Abe Burmeister

Abe Burmeister (AWB) is the founder of Outlier, a favorite of WITI. They make beautiful clothing out of interesting, technical fabrics that are quietly bombproof. The brand has found favor from everyone from Tokyo urbanites to SF soldiers on deployment in Iraq. Also, Abe has been a longstanding writer and thinker, back to the early days of the blogosphere, through a cult site called Abstract Dynamics, which hosted incredible writers like the late Mark “K Punk” Fisher, Philip Sherburne, and Sasha Frere Jones. He’s one of the most interesting and opinionated people we know, and we are very happy to have him on the page today. (CJN)Abe here. It’s possible that we’re living in the sixth age of extinction.The fifth of these wiped out the dinosaurs and made room for the rise of mammals, and in general these ages are characterized by the disappearance of 80% or more of life on the planet. What makes this one different than all the previous is that humans are responsible. The good news is that the planet survived the previous five and we’ve got a long way to go before the extinction rates get to those past levels. The bad news? Well a recent UN report tells us “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely”.Earlier this year people might have stumbled across a reminder of this grave state in the form of Extinction Rebellion, an activist organization that staged various die-ins around London and New York, blocking enough traffic in the British capital to make the news. (WITI readers might also remember the name from the 6/12 Data Dump Edition. It’s where Radiohead’s are donating their surplus revenue.) Of course if XR seems too extreme for you, there are more polite and stylish ways to worry about extinction. One could simply buy a Lacoste “Save Our Species” polo, with their trademark crocodile replaced with one of ten endangered species, each localized to the city it is sold in. Act fast though there are only 3,520 shirts made. Those a bit more textually oriented might want to check out Chris D. Thomas’ Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in the Age of Extinction, one of the most fascinating contrarian books to emerge in recent memory. It’s certainly one of the most strangely positive books of this era, perhaps even perversely utopian. Why Is This Interesting?If global warming is the defining trauma of our age, then climate change denialism is clearly the denial phase of grief. Extinction Rebellion then is the latest and sharpest articulation of raw anger, while something like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is the most recent of many government attempts at negotiation. The depression phase seems less prevalent in public life, but it hides in quiet places. What’s interesting about Inheritors of the Earth is that it represents one of the clearest attempts at an acceptance, a picture of a new world that is emerging in the wake of human impact on the planet.The book blasts through a flood of details all of which point to one extremely clear thesis: that evolution works much faster and more robustly than we had previously assumed. While an age of extinction may well be upon us, it is also an age of evolution. As humans drag animals and plants across the globe, ecosystems are transforming and evolving around us, with biological diversity actually increasing in many places. This includes areas we hardly think of as nature, cities and suburbs especially, but not ironically in the “rural” spaces of farmland. In the process new species are emerging via both hybridization and mutation sometimes within just decades, and there is good reason to believe there are many more to come. If there is a villain to this book, it’s not the anthropocene itself, but rather the strange ways that human’s try to deny their continual impact on nature. The earth after all is a highly dynamic system, with continents breaking apart and colliding, islands rising out of the ocean and mountains getting washed down to the sea. Humans, however, tend to view nature as being exactly the state of human impact that existed when they first encountered it. Cities are built, freezing mutable riverbanks into place, and farmland is built in flood land soil that we hope never floods. Many of the species humans first started documenting extensively a few hundred years ago, especially the large predators and niche island occupants, are either already extinct or at risk of going away. But from Thomas’ many examples at least, there is good reason to believe many more species are poised to emerge in the gaps, creating a landscape that will look very different than what we thought nature was when we grew up. In many ways this is an ecological take on Heraclitus, a book that looks at earth as a dynamic and ever changing flow. Nature, at least in Thomas’ viewpoint, can handle the impact of humans just fine, if anything it’s thriving, just not in the picturesque way we like to think of it. On the flip side though, whether humans can handle the impact of humans, well that’s still an open question. (AWB)Comic of the Day:It’s a law of the internet (or should be) that there’s an XKCD for everything. The XKCD “Earth Temperature Timeline” is way too big to include here, but worth checking out. So here’s “Cold” instead.Quick Links: Sam Cooke singing Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. (AWB)National Geographic on the effects of warming temperatures on sea turtles: “Since the sex of a sea turtle is determined by the heat of sand incubating their eggs, scientists had suspected they might see slightly more females. Climate change, after all, has driven air and sea temperatures higher, which, in these creatures, favors female offspring. But instead, they found female sea turtles from the Pacific Ocean's largest and most important green sea turtle rookery now outnumber males by at least 116 to 1.” (NRB)What Makes a Map Good? (CJN)The logo of Extinction Rebellion is meant to be an hourglass, but it looks a lot like the Green Lantern’s symbol crossed with the Silence = Death collective’s iconic use of the pink triangle in the heart of the AIDS crisis. While possibly coincidental, Silence = Death was closely tied to legendary AIDS activist group ACT UP, which pioneered the use of the die-in as a protest tactic. (AWB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Abe (AWB)

