forms that can easily be built and maintained segment-by-segment.� Market Streets existing constraints actually made way for some of the benchs more interesting features. To avoid reworking infrastructure like signs, trees, and lightposts, the bench is imagined as a playfully curving line weaving through and around these obstacles. And, to make the seating as interactive as possible, Sitelab added custom components like swings, tables, and loops that periodically interrupt the benchs flow. It is a spectacle meant to draw in visitors from locals to touristsa recognizable, Instagrammable moment, Crescimano says. It is also at a scale to be a platform and backdrop for major events, from the Pride parade, to protests, to celebrating the Warriors or Giants wins. In contrast to past approaches that removed seating to discourage certain behaviors, this proposal invites everyone in and encourages more foot traffic. While the 4-Mile Bench is still at the proposal phase, Crescimano says Sitelab has already received interest on a potential pilot project. To make the bench a reality, she adds, the teams next steps would include meeting with city officials and property owners to refine the design and identifying several blocks along Market Street as a starting point. She sees the 4-Mile Bench as a concept that reimagines Market Street from a place of scarcity to one of abundance, choosing to lean into the positive rather than designing to mitigate risk. We want this bench to be a place for everyoneits not about restricting how people use it, Crescimano says. The reality of homelessness is complex and ever-present, and instead of designing from a place of exclusion, were hoping to expand the idea of who our streets can serve. We started our practice in San Francisco, and that spirit of openness is what weve always loved about the city.
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E-Commerce
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