The real-life sport of Quidditch was inspired by the Harry Potter franchise but has since changed its name to Quadball. Organizers hope the name change distances the sport from the social positions of author J,K. Rowling, perhaps growing the sport.
Quadball refers to the number of balls and positions in the sport; its playfield governed largely by field sport codes and standards.
Readings: The “30-30” Rule for Outdoor Athletic Events Lightning Hazard
The term “lively arts” is attributed to American writer and poet James Thurber. It was popularized in the mid-20th century as a way to describe various forms of performing arts, such as theater, dance, music, and other creative expressions.
Standards Michigan Lively Art Catalog
Curtain for the Lviv Theatre of Opera and Ballet
“What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist.
It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap”
— Marcel Duchamp
Today we refresh our understanding of the literature that guides the safety and sustainability goals of lively art events in educational settlements. Consortia have evolved quickly in recent years, leading and lagging changes in the content creation and delivery domain. With this evolution a professional discipline has emerged that requires training and certification in the electrotechnologies that contribute to “event safety”; among them:
ASHRAE International
Standard 62.1: This standard establishes minimum ventilation rates and indoor air quality requirements for commercial buildings, including theaters and auditoriums.
Standard 55: This standard specifies thermal comfort conditions for occupants in indoor environments, which can have an impact on air quality.
Audio Visual and Experience Association
Entertainment Services and Technology Association
Set design model for Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, created for a Paris production in 1895@GallicaBnF
print(“Lively Arts”)https://t.co/93JWrmLwPh pic.twitter.com/RRxuzmGT4r— Standards Michigan (@StandardsMich) December 10, 2021
The Johnny Carson School of Theatre & Film commits to the philosophy that students of the lively arts must be provided w/ practical skills for employment in industry &
educational settings.https://t.co/DRe7qWJKgW@NebCarsonSchool
Print(“Lively”) #StandardsNebraska pic.twitter.com/7K8zfXYlZj— Standards Michigan (@StandardsMich) February 4, 2022
International Code Council
International Building Code: Section 303.2 Assembly Group A-1
Illumination Engineering Society
RP-16-17 Lighting for Theatrical Productions: This standard provides guidance on the design and implementation of lighting systems for theatrical productions. It includes information on the use of color, light direction, and light intensity to create different moods and effects.
RP-30-15 Recommended Practice for the Design of Theatres and Auditoriums: This standard provides guidance on the design of theaters and auditoriums, including lighting systems. It covers topics such as seating layout, stage design, and acoustics, as well as lighting design considerations.
DG-24-19 Design Guide for Color and Illumination: This guide provides information on the use of color in lighting design, including color temperature, color rendering, and color mixing. It is relevant to theater lighting design as well as other applications.
National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security
National Fire Protection Association
Life Safety Code
National Electrical Code
Articles 518-540: Arenas, Lecture Halls & Theaters
Society of Motion Picture Technology Engineers
Professional Lighting and Sound Association
Dance and Athletic Floor Product Standards: ASTM F2118, EN 14904, DIN 18032-2
Incumbent standards-setting organizations such as ASHRAE, ASTM, ICC, IEEE, NFPA have also discovered, integrated and promulgated event safety and sustainability concepts into their catalog of best practice titles; many already incorporated by reference into public safety law. We explore relevant research on crowd management and spectator safety.
