Tag Archives: D6

Loading
loading..

Theater Safety

“ I think that the theater is the initial glamorizer of thought; where it can be told – without too much disguise but without too much directness either – the secrets, and thereby its antipathies and sympathies – the secrets and the knowledge of the human heart…

…I think that makes the art of the theater as important as the doctor or the psychologist or the Minister…

…I think it’s vitally important that the world knows itself and I think the theater is one of the most immediate means of expression towards that end…”

– Sir Lawrence Olivier

Set design model by Marcel Jambon for an 1895 Paris production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello

Demand for live events in college towns — what is now called”entertainment content” — is gathering pace; owed somewhat to an older demographic that prefers expanded social interaction to the online entertainment offerings that the younger demographic prefers*.  We see an expansion of the market in the construction of architecturally astonishing buildings; though the circumstances of pandemic has changed everything.

Today our interest lies in the complex safety and sustainability characteristics of the physical infrastructure — with particular interest in the fire protection, environmental air and electrotechnologies required to make them safe and sustainable.   This facility class is far more complicated technologically and operates at significantly higher risk than, say, classrooms or office space.

The Entertainment Services and Technology Association is one of the first names in trade associations that support the ‘business of show business’ through networking, safe practices, education, and representation.  We follow the standards making activity of its technical committees and monitor public commenting opportunities.  ESTA releases markups of its consensus products for public comment at a fairly brisk pace on its standards development landing page:

ESTA Public Review Drafts

Consultation on an illumination standard runs through April 7th.

Transcripts of related standards:

2026 National Electrical Code Public Input Report CMP-15

2026 National Electrical Code Second Draft Report CMP-15

You may obtain an electronic copy at the link above, along with a comment form.  Send your comments to Karl Ruling, (212) 244-1505, standards@esta.org with an optional copy to psa@ansi.org).  We encourage our colleagues in school districts and in colleges and universities large and small; with responsibilities for the safety and sustainability of cultural resource properties, media centers, performance venues to participate in the ESTA technical standards development program.

Glorya Kaufman School of Dance / University of Southern California

We keep the ESTA suite on the standing agenda of our Lively Arts colloquia; open to everyone.   See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting.

Since the electrotechnologies for the lively arts have evolved into complex, interoperable systems we also collaborate with the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee on technical specifics.  That committee meets online four times per month in European and American time zones.

“We’re all actors: We all play different roles in different situations.”

Marlon Brando

 

Issue: [Various]

Category: Electrical, Infotech, Lively Arts,

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Christine Fischer, Mike Hiler, Nehad El-Sherif

ARCHIVE: ESTA


*More >>

State Capitals And College Towns: A Recipe For Success

Baby Boomers Are Retiring to College Towns

The original University of Michigan codes and standards advocacy enterprise interviewed an ESTA affiliate in 2015:


Entertainment Occupancies

World Census of Agriculture

Much like its role as a discoverer of new knowledge and as a large consumer in the energy sector, education communities have a significant role in food security research and as a consumer in its school lunch programs, dormitory, athletic facility and healthcare enterprises.  Accordingly — in much the same way we follow the US Census Bureau’s monthly construction activity report — we follow a data point provided by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as one of our stars to steer by.

The World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates  is a monthly report published by the USDA that provides comprehensive forecast of supply and demand for major crops (global and United States) and livestock (U.S. only). The report provides an analysis of the fundamental condition of the agricultural commodity markets for the use of farmers, governments and other market participants.

 

World Agricultural Supply & Demand Estimates | June 2025

 

 

 

We maintain the WASDE report on our periodic Nourriture colloquia.   See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone


More

Morrill Land-Grant Act

Family of Mr. Schoenfeldt | Sheridan County, Kansas
Source: Farm Security Administration Russell Lee photographer

Fish and Chips and the British Working Class

“Fish and Chips” | Fred Laidler (1918–1988)

Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1930

Fish and chips was in many ways the pioneer fast-food industry.  It became an essential component of working-class diet and popular culture in parts of London, and over wide areas of industrial midland and northern England and southern Scotland, in the early decades of the twentieth century…I propose to argue that the fish and chip trade was not only important enough in itself to justify sustained historical analysis, but also that it provides a useful vantage point for examining important changes in British society more generally.”

