A few weeks ago, the Design & Emotion conference adjourned at the IIT in Chicago ( http://www.id.iit.edu/de2010/ ). Without doubt, buildings can evoke emotions. Nevertheless, infrastructure and emotions are two terms commonly not strongly associated with each other. Here is an example of emotions coming to a boil over a long running project that just entered its "hot" (construction) phase: While recently passing through Stuttgart, Germany...

OK, here it goes again: another rebooking. This time it went fast a few minutes altogether. Even though the news reported about one airline flying to Frankfurt tonight, the airline that holds my ticket rescheduled me to travel on Thursday, April 22nd. Perhaps time to take bets whether that trip will fly (pun intended). Chances are getting better. Volcanic Ash Advisary from UK Meterorological Office . These tracking boundaries are estimates; therefore...

Watching the news on TV and reading the reports in newspapers I can nod, and confirm: yes, air travel is a bit messed up right now. Originally scheduled to return from the US to Germany on Thursday last week, 15th of April, I received my flight cancellation notification literally on my way to the airport. Fortunately I had a meeting half way to the airport when I received that message so that within what seems a few minutes I was rebooked on a flight...

In collaboration with PLP Architecture and the University College London , supported by the EPSRC , there is opportunity to apply for funded postgraduate studies and research towards an EngD degree in London. Details are available at http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/vacancies/engd-pdder.htm . Please take note of the funding eligibility criteria mentioned in the posting.

This is a cross-reference to my post from a few minutes ago on the GenerativeComponents Forum Announcements that Hanif Kara and Mark Burry have been confirmed as SmartGeometry keynote speakers. Here is a shortcut to the SmartGeometry 2010 Conference registration info and button. More information and links to additional contents in the other post .

Catching up on last year's skipped reading, I just came across a quote about "emergence" that told me I need to re-activate my blog: Illustrating the concept of emergence, S. Rasmussen is quoted: "[Hydrogen is] a colorless, odorless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people." (Science Vol 327, p. 1632; http://www.sciencemag.org/ , Sept. 25,2009 - report about the conference: Emergence in Chemical Systems 2.0, Univ. of Alaska...

... there will be other events this year. I'd like to point to one of those events, not because I will participate in it, but because of all the other brilliant people who will be there. The event is the 1st International Symposium on Distributed Intelligence in Design , consisting of a workshop and a symposium. I think that the topic is evocative, especially if one plays a bit with the language. If you have time on the 8 th or 9 th of May, and traveling...

Check out the SmartGeometry 2009 agenda , register , and join us at SmartGeometry 2009! With SmartGeometry events starting March 25 , and the Dow Jones taking a little up-tick in the past few days, perhaps things are not looking as gloomy in spite of all the disagreement about the stimulus package. However, we can all agree with the SmartGeometry stimulus package . As with any stimulus, it works by people feeling stimulated and acting accordingly...

Recently I came across an interesting report about another area of research: the southwestern script which was used about 2,500 years ago in the south-western part of Portugal (hence its name) and in adjacent parts of Spain. The fact aside that it is among the oldest scripts in Europe, researchers have attempted without success for approximately two centuries to decipher this script. The stele of Bensafrim (Wikimedia Commons). The story appealed to...

When considering the total ecological and economical impact of any endeavor there are currently two fundamental approaches: (1) Economic input-output (EIO) based analysis: The economic input-output method is an entirely statistics-based approach. At the high level, there is a reasonably good understanding of the resources (energy and materials) that flow in and out of most national economies, and the fractions of those resources that flow in and out...

Just a couple of days ago I came across a quote that I thought was... well, see for yourself: "We didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. Likewise, we must leave the oil age before we run out of oil." [Tom Demarco, Whistler, BC; in National Geographic Vol. 214, No 4, October 2008, Letters] A quick search on dogpile shows that in the past few years this has been a recurring sentiment (at least the first half of it), even...

Even though this may look like yet another book review, Ted Nordhaus' and Michael Shellenberger's book "Break Through" 1) picks up the trail of musings about human experimentation and happiness in a different way: "Environmentalism and other progressive social movements of the 1960s were born of the prosperity of the postwar era and the widespread emergence of higher-order postmaterialist needs. [...] This powerful correlation between...

WIth a few business trips and tax time thrown in, time passes rather quickly. So I went digging through hundreds of SmartGeometry 2008 Pictures and then realized that the surroundings were so interesting, they deserve to be shown, too --even if with the necessary restraint glimpses will have to suffice... The Angel of Peace ( Friedensengel ) in Munich, commemorating 25 years of peace after the war of 1870-71. A bicyclist in front of the Residenz in...

In this month's National Geographic in the report about Bhutan 1) , Brook Larmer describes King Jigme Singye Wangchuck's concept of "Gross National Happiness" (GNH), based on four principles: sustainable development, environmental protection, cultural preservation, and good governance 2) (promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment...

This year's SmartGeometry events in Munich were quite an experience. The pre-training introduced Prof. Rob Woodbury's concept of design patterns which is available at http://www.designpatterns.ca/ . Design patterns establish higher level conceptual gizmos for parametric, dependency-based (associative) design (with GenerativeComponents) as a common language between designers as well as a new way of thinking about approaches to solutions for design...

In his book "A Short History of Progress" Ronald Wright 1) takes a look at how homo sapiens sapiens has become one of the most successful species on Earth. He writes "Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes." 2) In this lab we have experimented ever faster. "From the first chipped stone to the first smelted...

For a few posts I want to pursue a thread of thoughts that for me personally started a long while ago. Lately I have been made or otherwise become aware of sources that express similar sentiments better than I could. (Nevertheless, in this introductory post, I will try to summarize my thoughts.) It is the idea that humans are but one species in the animal kingdom (homo sapiens sapiens - see Wikipedia: Homo (genus) ) and as such humans are an inextricably...

... since the previous post.

Perhaps I should not have closed out the first post, yet... Thinking about it I decided to revoke the "Mueller's Blog" name of the blog and instead dub it [an unnamed Blog] for the time being. That's like some of the cultures who do not name children until they grow up and show significant unique traits that are then used to determine the name they will bear for the rest of their lives. That's eerily like taxonomy (see Wikipedia entry)?...

Writing a Blog does not come naturally (to me, anyway). Thus far in my life, I have not been successful in keeping a diary for any amount of time. I did maintain a family web site for a few years after which maintenance backlog and privacy concerns got the better of me. I took it down last year --after not having maintained it for a few years . When I joined the BE community I was still working with a different company. However, I knew already that...