When the Buildings Take Over

By -
My wife can't turn the lights in her office on or off. Or, perhaps, she can do so, but only by moving a lot or a little. If she sits still thinking for to long, the lights go off. If she wants them off and jumps up to answer the phone, they go on.

This was a trend in building design that really got rolling -- in what, the 50s? The 60s? The basis of the design philosophy was, "Screw what you, the user of the building, thinks! We know what you really need. You thought you'd like a bit of fresh air? Forget it! We are bringing you perfectly filtered air! [Except, of course, when their machines fail, leaving the person stuck in an office with foul air and no way to correct the problem.] Heating and cooling? We will keep your office the perfect temperature constantly! [Except in unanticipated weather, or a power outage, or if you have lower than normal heat or cold tolerance.] Lighting? We know what light you'll need! [Except if you are trying to get in a quick nap, or are partially blind, or light sensitive...]"

It was all part of the post-WWII tendency to central control. And it happened in corporations just as much as it did in government.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more