— John Walken, 1998, Journal of Social History


Electrical Resource Adequacy

 “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation,
the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
— P.J. O’Rourke

 

“Federal Power Act” | June 10, 1920, Chapter 285 of the 66th Congress] 

Comment on FERC Action

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is an independent agency within the U.S. federal government that regulates interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil. It oversees wholesale energy markets, pipeline infrastructure, and hydroelectric projects, ensuring fair rates and reliability. While independent, FERC operates under the Department of Energy’s umbrella but does not take direct orders from the executive branch.

FERC enforces energy laws, approves infrastructure projects, and regulates market competition. FERC plays a crucial role in balancing economic, environmental, and energy security concerns, aiming to maintain a stable and efficient energy system across the United States.  Since the U.S. shares interconnected electricity grids with Canada and Mexico, FERC’s decisions on transmission rules and pricing affect energy flows and grid reliability in both countries.

Our interest lies in closing a technical gap that exists upstream from the building service point and downstream from the utility supply point. Some, not all of it, can be accomplished with titles in the IEEE catalog.

Given the dominance of vertical incumbents in the electric power domain, we have submitted a tranche of reliability concepts into the ASHRAE, NFPA and ICC catalogs — not so much with the expectation that they will be gratefully received — but that our proposals will unleash competitive energies among developers of voluntary consensus standards.

One of our proposals was heard at the April-May meetings of the International Code Council.  We are happy to discuss the outcome of that proposal any day at the usual hour.



Commissioner-Led Reliability Technical Conference Agenda: October 16, 2024, 10:00 AM

 


Nothing happened in August

Technical Conference RE: Large Loads Co-Located at Generating Facilities: November 1, 10AM EDT

Echo Chamber Synonyms: mutual admiration society, self congratulatory club,

back patting session, congratulatory loop, closed loop of praise, reciprocal praise fest,

feedback bubble, endless validation cycle, compliment carousel.

Predictive Reliability Analysis of Power Distribution Systems Considering the Effects of Seasonal Factors on Outage Data Using Weibull Analysis Combined With Polynomial Regression


February 2024 Highlights 

Failure Rate Prediction Model of Substation Equipment Based on Weibull Distribution and Time Series Analysis

January 2024 Highlights



Transmission Planning Using a Reliability Criterion

Readings / The Administrative State

In power system engineering, availability and reliability are two important concepts, but they refer to different aspects of the system’s performance.

Reliability:

  • Reliability refers to the ability of a power system to perform its intended function without failure for a specified period under given operating conditions. It is essentially a measure of how dependable the system is.
  • Reliability metrics often include indices such as the frequency and duration of outages, failure rates, mean time between failures (MTBF), and similar measures.
  • Reliability analysis focuses on identifying potential failure modes, predicting failure probabilities, and implementing measures to mitigate risks and improve system resilience.Availability:
  • Availability, on the other hand, refers to the proportion of time that a power system is operational and able to deliver power when needed, considering both scheduled and unscheduled downtime.
  • Availability is influenced by factors such as maintenance schedules, repair times, and system design redundancies.
  • Availability is typically expressed as a percentage and can be calculated using the ratio of the uptime to the total time (uptime plus downtime).
  • Availability analysis aims to maximize the operational readiness of the system by minimizing downtime and optimizing maintenance strategies.

Reliability focuses on the likelihood of failure and the ability of the system to sustain operations over time, while availability concerns the actual uptime and downtime of the system, reflecting its readiness to deliver power when required. Both concepts are crucial for assessing and improving the performance of power systems, but they address different aspects of system behavior.

 

November 2023 Highlights | FERC insight | Volume 10

Determining System and Subsystem Availability Requirements: Resource Planning and Evaluation

Comment: These 1-hour sessions tend to be administrative in substance, meeting the minimum requirements of the Sunshine Act. This meeting was no exception. Access to the substance of the docket is linked here.

Noteworthy: Research into the natural gas supply following Winter Storm Elliot.

