Brain Canvas

Preston and Andrew are both taking their August vacations getting refreshed and inspired. Posts will resume next week when Andrew gets back from India.

It seems today that people are more interested in their food than ever. How it’s raised, how it’s harvested and how it’s prepared are questions that more and more people are asking about what ends up on the dinner table. The meat industry in particular receives heightened scrutiny, both in regards to whether its treatment of animals is ethical and also for its impact on the environment. The proliferation of organic meat and other schemes like cow shares, wherein a number of families will together purchase sections of a cow that was raised and butchered according to their specific preferences, all point to a growing attention to where our food comes from.

But these new food options only go so far. While an individual consumer may have more choice when it comes to purchasing meat at the end of its life cycle, there are few options for the most conspicuous of meat consumers to have a direct hand in, and thus direct knowledge of, the entire process of getting an animal from the farm and into their bellies. This gap creates a golden opportunity for a new kind of farm tourism.

The idyllic rolling green hill of rural Wisconsin would provide the perfect backdrop for a family vacation or romantic get-away. Guests would have the chance to explore the farm and surrounding woodlands, sample the locally grown produce, and most importantly, pick out their own dinner.

Waking up bright and early on their first full day on the farm, they would be instructed in the proper technique for slaughtering their chosen animal using traditional and ethical procedures. They would then be shown how to correctly butcher the animal into all the different cuts and varieties of tasty meat. Finally, at the end of a hard day’s work of preparation, experienced gourmet chefs would help them select a menu composed of their cut of choice paired with vegetables grown on the property, bread baked at the farm house and wines grown and produced locally. The day would culminate with eating the fruits (and meats) of their labor, soaking in the sunset over the small duck pond around back. The remaining meat would be frozen and packed to take back home to enjoy similarly delicious meals for months to come.

What better way to not only sustain disappearing family farms, but feed the appetites of the world’s gastronomes who hunger for a little adventure.

Do you sing in your car, in the shower, or at board meetings?  Maybe you don’t think the night is over until someone has belted out “Don’t Stop Believing” despite angry curses from other people in the movie theater.  You drive to work the next morning, sad that when you sing to the latest Top 40 hit, everyone else in the crawl of traffic rolls up their windows.

You exhibitionist, you casual diva!  What you seek is a way for everyone in the world to hear your sing-along stylings without getting fired from your job for slacking off during work hours, and for losing major accounts because clients find your rendition of “Hit ‘em Up” surprisingly offensive.  If only there was some way where anyone could hear your voice like a well-directed megaphone when you get the urge to accompany the radio.  What you need, and the world needs now, is broadcast karaoke.

The simple way to do this is to set up a streaming channel on the Web.  You attach a microphone in your car, in your shower, or you can even use your mobile phone.  Channel the microphone to the radio, your sound system or the karaoke machine you just bought for your basement.  Now you can karaoke live, and save all of your overdubs for podcasts later.  The proliferation of HD Radio means radio stations have a lot more programming time and no programming with which to fill it; perhaps they are willing to give you fifteen minutes of fame on their HD-3 channel to serenade those who get up at 4:00 AM to drive to work.

Social upload sites like YouTube and Vimeo have taught us that with the right amount of accident, brilliance and artful error anyone can be a celebrity to the Net set.  Broadcast karaoke would likely be the same.  Tay Zonday became famous for his idiosyncratic voice and song structure, and among those who sing karaoke at KTV establishments or bars, there are a few standouts for their American Idol-quality efforts both good and bad.  You could become famous for all the wrong reasons, or someone could discover you and sign you to a lucrative recording contract.

Most importantly, singing every day is good for your mood.  Boost your confidence as well with broadcast karaoke.

