I am so, so jealous!
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Unfortunately, the odds arenât great that Youngkin will do the right thing.
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I truly miss NYC.
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Iâd imagine itâs Covid related.
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Itâs going to take years to fully implement, but FINALLY:
The fact that they donât crash test female dummies in the driverâs seat means that in reality women have a 73% higher likelihood than men of being seriously injured in an accident, no matter what the NHTSA safety rating is for the vehicle.
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There are years that NO ONE finishes, so this is quite impressive:
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Holy moly, with only 90 seconds to spare too!
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I read a wonderful and frustrating book written by an Egyptian architect. He did tons of research on Ancient Egyptian homes and buildings, and came to the conclusion that the mud brick used by his ancestors is an ideal material for homes in Egypt. He also concluded that their use of small clerestory windows, and wind scoops, would indeed keep homes and other buildings more than tolerably cool. The half- and full-sized models he built bore out all of this.
Heâd even found ancient homes surviving in places that were flood-prone, which belies the idea that mud brick is only temporary and fragile.
It was frustrating b/c the villagers didnât want their kids going to school in the cool and well-lit archaic-style mud building heâd been given permission to create. They preferred the unsuitable modern Western designs 
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I have a friend who was born and raised in a west African country. He earned his PhD from a university in Texas and settled near Austin. He built a small strawbale building on his property and his family back in his country of origin were surprised that he would choose to build with straw (a good insulator against the crazy heat we have here) rather than choose conventional industrialized U.S.ian methods and materials.
Yep. I am reminded of a Shelley poem here.2
Acceptance of or opposition to buildings constructed of natural and/or traditional materials by craftspeople and skilled folks in the trades has always been a point of friction in âWesternâ culture even though such methods and materials choices are time-tested and known to work well in context. [massive-head-desk.gif] International building codes have slowly been morphing to be more accepting, but there are plenty of places in the U.S. where âexperimentalâ or alternative building methods (i.e. anything not conventional) are excluded from permitting and regulating authorities.
The Last Straw is a good, encouraging journal (here I am swerving back on topic). Itâs a decades-long ongoing project to educate more people about natural building, including post-occupancy case studies and modern practices like fire-testing1 at a test facility run by ASTM. Some years ago it published some cool stuff on leaned âarchesâ aka Nubian vaults: very Egyptian and I think pretty genius.
Traditional Iranian architecture has similar climate hacking features. Utterly fascinating to me. My assumption is that once electrical demands make reliable grid-provided power increasingly difficult (or impossibly expensive), wind scoops, windcatchers and other known hacks will once again be used, at least by the precariat, who already bear the brunt of climate breakdownâif and only if they can afford to stay in one place, and that place has a reliable food and water supply.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who saidââTwo vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.â
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Hassan Fathy is indeed the gentleman, and Iâd forgot heâd built an entire beautiful but unwanted village for them. I read that book a long time ago.
Yeah, the residents of Gurna/Gourna didnât wanna live in old fashioned mud brick homes, nor did they want to give up tomb robbing [termed âtrading in archaeological findsâ on the wiki page] 
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As a follow-up, Jasmin Paris talks about being one of the elite (only 20 finishers total since 1989) to finish the Barkley race:
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SIX quad jumps in one skating program. Absolute perfection:
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CW: this story from The Guardian has a plethora of Extremely Awful Stuff including pedo-stuff and most kinds of human-on-human abuse.
The size of this manâs heart is bigger than our planet. I am in awe. Just. Wow.
The many victories this man has achieved defies logic and makes me believe in miracles. And I do.
ETA: clarity
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