Category: society

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Home cooling

In the summer months, in Europe, the concern shifts from heating your home to cooling your home. For generations this has been possible without use of air conditioning. A natural way of cooling has been for centuries to dig into earth to take advantage of the rather stable and cool temperatures underground. In home building this has also been a tradition for centuries to build cellars underneath a home.
Wine growing regions have used the cellar as a natural cooling facility for long and short term storage of wine. Digging into a mountain of a valley offered a natural cool storage solution for years without additional energy consumption. Modern buildings should return to this practice and gain cold from below the surface to cool buildings in the warm or hot seasons. Good isolation combined with the cool temperatures from below the surface in summer months will substantially save energy and thereby CO2 emissions. Circulation of the cool air from below to the upper floors is the issue as well as dealing with differential humidity levels. The wisdom of previous generations in home building with no access to air conditioning (avoiding the air conditioning paradox) is likely to experience a revival in the coming years.
Coolness is the new and old wisdom.

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Home extension

Most people think of home extension as some sort of extension of the roof, an additional room or the transformation of a garage into an additional room. However, the digital home requires a home extension of a different kind. In order for all rooms to be included into the digital home a range extender of your wireless might be necessary. Yes, this even includes the bathrooms, because otherwise you can no longer sing along your favourite tune under the shower if you are used to the streaming of the musical or orchestral accompaniment. Additionally, the immediate surroundings of a home with or without garden might make it necessary for your robot to mow properly or your digital letter box to send you the mail for the long awaited love letters while you out of home.
Being out of range in your home, is almost equal to not being home at all. Of course, you don’t have to automatically send an out of home message to all your contacts when you are too far away from your digital home for your digital device, but the comfort of a range extender may avoid the new “digital inequality” between adolescents in your home. Room choices are made according to wireless access points and signal strength rather than the room with the best view. Lots of new issues arise we did not even think we would have 10 years ago. Of course, we follow the suggestions of an AI chatbot that recommends the best location for us after we entered images and descriptions of the consistency of each wall into the system. Just a practical advice, install extensions out of reach of any toddler, because a sudden interruption of the connection will create very unpleasant surprises.

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Satie Popular

Erik Satie has been quite involved with the surrealist and Dada movement of his time. He personally knew the main proponents ranging from Breton to Magritte. He became one of the major figures applying the ideas of surrealism to music. His early compositions like the Gnossienne (extract of Nr. 1 below) are admired for their simplicity. They became popular only years later and have entered popular music repertoire through many retakes of the original tune in various styles ranging from jazz to rap. Many of Satie’s formative years he spent playing and performing popular music in the animated cafés, bars and shows of Montmartre in Paris. The making of a living based on music can be a challenge. Satie had to bear the full risk of a life in poverty at times to reserve sufficient time for his creative work.
He remained very much connected to the working class as his later membership of the Communist party after the Great War testifies. Composing for children and transmitting music to the next generation was equally close to his heart and mind, especially in his later years.
For him, popular music constituted a fountain of original tunes and a test with an intuitive audience rather than the academic circles. Maybe, with this attitude, he followed the footsteps of Flotow, Offenbach, Ravel and many others later on until pop music became the vastly dominant music in the late 20th and 21st centuries.

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Erik Satie Satisfied

The collection of letters from Erik Satie contains more than 1000 letters amongst them some in exchange with the best artists of his time. The range is largely due to the circle of artists who met at Montmartre in Paris before and during the Great War. We discover letters to Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse. For some artists there are 100+ letters preserved like to Jean Cocteau. In the 1920s he composed music for shows at Montmartre, where the scenario was painted by Pablo Picasso and costumes designed by Coco Chanel. The sculpture by Brancusi must have been familiar to him, just as much as the cubist paintings by Georges Braques, as there are also letters or references to such letters in the impressive 1000+ pages collection. Like Ravel he was rejected by the Conservatoire de Musique de Paris in his early days as student. Montmartre allowed to live and create at the same time while living on a minimal budget. Erik Satie signed his letters with ES. In German this denotes a “neutrum”, maybe, beyond male or female differentiation, but also a tonality in music (E flat). There is no trace that this was a conscious choice. It is just another unresolved puzzle about the self-declared “Gymnopédiste” and composer of the “Parade” and the popular piano music the “Gnossienne”. 100 years after his death on 1925-7-1 he (ES) could be rather satisfied with his impact on the course of music in the 20th century and beyond.