As we all know, the Statue of Liberty, seen here beneath the ice of Lake Mendota in my city of residence, was given by the French to United States as a gift commemorating its centennial in 1886. The colossal statue stands at 150 ft. and made of cooper plates attached to an inner frame. In modern day imagery of course, Lady Liberty is depicted as having a dull-greenish hue, due to the copper’s oxidation. But when the statue was first built through about 20 after its erecting it was a copper color, grower duller and greener every year as a penny would decade after decade. Imagine the magnificent Statue of Liberty as seen from Battery Park with a soft coppery glow. The 150th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty will be October 28th, 2036 – 26 years from now. This gives a golden window of opportunity to the National Park Service, the government agency responsible for operating the monument, to plan the celebration of 150 years of Lady Liberty gracing the New York skyline. For six generations the Statue of Liberty has stood not only as a symbol of liberty (quite literally, the statue of liberty is modeled after the Roman goddess of liberty), but as a physical embodiment of America, its people and all the things that make the country great. What can the Park Service do to best honor the historical tradition of this symbol of America and preserve it for generations to come? Rededicate the Statue of Liberty with new copper plating. It might sound crazy, but what better way could there be to mark an important pivot point in American and World history? With 26 years to complete the project, it could be a milestone literally erected to inspire today’s leaders to attack the most critical issues facing our society. The announcement could read something like this: “On October 28th, 2036, 26 years from now, the National Park Service of the United States of America will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty by rededicating this historic landmark with a new copper exterior. Having curbed climate change by becoming a world leader in new green technology, balanced the federal budget, overcame international terrorism and put a person on Mars, the re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty will enshrine these achievements and inspire Americans for the next 150 years”.

For the last few months we’ve been writing on different themes here at Brain Canvas. We’ve featured one theme every month since April and written exclusively on that topic for the whole month. April – Health: How Technologies to Help Veterans can Help us All Quick-Delivery Health Tips for a Better Life A Cure for Aging? May – Entertainment: Campus Paintball War ESPN and The Food Network should launch a new channel Entertainment Evolves to Offer Challenge, Not Escape June – GSA Challenge Post: Building the GSA/ChallengePost Community End-to-End Open Government Update the Tax Code Citizen Scientists July – Transportation: Maglev Empire Transportation and Suburban Renewal Walkabout to Repair Your City We really enjoyed writing on topical subjects for the past four months, but because nothing is topical in August, we’re bringing back the original Brain Canvas formula this month. Preston and I will be writing about whatever “What If” fantasies strike our fancy, and hope it will give you all something to cheer about in this dullest of months. And if that’s not enough, make sure you stay tuned in August as we’ll be rolling out some cool new content features in September. Freshly, Andrew

