Roofs and more

It’s about architecture and food!

Now this is what I’m talking about, an example of a house typology I’ve been envisioning for a while. Simple, passive design for a place, not divorced from its milieu:

To paraphrase an article I read on it: “The steel shading and concrete foundation help keep the home’s temperature a comfortable 23~C, even with outside temperatures hitting in the 40s; the air conditioning unit required by county codes still hasn’t been turned on.”

This is more of what we need.

Food wise, I caught a lecture by Michael Pollan on “It’s your World” (on NPR), great little lecture with those again simple three rules he’s researched:

• Eat Food (and have them be whole foods)
• Not too much (the 80% full rule seems to work well)
• Mostly Plants (85%+ of daily intake)

He also says much other interesting stuff to sum up his research and writing.

That the “western diet” is proving disastrous to health is one of those things that seems to fall in the “We don’t want to believe what we know” category. His illumination of the focus on nutritionism is spot-on, and interesting how it has not only altered eating and allowed huge profits and marketing, but also provided a cover for not confronting our actual food choices and consumption and their impact.

Good stuff.

Something to ponder

The quote in my last post is a great segue to something I’ve been doing some contemplation over the past few weeks and wanting to explore and share, and that is the human phenomenon of Cognitive Dissonance.  It’s one of those things that hides out in the background, going mostly unnoticed in our lives, yet it’s there at play.  Broadly speaking one of the key components to cognitive dissonance is the ability to actually hold two contradictory ideas in our mind simultaneously.  When the two are actually present at the same time there is discomfort and discord and so to avoid this (cope with it) we often rationalize and justify the discontinuity, or we isolate the two in a way that the twain shall never meet.  And this is where the quote “We don’t want to believe what we know,” lives.  Something comes up to challenge where we stand, and we rationalize it, explain it away, or simply dismiss it out of hand.  It doesn’t even matter if it’s right in our face, we can do a great job of sweeping it under the rug and not seeing it, explaining away the discomfort.

Another aspect, mused upon by Scott Adams on his blog once, is that cognitive dissonance also gives rise to resistance to and the inability to hear and to entertain other explanations or viewpoints other than those we already hold.  New ideas and new information, or information that simply doesn’t match up, are filtered through this barrier, making it the rare few that make it through.

Given that we are human beings, we have cognitive dissonance.  It’s not a question of “if,” it’s a question of “where do I have cognitive dissonance?”  The great thing is that once we recognize we are having it we are free to just let it be and to actually, well, listen, learn and grow.  I think if we all spent more time getting that cognitive dissonance is at work in all sorts of instances, we’d grow our understanding of the world, of possibilities, and of each other.  And that can only make the sandbox in which we play bigger.

And that would be a fantastic place to be in.

Reflective QotD

QFMFT:  “We don’t want to believe what we know.”  –  Yann Arthus-Bertrand

That’s a good one to meditate on.

Floating on the clouds

Soooo much going on, sooooo very cool stuff, and one stunning insight that has altered the very fabric of the everyday experience.  All of which begets some very cool things happening in my life!

Which I won’t catch up on in this post because I’m a meanie.  No, wait, that’s not right… actually simply because all that good stuff is making life very full and I’ve been neglecting this in its place…. and that’s not quite done yet.  HOWEVER, I would be very remiss if I didn’t post about UP!

So, it’s Pixar.  And Pixar can do no wrong.  So has been my mantra.  Even at their ‘worst’ they are still fine films… even though UP seems like yet another unlikely concept, would Pixar reign supreme once more?