Why is this interesting? - The Extinction Edition

Abe Burmeister (AWB) is the founder of Outlier, a favorite of WITI. They make beautiful clothing out of interesting, technical fabrics that are quietly bombproof.  Abe has been a longstanding writer and thinker, back to the early days of the blogosphere, through a cult site called Abstract Dynamics, which hosted incredible writers like the late Mark “K Punk” Fisher, Philip Sherburne, and Sasha Frere Jones. He’s one of the most interesting and opinionated people we know, and we are very happy to have him on the page today.  -Colin (CJN) This is the time of ventilation, the forgotten V in your HVAC system (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning). There is growing consensus that COVID-19 spreads most virulently via prolonged airborne exposure indoors. Outdoor transmission definitely happens, but is relatively rare—contract tracing of super spreader events almost always points towards indoor spaces where individuals linger around. Ventilation is the term for bringing outdoor air indoors, and most Americans spend 90% of their lives inside buildings. Ventilation can bring the safety of outdoor air indoors, or be the mechanism that shuts it off. As we try to reopen schools and offices, ventilation is life and death, and it is almost entirely invisible.Why is this interesting?One of the dirty secrets of modern architecture and real estate is that most buildings are very poorly ventilated. There is no building standard for good ventilation, only a standard for minimum viable ventilation. Most buildings get built to meet only this minimum, and they only need to meet even that threshold at the time of construction. Once a building is approved to open, the maintenance of ventilation levels is entirely in the hands of the management. And good ventilation, at least in how it's handled in modern buildings, is expensive to keep up. An office, classroom, or apartment built in the past fifty years is almost certainly bringing in far less fresh air than is optimal, even before the current pandemic. Outdoor air pollution gets all the attention, but indoor air quality levels are often significantly worse than outdoors, filled with volatile organic compounds (VOCs), formaldehyde, and CO2 from human breath, on top of all the small particulate matter also found outside. Bad ventilation was already a blunt threat to your health, but now it's also apparently a prime vector for coronavirus transmission adding a sharp edge to a hidden problem. Auspiciously published in late April this year is a book called Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity by Joseph Allen. It's both extremely timely and also one published way too late. Ventilation is just one part of what makes a healthy building, but Allen ranks it as by far as both the most important and easiest to fix of the nine criteria he uses. And fixing it just might be crucial in rebooting our virus-ravaged world. While exact data is hard to come by there is good reason to believe a well-ventilated room is dramatically safer than a poorly ventilated one. Asian authorities have been warning their population to avoid poorly ventilated spaces since early in the pandemic, most notably in Japan's "Three Cs", which has C #1 to avoid as "Closed Spaces with poor ventilation".It's easy to say "avoid spaces with poor ventilation", but in practice, it's hardly obvious what spaces are well-ventilated and which are not. There are clues to look out for, though. The most obvious is open doors and windows: the more open a space is to the outdoors the better, especially if there are openings on multiple sides to provide cross-ventilation. Beyond that things get a lot more subtle. Often we can feel when a place has no airflow—that stuffy warm sleepy feeling of a conference room or airplane during boarding. (Once airplanes leave the gate and turn on their systems they actually have excellent ventilation though.) Sometimes one can actually feel the airflow or notice tiny flags attached to vents moving, but airflow is not the same as ventilation. HVAC systems generally combine outdoor air with recirculated indoor air for reasons of energy efficiency. The indoor air has already been cooled or heated to the target temperature, while fresh outdoor air generally needs far more cooling or heating to keep the indoor air synced to the thermostat. The cool breeze coming from an air conditioner might be fresh and filtered, or it might be recirculated breath piled on recirculated breath until a deadly viral load is achieved. And sure enough, some of the most detailed contract tracing studies of superspreading events tend to see transmission patterns that closely trace airflow from air conditioning. The crisp cold feeling of an air conditioner is not fresh air, it's a warning sign. New York City began reopening right as spring turned to summer, and stores that once were propping their doors wide open for airflow suddenly began shutting them closed to keep in the cold air. In fact, in New York they are legally obligated to do so, a fact that clearly illustrates the fundamental challenge of good ventilation. The law, passed five years ago, came with the purest of intentions: it was there to prevent excess globally warming energy use from stores trying to lure in customers with blasts of cold air from their open doors. Closing the doors, keeps the cold air inside, reducing the amount of air conditioning usage. But it also reduces ventilation, trapping employees and customers together with cold recirculated air. Ever since the energy crisis in the early 1970s, buildings have been optimized towards energy-saving. If Allen's book suffers one unfortunate flaw it's that he spends far too much time building counterarguments to these economics, only to have the damn virus render them irrelevant. The fact that increasing ventilation can lead to healthier and more productive environments, and thus higher rents, is probably true, and Allen argues this in-depth. But it's also quite irrelevant in a day and age where improving ventilation is no longer a matter of saving a few pennies, it's the difference between life and death. (AWB)Book of the Day:How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) that proposes “...buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time...More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they’re allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.” (CJN)Quick Links: A updating thread on the explosion in Beirut (CJN)Hackers broke into news sites to plant fake stories (CJN)Wow: Katie Ledecky swimming the length of a pool without spilling a single drop of the chocolate milk balanced on her head. (CJN)Encyclopedia of Flowers (AWB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Abe (AWB)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).