One Sunday morning several years ago my friend Shaun and I walked a couple of miles from our university campus in Atlanta to a certain 24-hour diner for breakfast. Atlanta, like so many cities in North America, is highly automobile-centric. Most people get places – even places just two miles away – by driving in their glass and metal pods, oblivious to the smaller stitches that bind together the community, infrastructure, economy and aesthetics of their city. I was as guilty of this as anyone, which is why I took such notice of just how run-down and shabby so much of the walk was. Some stretches as short as twenty meters were downright danger-havens, obstructing the healthy and secure flow of what otherwise should have been a routine walking path. Broken and stolen bicycles littered a small clearing in the kudzu between an abandoned building, the busiest interstate highway in the South, and a flimsy mesh-wire fence that separated a one-way four-lane road from the small green buffer to the highway. The litter, organic and non, of homeless people, drunks and troublemakers stank under a small bridge. There stood few to no trees whatsoever to provide shelter or windbreaks, and the sidewalks sat low enough to allow an idling car to jump the curb. When cars turned, they turned extremely close to the junction of the crosswalk and the sidewalk, such that we had to walk well away from the edge of the area specifically designated for pedestrians to avoid grievous injury. That walk opened my eyes to the negative effects of driving everywhere, or perhaps more importantly the expectation of driving everywhere.  In your car you are protected from all manner of the elements, the refuse and the antagonism of the brave new world.  Distances shrink such that you have no reason to focus on anything more than a dangerous intersection or an extended stretch of poorly-paved road.  In this relativity distortion field, an unsightly ten-meter stretch becomes as significant as a discolored brick at the base of a building.  When you see how unpleasant walking can be in many cities, it either turns you off to walking altogether or leads you to take solace in the knowledge that next time, you can drive.  Thus only the committed and specifically interested – mostly those who don’t or can’t afford to drive their own cars – can take stock of the problems and arrange to solve them.  Unfortunately, that usually means going through the bureaucracy of City Hall, and fixing the problem will cost money, which turns everybody off.  Advocates and stakeholders in walkable town development are stuck unless your city is forward-looking, the neighborhood association is educated and influential, or some agents of gentrification like Starbucks and real estate developers decide to make inroads to the area – which usually means that the streets are deserted and dangerous at night when no one is out shopping for $5 ice cream and imported clothing! What if you had to walk everywhere for one month?  Imagine that you wake up tomorrow morning and your car is gone.  Every bus in the city has stopped working, and all other modes of public transportation like light rail and subways no longer function.  Even your bicycle has turned to cast iron.  The entire city is struck with the incapacitation of every form of mechanical transport.  All you can do in this car-free town is walk. You still have to pay the bills by working, and you still have to buy and eat food.  If you are lucky your boss will let you telecommute, but no one is going to deliver any food to you when they would have to walk just like you.  Now you actually have to walk to the grocery store.  You have to walk to friends’ houses, or to bars, or to places of worship or the post office.  This month is probably going to be the most hard-learning month you have faced, if you are a fortunate person.  The size of your front yard will become apparent like never before when every time you return home you have to walk its length rather than zip past it on the driveway.  Your street never seemed this long when you were driving!  And how are there only three houses between yours and the curb?  You never noticed how much space was wasted around you.  Alternatively, you could be pleased to note how many front doors of businesses and residences you can pass in five minutes of walking, and you may have never noticed half of the stores you see now that you have to look. If you need to walk to pick up food or some other commodity, you may be highly disappointed to realize how far away a neighborhood commercial center is.  You could pass one hundred houses with no break for parks or businesses before reaching a marginally diverse commercial zone that offers food, mechanical supplies, fuel, and a service or two like a gym or church.  The parking lot will seem like a flat barren wasteland to you  now.  There are probably no trees, or perhaps only small rows of perfectly-cut shrubs, to offer a micro-climate supporting living things like birds and insects.  Take a look around, and unless you live in a pretty upscale neighborhood you will notice broken glass, plastic and trash, the artifacts of car accidents and human neglect.  If it is hot outside, it will be so twice over on your walk.  You can’t look forward to the air conditioner on your way back, and the blacktop will bake like a river from hell.  It could be cold, and then your survivability comes into question – if it’s too cold to walk far enough to get fuel and food, how are you going to survive?  Your neighborhood is built such that without personal vehicles, an innovation less than one hundred years old, you become a veritable Daniel Boone in your own city.  Hope you’ve stocked up for the winter! Not everything is bad, even though your city is engineered to make walking less efficient than driving.  Places that used to be dangerous to walk around may now be filled with peaceful people whose presence discourages violent crime and theft.  If you are lucky enough to live in a neighborhood which is as walkable as it is drivable, you could discover new amenities and pleasures close to home.  In the process you ought to become closer to your neighbors.  One thing you will likely discuss with them is that you never noticed how bad the sidewalk is on this stretch of Eleventh Street, or how you wish there were more trees to shade the walk.  A neighbor will mention how unsightly this or that building is, which they never noticed until today.  Shame, too, since it would make a great music hall.  Across town a group of neighbors are planning improvements for their area and removing old furniture blocking an alleyway frequented by a gang.  They used to drive right past it, and stopped wondering long ago who put the blockage there. Thirty days later (let’s assume you don’t know when you will regain use of your vehicles), people are walking paths within a quarter mile of their home that four weeks ago they never knew existed.  Crime in most neighborhoods is at its lowest in decades – except for the affluent ones, where bored rich kids vandalize each others’ homes at night.  Although there is a lot of trash that has not been picked up by the sanitation department in the last month, it has been compacted and arranged to ensure that it does not make walking unpleasant.  Among the trash in those piles is all of the urban refuse that littered the sidewalks and underpasses before the Day the Wheels Stopped Moving.  Flowers, and some small herb and vegetable gardens, are planted in every median.  There is a tree fort on every block.  People have learned to stretch their dollars when buying food.  Every business that can incorporate it now knows the value of telecommuting.  People are less stressed.  You have made several new friends and have joined two new community organizations, as well as a community sport.  The team plays the neighborhood across the bridge in three days. When you wake up tomorrow morning and find your car in your garage once more, what will you do?

