Readings

Denmark, Germany, and Europe in general is betting on a more pedestrian centric city by making it harder more expensive to own cars. It's a little hard to imagine if you haven't been there but the US is going the opposite direction which I think over time will prove to be the wrong decision.

I'm not a big fan of articles about how college is or is not worth the cost and time. It clearly is with some caveats. This article from the NYT does a great job of breaking it down. To put things into perspective:

[C]ollege tuition in recent decades has delivered an inflation-adjusted annual return of more than 15 percent. For stocks, the historical return is 7 percent. For real estate, it’s less than 1 percent.

Someone finally puts solar panels into window assemblies. (Hat tip: Hass)

Food label 1 & 2 design seems to be getting a lot of press lately. Problem - if I walked around the street right now and asked people very basic but entirely relevant questions about food labels/general nutritional knowledge most people, as in 80-90%, would utterly fail. Until people can somehow understand that there are three major sources of nutrition (carbohydrates/sugars/saccharides, fat/lipids, protein/amino acids) what does it matter if you show how many grams of fiber are in something? Conversely, when I visited Google in Palo Alto they have a simple and effective system. Everything gets a color: red is unhealthy, yellow is in between, and green in healthy. In a society where people think that lower taxes decreases debt levels I think that's more the level we need to be shooting for.

Finch Brewery - Process Photos

I went to a BBQ at Finch's Brewery a few weeks ago at 4565 N. Elston. Afterwards I asked one of the owners if I could photograph his brewery and oddly enough he said yes. And that's why small companies rule. This is the digital portion of the results.

The warehouse was really nicely done. I've been in a lot of factories so I have a fairly good idea of what a good fit and finish looks like industrially. These guys spent some money up front and ended up with a really nice place. They're busy too. The day I was there they had about six or seven employees working - it didn't hurt that they were all really nice and entertained my usual battery of questions.

This is their main room where all cooking and fermenting happens.

Keg washer. The kegs get rinsed with pressurized acid to eat away any build up, then iodine to sterilize them, and (if I remember all this right) are finally rinsed with water. This same station handles keg filling.

After being washed the kegs are stored in the fridge to get the ready to be filled.

Beer making is at least 50% sterilizing everything. Hence, there's sterilizer everywhere.

This is the grain grinder.

It has it's own dedicated room (Update: this is supposedly because grinding grain causes a fine dust to accumulate in the air that becomes an explosion hazard).

Their milled grain connects directly to a silo via a system very similar to those vacuum tubes used at banks. I'm not actually sure what mechanisms move the grain around. I'm assuming an auger attached to a motor.

The silo sits right next to what I'm going to call the cooking station.

Cooking station. Update: The vessel on the left is a boil kettle where the wort is boiled to the desired gravity. The one on the right is a combination mash/lauter tun where the grains steep in water to extract their starches (sugar).

This is a PLC (programmable logic controller) LCD screen. Everything is automated - it's incredible how similar this is to the concrete plants I work at - the output here is just more interesting.

No open flames at Finch's hence the steam boiler. Never seen one of those before...

This is a heat exchanger that removes heat from the freshly brewed wort (pre-beer) so that yeast can be pitched. This is a much bigger version of the tiny copper coil that Evan and I use to chill our massive 5 gallon batches. Finch's does a 1000 gallons at a time. If you don't cool it down the yeast will die and fermentation will never start - at least not with the bacteria that you want. I think they run city water through this then chilled glycol (more on that in a bit). I think I'd increase my surface area and lower my delta T (city water is pretty cheap) but they seem to have their system pretty well worked out.

The grain needs to get cleaned out of the mash/lauter tun. A tad bigger than our 3 gallon stock pot.

These are their 1000 gallon fermenters where their beer will sit for several weeks.

The yeast gives off CO2 as it converts sugar into alcohol, but air cannot be allowed back into the fermenter. Hence, an air lock. In this case a 5 gallon bucket filled with sanitizer. This one was really bubbling off.

These are 5 gallon kegs that I would normally help Evan fill with beer. In this case this is what they use to hold their yeast. 5 gallons of yeast to 1000 gallons of beer! They propagate all their own yeast.

That's a food grade hose. Everything is stainless, seamless, and sterilized.

This is part of their glycol system. The fermenters are jacketed. That is, double walled. Chilled glycol is circulated around them to keep them at whatever temperature is wanted.

Glycol supply and return lines

A solenoid and control precisely control the temperature.

This is the reservoir/make-up tank for the glycol. As you might be able to tell from the number of photos I was really impressed by this system.