“Art is anything you can get away with” — Marshall McLuhan
More
International Code Council (N.B. Changes to its Code Development Process)
International Building Code: Entertainment Occupancies
Section 410: Stages, Platforms and Technical Production Areas
National Electrical Code: Articles 518 – 540
Code-Making Panel 15 (NEC-P15): Public Input Report 10/1/2020
Code-Making Panel 15 (NEC-P15): Public Comment Report 11/18/2021
ASHRAE 62.1 Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality
Princeton University: Set Design & Construction
Building the Virtual Stage: A System for Enabling Mixed Reality Theatre
University of California: Special Effects Safety and Loss Prevention
University of San Francisco Special Effects Safety
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Montclair State University Financial Position: $391, 445 (000)
New Jersey Schools Development Authority: Design Standards
The European Conservative: Harrison Pitt & Eric Kaufman
Wishing it could be fall year round 🍂 #MontclairViews pic.twitter.com/l1J5ybZ2g5
— Montclair State University (@montclairstateu) October 23, 2025
Montclair State University | Essex County New Jersey
Related:
God and Man at Yale | Willam F. Buckley, Jr 1951
The Conservative Mind | Russell Kirk 1953
The ISI is a nonprofit organization founded in 1953 by Frank Chodorov and William F. Buckley Jr. to promote conservative and libertarian ideas on American college campuses. ISI educates students through publications (e.g., Modern Age, The Intercollegiate Review), campus lectures, honors programs, and fellowships that emphasize free-market economics, limited government, traditional values, and the Western intellectual tradition. Independent of political parties, it has influenced generations of conservative leaders, including judges, journalists, and policymakers. Headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware, ISI remains active in countering perceived leftist dominance in higher education
New ISI chapters and new Collegiate Network publications reflect a growing demand for thoughtful, principled conservatism. Discover the work happening across the ISI community at the link below.https://t.co/F1tmk1741T pic.twitter.com/XqCn1lSITY
— Intercollegiate Studies Institute (@ISI) November 17, 2025
Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal | Mecosta County Michigan
“The seeming infinitude of internet content renders it transient: just one more funny video, just one more brightly-colored photo from family vacation, just one more horror story on the news, just one more passionately-written think piece.” pic.twitter.com/i71OLQmOqJ
— Russell Kirk Center (@KirkCenter) November 26, 2025
The Codex Alimentarius Commission regularly reviews and updates its standards and guidelines to reflect the latest scientific knowledge and technological advancements in the food industry. These standards are voluntary, but they serve as a reference for countries and international organizations when developing their own food safety and quality regulations. Compliance with Codex standards can facilitate international trade by ensuring that food products meet common criteria for safety and quality.
Some of the key areas addressed by Codex standards include:
Food safety: Codex sets standards for food contaminants, residues of pesticides and veterinary drugs, food additives, and microbiological criteria to ensure that food products are safe for consumption.
Food labeling: Codex provides guidelines on how food products should be labeled, including information on ingredients, nutrition, allergens, and more.
Food hygiene: It establishes principles and guidelines for food handling, processing, and storage to prevent foodborne illnesses.
Food quality: Codex standards also cover the quality attributes of various food products, including fruits, vegetables, and various processed foods.
Food additives: Codex regulates the use of food additives to ensure they are safe for consumption and serve a specific purpose in food production.
Residue limits: It sets maximum residue limits for various chemicals, such as pesticides and veterinary drugs, in food products to protect consumers from potential harm.
📰 | #CodexNews | National Codex Committee of Turkmenistan🇹🇲 visits Germany🇩🇪
➕ℹ️➡️ https://t.co/TixjQTUILA#FoodSafety | #Codex pic.twitter.com/1d29EQISDh
— Codex Alimentarius (@FAOWHOCodex) September 15, 2023
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Cultural Geographies + Rewriting the Earth
Paul Kingsbury (Simon Fraser University)
Arun Saldanha University of Minnesota
Acquiring Editor
Bridget Barry
Cultural geography has witnessed profound changes in recent years on three interrelated levels: theoretical, methodological, and sociopolitical. In terms of theory, new conceptions of culture have emerged that examine social and geographical differentiation as involving objects, affect, nonhumans, mobility, emotion, queerness, assemblage, materiality, the unconscious, biopolitics, relationality, and intersectionality.
At the level of methodology, experiments with fieldwork and writing practices demonstrate the extent to which cultural geography has learned from and contributes to many areas of policy, science, therapy, ethics, aesthetics, and activism. Finally, in terms of the sociopolitical engagements with the world outside of academia, cultural geographers are exploring the multiple crises of energy, climate change, nationalism, (sub)urban expansion, loss of biodiversity, inequality, and fragmentation of social life under the spell of digital technologies and consumerism.
Contemporary cultural geography, a distinctive and dynamic subdiscipline in geography, is an efflorescence of many strands of research exploring cultural phenomena with the shared commitment to spatiality. Arguably, the new hopes, dangers, and intensities that are rewriting the earth are best addressed through the unique perspectives of cultural geography.
This series, Cultural Geographies + Rewriting the Earth, provides a forum for cutting-edge research that embraces theoretical creativity, methodological experimentation, and ethico-political urgency. It provides a forum for a wide readership who desire to keep up with the innovations, debates, and agendas that define the humanities and social sciences today.