This month’s Brain Canvas theme on transportation is a bit above my head from a technical standpoint, as I don’t have the benefit of an engineering degree from THE Georgia Institute of Technology like my colleague Preston. So rather than try to write about the future of transportation by speculating about innovative new technologies, I’ll instead talk about some of the exciting outcomes society might realize from alternate transportation regimes and leave how to get from A to B to the engineers. I recently viewed a TED talk by Ellen Dunham-Jones (also of Georgia Tech) on the topic of Retrofitting Suburbia, laying out the argument for reclaiming abandoned strip malls and big box stores that are the hallmark of the suburban landscape. In addition to the reclamation of abandoned existing structures she also points to the importance of building on top of existing structures as well. One community that Durham-Jones holds up as an example is the D.C. suburb of Hyattsville, Maryland (10:25 in video linked above). Hyattsville has experienced over a decade of growth and renewal in its downtown. What was in the early 90′s a suburban office building and not much else, connected to the rest of the world only by conventional highway transportation system, is now a vibrant community featuring a downtown arts district, and a mixed use residential and retail site. Importantly for this month’s topic of transportation, this development coincided with the opening of two DC Metro stations in Hyattsville. In 1993 D.C. Metro extended service connecting Hyattsville with Washington D.C. providing more convenient transportation for commuters living in the city to reach office jobs in the suburbs and for suburban dwellers to enjoy the best parts of the city life. This is one of the indirect benefits of transportation technology like the Maglev trains profiled on Brain Canvas last week by Preston. Trains that can easily reach speeds of 500 mph extend the radius of commutable communities by hundreds of miles, opening up the distant suburbs and exurbs to the exiting outcomes described by Dunham-Jones and realized by Hyattsville, Maryland.

Rail transport has transformed the economies of many countries since its introduction in Britain nearly 200 years ago.  Today people can easily zip between cities hundreds and thousands of kilometers apart, while hundreds of millions of freight containers are shipped by rail every year.  In the United States the development of a national rail network was the fundamental economic, social and political event of the second half of the 19th century.  In China national and international rail development is twinned with manufacturing as the most important driver of industrialization in that country.  From the beginning of rail’s economic viability with Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Western Railway in 1830s Britain, to China’s current intent to redevelop the ancient Silk Road as a cross-continental rail and highway network, rail transport has always been an industry defined by massive investments and driven by grandiose ambitions for economic payoff and social transformation. Where is that ambition today?  What used to be a great project with clear payoff has now become a political albatross of sticker-shock and lukewarm commitments.  There exist proven and viable technologies to greatly increase the efficiency and speed of rail transport.  A few countries are taking them somewhat seriously, such as Spain with its AVE lines and China which boasts two records: the world’s fastest-average-speed rail line and the Shanghai Maglev Train, which hits a top speed of 431 km/h.  Compare to this the United States’ own high speed rail plans, which are currently underfunded and call for a top speed of merely 240 km/h – on a ride which currently averages 109 km / h between DC and Boston. If the robber barons of the Rail Age merged with a hodgepodge of SimCity geeks, new urbanism advocates and wild-eyed futurists, the resulting organism would sweep aside the meek  and the cash-poor with blueprints for something even more radical than the first wave of rail development: a dense, hyper-efficient global network of standardized maglev trains, two tracks side-by-side each stacked three tracks high, threaded through the widened medians of intercity highways. Maglev trains exist in several flavors, which have their own quirks and cost-benefit rap sheets.  Many people roll their eyes when they hear talk of maglev, equating it with one or both of “DisneyWorld / monorail” and “cost overruns.”  The most-cited example is the Shanghai Maglev Train, which I have had the pleasure of riding thrice.  Without getting into too many specifics, that train’s technology is built on a “smart track, dumb train” model in which the expensive technology is all in the track – a guaranteed road to financial ruin, as building out the track for any great length is magnificently costly.  There exist both working and in-development alternatives to this technology which use a “smart train, dumb track” model which is much cheaper and easier to implement, like a standard railway.  American Maglev Technology has a working test track in Powder Springs, GA which uses the electrical equivalent of seventeen hair dryers to levitate, and the Inductrack system is under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Several advantages exist in using maglev over conventional high-speed rail transportation.  Most important is the lack of moving parts, like wheels and suspension, enabling the train to achieve much higher speeds (up to 500 km/h on the Shanghai line) and reducing maintenance costs as there are no contact or moving parts to repair.  The absence of contact friction also means less power is required to propel the train forward; if you ever visit a working maglev test track you can push the train forward with your hand.  The only significant friction on the train is wind friction.  Finally, if the train’s electricity comes from 100% renewable energy, it is a carbon-free form of transportation once construction is finished.  With these factors combined, the high cost of maglev investment delivers a long-term payoff unsurpassed in other options for infrastructure development, short of fusion energy. Now that our infrastructure investment demigod has chosen maglev as its weapon of choice, why multiple-stacked tracks between highway lanes?  Part of this was actually my old man’s idea.  He described it to me thusly: when we want to go from our Gadsden, Alabama hometown to Tuscaloosa to watch the University of Alabama play football, we have to drive over two hours on highways jam-packed with people traveling to the biggest temple in the state, Bryant-Denny Stadium.  What if the government, when planning the construction of the interstate highway system, had made the median wider and placed rail tracks between the lanes?  We could take a train to football games, and not have to contend with traffic or drunk drivers or parking.  Then imagine any other road trip you would take involving the interstate highway system – for the right price it could be replaced by a rail journey, all while not having to cut any new path across the countryside for the railway.  Stacking them three high, thus producing six maglev tracks in one corridor, was my idea – the freight and passenger capacity would be unprecedented.  Goodbye congestion, hello reduced transport costs! Tomorrow, though, I don’t want to go from my hometown to Tuscaloosa.  I want to go from Beijing to Moscow.  Great!  With our global maglev rail network, I could probably complete the trip in under 20 hours.  Flying would be faster, but remember – I could travel 9000 km by train in under 20 hours on a trip that would take six days on current rail infrastructure.  Perhaps the greatest advantage to personal travel would come from less ambitious, halfway-across-the-continent journeys.  London to Istanbul could be done in just over six hours, and instead of flying above the clouds, all of Europe’s countryside and cityscape glory would zip past visible from ground level.  And let’s not stop with overland routes!  Spain and Morocco have been in talks for some time to build a rail tunnel underneath the Strait of Gibraltar to connect Africa and Europe.  The Bering Strait has been awfully lonely for the last ten thousand years or so since people stopped walking across its land bridge – Buenos Aires to Singapore by rail would be just a ticket purchase away. A new golden era of rail travel would open once significant portions of the global network were operational.  With so many destinations more easily accessible to the average human being, whether for business or pleasure, global connection would be a much greater part of day-to-day life.  If its energy sources are clean and renewable, transportation would fall off the list of most polluting industries.  Opportunities of all sorts would radically redefine the outlook of billions of people.  Workers who now travel into New York City on an hour-long train ride could move to DC and make the trip in the same amount of time.  To get really ambitious you could put the trains in vacuum tubes to remove air friction and enable speeds of up to 8000 km/h.  This would put you on the other side of the planet in less than three hours. It is no time to be cautious!  Since a global, super-high-speed rail network is likely within the next 500 years, let us start now and be magnetically levitated into the future!