Once fermenting is done the beer can be either bottled or put into kegs. This is the canning line.

If the beer is to be kegged it makes its way to the manifold (bottom). All the fermenting tanks connect to this. Very nice. Much easier to open a valve and let gravity and pumps do the work.

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"When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature." - Sigmund Freud

Not a huge fan of Freud but that one reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Hagakure:

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: 'Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.' Among one's affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern. If these are deliberated upon during ordinary times, they can be understood. thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the times comes is what this is all about. To face an event and solve it lightly is difficult if you are not resolved beforehand, and there will always be uncertainty in hitting your mark. However, if the foundation is laid previously, you can think of the saying, 'Matters of great concern should be treated lightly,' as your own basis for action." - Hagakure (27)

This is my friend Garret Santora playing at the Streetside Bar in Chicago.

This is a random unedited video of them playing that night:

Charter Cities

This is a concept I've been curious about for a while, but Paul Romer seems to have worked out a lot of the details and is actually making it happen. The concept is this: cities are worth more than it costs to build them. But yet historically they have to develop naturally and are their growth is burdened by their complexity, laws, and bureaucracy. What if instead the general framework for the city is predetermined? A vast tract of land is set aside and laws and a tax structure that encourage growth are put in place. The city is essentially a sovereign city-state within a country. There will definitely be some interesting problems that arise but it none the less is very fascinating and I think promising. South Korea and China have already done similar things and are actually helping with the project (second video).

The first video is by far the more interesting of the two.

And the follow up of this actually becoming reality in Central America...

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"I've heard people say that the trouble with the world is, we haven't enough good leaders. I think we haven't enough great followers. I have stood side by side with great thinkers--surgeons, engineers, economists; men who deserve a great following--and have heard the crowd cheer me instead. I'm proud of my profession. I like to play baseball. I like fans, too, but I think they yelled too loudly for the wrong man." - Babe Ruth

Propane tank converted to grill pulled by a dune buggy made by the driver, Carlos. That's my dad sitting shotgun. This is the first photo he ever sent me via email - it's a new medium for him.

Dr. King Legacy Apartments

So I went to take some photos the other day as spec work for an architecture firm and I noticed that my widest angle lens was going off at about 1/60th for a 1 second shot... The great thing about old school manual cameras is that they can be repaired (unlike newer far more complex digital models). The bad news is... that they're complex.

I haven't gotten my color 4x5 film developed yet, but hopefully will soon. The rest of these are from my digital SLR.

This is the west elevation of the Dr. King Legacy Apartments by Johnson and Lee Architects.

Southeast corner looking west.

Northwest corner looking south.

This building is built in a not so great neighborhood - it's at roughly 16th and Kedzie. What makes it interesting is that the architects were able to stretch their dollars so well. The facade is basically just brick with a little bit of limestone and what I assume is some sort of aluminum or steel cladding around some of the windows. The spacing is even throughout, so no added cost there. The facade is fairly flat and the change is color is just different brick. This is public housing so you can imagine they weren't splurging. So again, I commend them for being able to produce something this pleasing on a budget that permitted little more than a brick and concrete box.

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Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. ... The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

-Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love

With the killing of Osama Bin Laden there were a lot of misattributed MLK quotes floating around. I thought this one was pretty much amazing.

I recently submitted a few photos about steam engines for publication for a new journal at IIT. They only printed my black and white stuff so I thought I'd post the color photos that were left out. This is one continuous strip of film I shot in a concrete plant in Mokena, IL during my winter break the first year of grad school. This is my brother working on a scotch marine boiler.

The Cost of Energy

I was working on a project for school that looked at the benefits of solar hot water heating equipment and I ran into something odd. Solar hot water heating panels look like regular solar panels but they're usually solid black and water is pumped through them. They're fairly common to see because unlike solar panels that produce electricity (in many cases, lets not get into it) they actually pay for themselves. But there is an interesting oddity to them. They are generally meant to replace the quantity of natural gas needed for heating water, but natural gas is cheap. So even though they save a large amount of energy they do not in fact save that much money. Here is why:

Here I'm showing the three most commonly bought forms of energy: natural gas, electricity, and gasoline.

Natural gas is sold in therms.

1 therm = 100,000 BTU's (British thermal units)

Cost per 100,000 BTU's = $0.86 (in Chicago currently, it's usually about a dollar)

Electricity is sold in kilowatt hours (kWH - 1000 watts for one hour).

1 watt = 3.412 BTU's so a kWH is 3,412 BTU's.