Check out our healthy recipes page here: https://t.co/4pu4UAA0JW pic.twitter.com/6dmxSdEUtt
— UMass Ag/Food/Env (@CAFE_UMass) June 9, 2025
Cranberry Mule: A holiday twist on the classic Moscow Mule, featuring cranberry juice, ginger beer, and vodka. Garnish with a slice of lime and fresh cranberries. Here’s a simple recipe for a “Cranberry Mule”:
2 oz vodka
4 oz ginger beer
2 oz cranberry juice
1/2 oz fresh lime juice
Ice
Cranberries and lime slices for garnish
Instructions:
Fill a copper mug (or another glass of your choice) with ice.
Pour in the vodka and cranberry juice.
Add the fresh lime juice.
Top off with ginger beer.
Stir gently to combine the ingredients.
Garnish with cranberries and a lime slice.
2024 Update to ASHRAE Position Statements
List of Titles, Scopes and Purposes of the ASHRAE Catalog
The parent title of this standard is ASHRAE Standard 90.1: Energy Standard for Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings and is continually under revision; frequently appearing in electrical engineering design guidelines, construction specifications, commissioning and O&M titles in our industry and others.
ASHRAE 90.4 defines an alternate compliance path, specific to data centers, while the compliance requirements for “non-data center” components are contained in ASHRAE 90.1 . The 90.4 structure also streamlines the ongoing maintenance process as well ensures that Standards 90.1 and 90.4 stay in their respective lanes to avoid any overlap and redundancies relating to the technical and administrative boundaries. Updates to ASHRAE 90.1 will still include the alternate compliance path defined in ASHRAE 90.4. Conversely the 2022 Edition of 90.4-2022 refers to ASHRAE 90.1-2022; cross-referencing one another synchronously
Links to noteworthy coverage from expert agencies on the 2022 revisions:
HPC Data Center Cooling Design Considerations
ASHRAE standard 90.4 updates emphasize green energy
ASHRAE updated its standard for data centers
How to Design a Data Center Cooling System for ASHRAE 90.4
Designing a Data Center with Computer Software Modeling
This title resides on the standing agenda of our Infotech 400 colloquium; hosted several times per year and as close coupled with the annual meetings of ASHRAE International as possible. Technical committees generally meet during these meetings make decisions about the ASHRAE catalog. The next all committee conference will be hosted January 20-24, 2024 in Chicago. As always we encourage education industry facility managers, energy conservation workgroups and sustainability professionals to participate directly in the ASHRAE consensus standard development process. It is one of the better facilities out there.
Start at ASHRAE’s public commenting facility:
Online Standards Actions & Public Review Drafts
Update: May 30, 2023
Proposed Addendum g makes changes to definitions were modified in section 3 and mandatory language in Section 6 to support the regulation of process heat and process ventilation was moved in the section for clarity. Other changes are added based on comments from the first public review including changes to informative notes.
Consultation closes June 4th
Update: February 10, 2023
The most actively managed consensus standard for data center energy supply operating in education communities (and most others) is not published by the IEEE but rather by ASHRAE International — ASHRAE 90.4 Energy Standard for Data Centers (2019). It is not required to be a free access title although anyone may participate in its development. It is copyrighted and ready for purchase but, for our purpose here, we need only examine its scope and purpose. A superceded version of 90.4 is available in the link below:
Third ISC Public Review Draft (January 2016)
Noteworthy: The heavy dependence on IEEE power chain standards as seen in the Appendix and Chapter 8. Recent errata are linked below:
We provide the foregoing links for a deeper dive “into the weeds”. Another addendum has been released for consultation; largely administrative:
ASHRAE 90.4 | Pages 60-61 | Consultation closes January 15, 2023.
It is likely that the technical committee charged with updating this standard are already at work preparing an updated version that will supercede the 2019 Edition. CLICK HERE for a listing of Project Committee Interim Meetings.
We maintain many titles from the ASHRAE catalog on the standing agenda of our Mechanical, Energy 200/400, Data and Cloud teleconferences. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Originally posted Summer 2020.
ASHRAE International has released four new addenda to its energy conservation consensus document ASHRAE 90.4-2016 Energy Standard for Data Centers. This document establishes the minimum energy efficiency requirements of data centers for design and construction, for the creation of a plan for operation and maintenance and for utilization of on-site or off-site renewable energy resources.
It is a relatively new document more fully explained in an article published by ASHRAE in 2016 (Click here). The addenda described briefly:
Addendum a – clarifies existing requirements in Section 6.5 as well as introduce new provisions to encourage heat recovery within data centers.