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Smart Heat Pumps

The potential to reduce CO2 emissions through the replacement of fossil fuels with heat pumps is huge. The technology is well known and has reached a considerable amount of maturity in the mid 2020s. Noise is much less an issue even at higher compression rates and during the use of booster functions to cater for peaks of hot water or home heating. Combined with solar energy the local production and consumption of energy turn each household into a “prosumer” of energy. Besides the initial investment you have to find capable technicians and enterprises that master the installation of the technology with the necessary care and ensure the adequate calculation of the envisaged energy needs of the household. Household and family size matter, and this is not easy to project into the future. Additional saving potentials can be harvested through the use of smart home applications. Switch off the heating before you leave or if a longer than previewed absence occurs. Just do it if you are away from home. Alternatively, just start the heating when you get on your way back home from work rather than at previously estimated, but fixed times. Smart technology is just perfect for such use cases.

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Archers destroyed

In the attempt to explain modern warfare to people, the Roman and medieval languages are staging a comeback. The archers have found their way from warfare into art history and back again. George Barros explains recent defensive actions by Ukrainian military forces as the strategy to put the archers out of power rather than the arches.
Destroyed or unfit air planes can no longer launch missiles or bombs. The Russian reserves are, however, fairly numerous, but the air strikes on the modern archers have demonstrated an astonishing military intelligence on the Ukrainian side. The technological advances of the Ukrainian military services may shift the balance or raise the costs of war to Russia, considerably.

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Citizen Walk

Capitals like Paris and Berlin make great efforts to improve the walkability of their cities. After decades of focus on automotive traffic and mobility and the detrimental effects on health for several generations of people, the awareness that walking citizens are part of the solution is spreading. Citizens of Paris voted in a referendum to stop circulation of cars in 500 more streets. In Berlin pedestrians unite to mobilize more people to take to the streets as well and reclaim walking space. In high density spaces like metropolitan areas it is possible to reach all major amenities within a reasonable walking distance. The more spread out suburban area, however, leve fewer options to walk and carry your shopping or do your dily commute to work while walking. Fewer cars and pharmaceutical products sold would mean less „artificial economic growth, but more healthy and happy citizens. It will take decades again to realize such visions.

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Paris Gare

Train stations in metropolitan inner cities are hot spots of traffic and mobility. The number of people passing through these exchanges are impressive. Public transport systems are continuously put to the test of their capacity to handle passengers who want to get from A to B the fastest way possible. In Paris the RER lines, metro and buses to a great job in handling the affluence of passengers. The comparatively small number of passengers arriving and departing nyy taxi, however, still take a disproportionate amount of space. That’s part of the differentiation or inequality of mobility in Paris. Person‘s in need of assistance should have special access to central points of mobility like train stations. Everybody else could rely on shared modes of transportation otherwise the millions of inhabitants will not be able to get around in a comfortable way.

 

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Retirement Recruitment

The debate that later retirement of seniors reduces the hiring of youth has received new attention. Paul Mohnen published a paper on the “retirement slowdown on the US youth labor market” , which demonstrates this “crowding out effect”. Moreover, the recruitment of middle aged workers is also affected, as job changes slowed down for these age groups. The surprising finding is that higher skilled youth suffers the largest reduction in employment opportunities and become “pulled” into lower skilled jobs as jo offers for lower skilled persons remained high during the observation periods (until 2017!). This evidence suggests that the well-documented firm-level effect of fewer retirement means less recruitment holds also for society as a whole. Knowing that recruitment during a recession affects young workers more than persons already in employment, the macro level effects in 2025 will be rather unfavorable for young labor market entrants. (Image Frans Hals 1625, Odessa Museum in Berlin exhibition 2025).

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Artist Development

For many artists it takes years before they find their idiosyncratic style. Testing different forms of art before zooming in on a particular style of art is the  common trajectory for most artists. Maybe the art marker and collectors of art are in search of a “defining style” for an artist so the uniqueness becomes more easily identifiable. Being part of a group of artists has been beneficial as well. The “Neue Nationalgalerie” in Berlin makes this development of an artist, in this case Lygia Clark transparent through the organization of a retrospective devoted to her evolution from abstract paintings towards participative and more organic forms of art. Berlin offers to interact with the pieces at the exhibition. You become part of the exhibition and the happening of art instantaneously. The form stays the same, the persons interacting change permanently. The piece of art is never the same. Just the idea of it thrives. In the Corpo Colletivo the performers wear an overall, all of them are linked to each other and movements happen organically as a group rather than individually. This is like a tutorial in sociology as individuals move as part of a collective body and feel the embeddedness and multiple links to other persons (Image: Corpo Collectivo 1970, exhibit in Berlin 2025)