Gaslight & Steam Dev Blog

The September 2009 issue of National Geographic Magazine had a fascinating article about Manhattan before it was settled. The article is based on the work of the Manahatta Project, an endeavor to match the current city to the terrain as it existed prior to settlement by Europeans and to then add the ecosystem that went with the land. The science of landscape ecology and the visualization of biosystem relations that the project has dubbed “Muir Webs” both appear to me to be narratives that go beyond single dimensions and instead look at the patterns formed.

For much the same reason, there is a similar narrative about the early settlers of New Amsterdam, among them is the story of my ancestor Jan Jansen van Flensburg. As a baker who came to the New Netherlands and raised his children in New Amsterdam, the records are far more extensive than for many other immigrants of that time and the maps well detailed (such as this 1656 map of the New Netherlands).

Seeing new ways of combining various data the way the Manahatta Project has done inspires me to look at new ways to bring together historical data and maps such that they tell a story that’s richer than the sum of their parts. A good start in this way of looking at information is the software from TimeGlider, which is useful in putting together historical events in sequence such as this history of World War I.

With the recent heatwave in Seattle, we discovered that one of the joys of working in a LEED-certified building is that there are controls on how long the air-conditioning can be run (or rather, I suppose, the usage of energy to run the building). That means it wouldn’t kick on until after the sun had already come up, making for some warm mornings in any areas with east-facing windows. For me, I always thought LEED Certification was one of those one-time things, not an ongoing set of practices. Obviously, that would defeat the whole point of sustainability, though the biggest issue seems to be planning intelligently for the future for the life of the building along with developing practices to that purpose. It’s not just as simple as following a checklist.

Beyond LEED-certified buildings, my company has taken other steps to be more environmentally-friendly. It’s not an easy thing to accomplish and a recent review pointed out that not only is it hard to do, it’s also hard to measure:

“The hope is that people are not intentionally misrepresenting themselves; they just don’t understand how challenging it is to be “green.” The important lesson we wanted people to take away from our presentation was that you have to ask questions — lots of questions.”

“Determining whether Group Health was doing a good job wasn’t as easy to decide as those involved thought it would be. The questions to be reviewed turned out to be more difficult than anticipated; in many cases, figuring out the answers wasn’t simple.”

Other companies struggle to implement green policies too. Over at Timberland, they’ve introduced a number of measures to make their business more environmentally friendly including only buying leather that doesn’t deplete the Amazon biome and painting their roof white. But it’s not as easy as it might seem, particularly when it comes to banning bottled water.

In the Earthkeeper blog, Jeff Swartz, the President & CEO of Timberland, noted, “It’s really exhilarating to want to run a more sustainable business… but to actually do it is really freaking hard.”