Addendum b – clarifies existing requirements in Sections 6 and 11 and to provide guidance for taking credit for renewable energy systems.
Addendum d – a response to a Request for Interpretation on the 90.4 consideration of DieselRotary UPS Systems (DRUPS) and the corresponding accounting of these systems in the Electrical Loss Component (ELC). In crafting the IC, the committee also identified several marginal changes to 90.4 definitions and passages in Section 8 that would add further clarity to the issue. This addendum contains the proposed changes for that aim as well as other minor changes to correct spelling or text errors, incorporate the latest ELC values into Section 11, and to refresh information in the Normative Reference.
Addendum e adds language to Section 11 intended to clarify how compliance with Standard 90.4 can be achieved through the use of shared systems.
Comments are due September 6th. Until this deadline you may review the changes and comment upon them by by CLICKING HERE
Universitat de Barcelona
Education facility managers, energy conservation workgroups and sustainability professionals are encouraged to participate directly in the ASHRAE standard development process. Start at ASHRAE’s public commenting facility:
Online Standards Actions & Public Review Drafts
The ASHRAE catalog is a priority title in our practice. This title appears on the standing agenda of our Infotech sessions. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Issue: [12-54]
Category: Telecommunications, Infotech, Energy
Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Robert G. Arno, Neal Dowling, Jim Harvey, Mike Hiler, Robert Schuerger, Larry Spielvogel
Addendum av to ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1-2022, Energy Standard for Sites and Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings. This addendum creates more exacting provisions for envelope alterations. The new format is intended to better communicate the requirements, triggers, and allowances associated with performing an envelope alteration to promote energy efficiency within the impacted area(s). Consultation closes October 6.
ANSI Standards Action Weekly Edition | Given ASHRAE’s revision redlines are frequently uploaded here
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) is an ANSI-accredited continuous-maintenance standards developer (a major contributor to what we call a regulatory product development “stream”). Continuous maintenance means that changes to its consensus products can change in as little as 30 days so it is wise to keep pace.
Among the leading titles in its catalog is ASHRAE 90.1 Energy Standard for Sites and Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings. Standard 90.1 has been a benchmark for commercial building energy codes in the United States and a key basis for codes and standards around the world for more than 35 years. Free access to ASHRAE 90.1 version is available at the link below:
READ ONLY Version of 2022 ASHRAE 90.1
Redlines are released at a fairly brisk pace — with 30 to 45 day consultation periods. A related title — ASHRAE 189.1 Standard for the Design of High Performance Green Buildings — first published in 2009 and far more prescriptive in its scope heavily references parent title 90.1 so we usually them as a pair because 189.1 makes a market for green building conformance enterprises. Note the “extreme prescriptiveness” (our term of art) in 189.1 which has the practical effect of legislating engineering judgement, in our view.
25 January 2023: Newly Released ASHRAE 90.1-2022 Includes Expanded Scope For Building Sites
ASHRAE committees post their redlines at the link below:
Online Standards Actions & Public Review Drafts
Education estate managers, energy conservation workgroups, sustainability officers, electric shop foreman, electricians and front-line maintenance professionals who change lighting fixtures, maintain environmental air systems are encouraged to participate directly in the ASHRAE consensus standard development process.
We also maintain ASHRAE best practice titles as standing items on our Mechanical, Water, Energy and Illumination colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Issue: [Various]
Category: Mechanical, Electrical, Energy Conservation, Facility Asset Management, US Department of Energy, #SmartCampus
Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Larry Spielvogel, Richard Robben
Under Construction: ASHRAE WORKSPACE
More
ARCHIVE 2002-2016 / ASHRAE 90.1 ENERGY STANDARD FOR BUILDINGS
US Department of Energy Building Energy Codes Program
ASHRAE Guideline 0 The Commissioning Process
Why Software is Eating the World
* Many standards-developing organizations aim to broaden their influence by entering the product standard and certification domain. Although our primary focus is on interoperability standards (within a system of interoperable products), we also consider market dynamics when product performance specifications are incorporated by reference into public law.
This map shows how US households heat their homes. Source: https://t.co/FYhAQ4U9iV pic.twitter.com/Vyw02f7Wa2
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) December 18, 2024
Love data like this, even though I would set temperature at a different scale. I like it warm. pic.twitter.com/itJgsZWZlK
— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) December 15, 2024
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwB pic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
— USPTO (@uspto) July 13, 2023
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