Originally published at: Addressable Space - Summer of Protocols
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Digital information is encoded in the built environment all around us. It emerged prior to the advent of electronic computing in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the development of building floor numbers, street addresses and enclosed interior rooms associated with names or numbers all mapped physical space according to discrete and arbitrary sets of…
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Live stream link
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just reminded of a book by shannon mattern, a city is not a computer.
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Re: the point about 1770s habsburg’s arbitrary number merging model, I think things like this might still be around. A common model in India seems to be assigning fractional numbers. I’ve also seen joint numbering schemes like if a large multi-block building is assigned 2 numbers, the street address is something like 34/35 X street. It’s like a weirdly fluid blockspace.
my understanding addresses in japan do this as well; also when i was living in yaletown, a building was going up across the street with the construction elevator strapped to the outside, and the floor numbers were big decals on the rigging, and they were missing 4/14/24 as well as 13.
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Speaking of roomba trajectory light paintings, apparently this sort of painting is a thing. https://twitter.com/rainmaker1973/status/1750400606882202065
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a lot of parallels with the talk i did in 2017 but was arguing something different
“It’s still physical” comment makes me think that built environments should have a “latency numbers every architect should know” cheat sheet just like programmers have one by Jeff Dean Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know · GitHub
L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict 5 ns
L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD
Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns 250 us
Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns 500 us
Read 1 MB sequentially from SSD* 1,000,000 ns 1,000 us 1 ms ~1GB/sec SSD, 4X memory
Disk seek 10,000,000 ns 10,000 us 10 ms 20x datacenter roundtrip
Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 20,000,000 ns 20,000 us 20 ms 80x memory, 20X SSD
Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns 150,000 us 150 ms
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elevators as self-driving vertical cars
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i remember reading something (might be venturi/scott brown?) but if you put something on another floor it’s like putting it ~150 metres away.
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also the invention of the chimney paved the way for separate rooms, rather than one big longhouse with a hearth in the middle.
half baked thought: chain restaurants are the mass media of locations? same “text” entering different local contexts like books
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a chain is like a set of spatio-temporal tropes perhaps? we should have an architropes website like tvtropes
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we can call it “memes in space!”
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Thinking the movie Cube, and Heinlein’s And He Built a Crooked House
Can anyone remember the Simpsons episode where the family goes to a food carnival or fair and orders from different booths serving wildly different cuisines are actually served by the same underground prep facility pumping the same goo to all the booths with cosmetic differences? This was like 20+ years ago so they really anticipated this dark kitchen/rebranded OEM chuck-e-cheese pattern chenoe is talking about. I can’t find the clip or the specific shot of the underground prep facility.
“reverse skeuomorphism” reminds me of something i wrote a while back about idioms/analogues/metaphors
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FWIW players generally have surprisingly few issues with radically discontinuous spaces in games. Polite practice would be signaling a border (e.g. a glowing portal hovering in air), and consistency (going back and forth returns you to same locations), but even if you toss both of those out the window, many players will still move pretty effortlessly through if you can avoid punishing them for it. Pokemon Go would also be a resonant example from games for this talk given it’s massive popularity.
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That’s a nice drawing. Did you make it?