Apologies for the late July theme post, we were too busy celebrating BrainCanvas’ one-year anniversary! It was a year ago on July 4 when BrainCanvas posited its first “What If?” and the world has never been the same since. This month we will focus on the topic of transportation. Although independently conceived of Slate’s call for imagination on the subject of “Nimble Cities,” the spirit of our quest is similar: to ask and receive knowledge of great possible ways to get around. If you have any ideas for a post topic, email us and we will see that it gets its proper shake at BrainCanvas glory.

The United States Constitutions provides for Citizen Soldiers in its second amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The concept of Citizen Soldiery is not merely a right for individual citizens to bear arms, but rather a duty that citizens have to arm themselves in defending the country from foreign invasion or domestic misrule. It is a direct result of the revolutionary war experiences of the founders, when foreign soldiers were forcibly quartered with local civilians and incidents like the Boston Massacre created a need to balance the rights of the people against the military. This concept has become somewhat antiquated in the modern era, not least of all because of the practical challenge posed by the modern equipment and armaments that any potential foreign or domestic threat would likely possess. However, today’s National Guard does traces its roots to this idea. The idea of citizens having not only a right but a responsibility to protect the interests of their communities and make them better places to live is a noble concept. NASA already routinely uses the principles of crowdsourcing to help them analyze the mountains of data collected by satellites and observatories that cannot be reliably processed by computers. Their “Be a Martian” project is definitely one of the more innovative and interactive approaches to this sort of work. NASA is on the right track, but why not take things one step further in terms of comprehensiveness and accessibility. How about, for instance, an application that allows different agencies or community organizations to release geotagged science projects for individuals to take on that would improve their communities. Imagine opening the app on your phone and seeing a project from the US Wildlife Fund to photograph endangered birds in the woods near your house, or a project from the EPA to measure groundwater purity in the park down the street.