Cost = 12 cents per 3,412 BTU's

Cost per 100,000 BTU's = $3.52

Gasoline is sold by the gallon.

1 gallon of gasoline = 125,000 BTU's

Cost = $4.50 (in Chicago currently)

Cost per 100,000 BTU's = $3.60

So natural gas is more than four times cheaper than other forms of energy per unit. This is why heating my apartment with electricity is stupid. It was cheap for the contractor to put in electric radiant heat washes near the windows but it's incredibly expensive for me to run. The price of electricity is almost double on the west coast ($.025/kWH) and the east coast ($0.20/kWH). Say what you will but nuclear energy makes energy relatively cheap for the Midwest.

When you change the cost of an input, in this case energy, it changes behavior - not really shocking. Doubling the price of electricity causes people to buy more solar panels because it becomes cost effective.

In Chicago it can get up to 100F in the summer - about 30 degrees warmer than we'd like. In the winter it can get to -10F - roughly 80 colder than we'd like. Thus, it takes more energy to heat our homes than it does to cool them. From an environmental/ecological point of view we should live in a warmer climate, but monetarily an 80F difference divided by 4 times cheaper energy because we're using natural gas and not electricity means it's actually cheaper to heat our homes in winter than it is to cool them in the summer with electricity. This is how the cost of something can create perverse incentives.

What is shocking is that no one has figured out how to arbitrage this situation. Why don't any cars run on natural gas or why don't people produce their own electricity from natural gas? The answer is of course in the up front costs of doing such things. Generating your own power is expensive an inefficient. Most generators are roughly 20%-40% efficient...

Everynone Videos

A new video from everynone/Radi0Lab.



This is the first of theirs I saw... definately have to watch it at least twice.

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"There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything." - Yamamoto Tsunetomo in Hagakure, 38

I found this photo while I was looking for photos of the actual lathe that the legs came from in the post below. It's my older brother and father standing in our now demolished warehouse.

Lathe Table

I just completed another table that's been in the works for almost two years now. We had to clean out my familie's warehouse the summer before I started grad school so that it could be demolished - really sad. We scrapped and threw out dozens of semi-trailer loads of steel, stainless, aluminum, brass, lead, copper, etc. (in ascending monetary value of course) in the process. That place was a true treasure trove or potential projects.

The legs are cast iron, although because of their age there's probably a good amount of nickel in them making it more like steel or so I'm told, they came off of a working lathe. This is it sitting on the flat bed - it's probably the frame of a Toyota or rebar buried in Mumbai now; or something else equally undignified.


The dimensions are 48" L x 32" W x 26" H, the tabletop is 1 3/4" thick, and it weights around 250 pounds (I'm guessing tabletop 100 lbs + 75 lbs for each leg - I'm going to weigh it soon). UPDATE: the table top is 88.0 lbs, the legs are 78.0 lbs and 78.6 lbs, and the bolts are 1.6 lbs giving it a total weight of 246.2 lbs.


The wood is jatoba and is also known as Brazilian Cherry even though it's not part of the cherry family. The wood is insanely heavy and literally twice as hard as oak (2300-2800 on the Janka harness scale, oak is around 1300-1400). It will darken with time too. Some other random specifics: it's finished with several coats of semi-gloss polyurethane (I kind of fought doing this but it does protect it so well); the bolts are 5/8" stainless; the tabletop is what is known as a "glue-up" which means that the pieces were joined, glued, and planed into a single slab; and I sealed the cast iron legs with boiled linseed oil, it's the same stuff that artists use to seal oil paintings, which gave it a great kind of lacquered feel that will keep it from rusting.

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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Teachers unions and getting rid of terrible teachers; cops and the drug war - judges too; populist politicians who spew idiocy, racism, and anti-science rhetoric so that they can garner the support from voters who hold similar opinions; the mega-rich in America and issues of fairness/taxes (see: Koch brothers); home contractors and using truly new materials, technology, and ideas to build responsible homes; etc. The further I go in school the more I realize how difficult true change is to accomplish - especially as the area of interest gains prominence. We had a lawyer that specializes in litigating claims related to architecture speak to us. His message over and over was that lawyers and judges, given opposing opportunities, will make legal decisions based on which allows them to stay busy and make more money. It was a way of predicting the outcome of any given trial that proved quite accurate.

So now the constructive part - how do you incentivize people to change their deleterious but self-preserving actions for the benefit of all?

Just a dreary shot of Chicago from the roof of Vetro.