 


August 14, 2003


 UPDATED POLICIES ON U.S. DECARBONIZATION AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSITIONS


June 15:FERC Finalizes Plans to Boost Grid Reliability in Extreme Weather Conditions

On Monday June 13th, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission commissioners informed the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that the “environmental justice” agenda prohibits reliable dispatchable electric power needed for national power security. One megawatt of natural gas generation does not equal one megawatt of renewable generation. The minority party on the committee — the oldest standing legislative committee in the House of Representatives (established 1795) — appears indifferent to the reliability consequences of its policy.

Joint Federal-State Task Force on Electric Transmission

“Our nation’s continued energy transition requires the efficient development of new transmission infrastructure. Federal and state regulators must address numerous transmission-related issues, including how to plan and pay for new transmission infrastructure and how to navigate shared federal-state regulatory authority and processes. As a result, the time is ripe for greater federal-state coordination and cooperation.”












 

Bibliography:

Natural Gas Act of 1938

Natural Gas Policy Act of 1978

Glossary of Terms Used in NERC Reliability Standards

The Major Questions Doctrine and Transmission Planning Reform

As utilities spend billions on transmission, support builds for independent monitoring

States press FERC for independent monitors on transmission planning, spending as Southern Co. balks

Related:

Homeland Power Security

At the July 20th meeting of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Tristan Kessler explained the technical basis for a Draft Final Rule for Improvements to Generator Interconnection Procedures and Agreements, On August 16th the Commission posted a video reflecting changes in national energy policy since August 14, 2003; the largest blackout in American history.

International Zoning Code

ANSI Standards Action: February 2, 2024

National Association of County Engineers

The purpose of the code is to establish minimum requirements to provide a reasonable level of health, safety, property protection and welfare by controlling the design, location, use or occupancy of all buildings and structures through the regulated and orderly development of land and land uses within this jurisdiction.

CLICK IMAGE

Municipalities usually have specific land use or zoning considerations to accommodate the unique needs and characteristics of college towns:

  1. Mixed-Use Zoning: Cities with colleges and universities often employ mixed-use zoning strategies to encourage a vibrant and diverse urban environment. This zoning approach allows for a combination of residential, commercial, and institutional uses within the same area, fostering a sense of community and facilitating interactions between students, faculty, and residents.
  2. Height and Density Restrictions: Due to the presence of educational institutions, cities may have specific regulations on building height and density to ensure compatibility with the surrounding neighborhoods and maintain the character of the area. These restrictions help balance the need for development with the preservation of the existing urban fabric.
  3. Student Housing: Cities with colleges and universities may have regulations or guidelines for student housing to ensure an adequate supply of affordable and safe accommodations for students. This can
    include requirements for minimum bedroom sizes, occupancy limits, and proximity to campus.
  4. Parking and Transportation: Given the concentration of students, faculty, and staff, parking and transportation considerations are crucial. Cities may require educational institutions to provide parking facilities or implement transportation demand management strategies, such as promoting public transit use, cycling infrastructure, and pedestrian-friendly designs.
  5. Community Engagement: Some cities encourage colleges and universities to engage with the local community through formalized agreements or community benefit plans. These may include commitments to support local businesses, contribute to neighborhood improvement projects, or provide educational and cultural resources to residents.

This is a relatively new title in the International Code Council catalog; revised every three years in the Group B tranche of titles.  Search on character strings such as “zoning” in the link below reveals the ideas that ran through the current revision:

Complete Monograph: 2022 Proposed Changes to Group B I-Codes (1971 pages)

We maintain it on our periodic I-Codes colloquia, open to everyone.  Proposals for the 2026 revision will be received until January 10, 2025.

2024/2025/2026 ICC CODE DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE

We maintain it on our periodic I-Codes colloquia, open to everyone with the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.

The City Rises (La città che sale) | 1910 Umberto Boccioni


Related:

Signs, Signs, Signs

  1. Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015): This Supreme Court case involved a challenge to the town of Gilbert, Arizona’s sign code, which regulated the size, location, and duration of signs based on their content. The court held that the sign code was a content-based restriction on speech and therefore subject to strict scrutiny.
  2. City of Ladue v. Gilleo (1994): In this Supreme Court case, the court struck down a municipal ordinance that banned the display of signs on residential property, except for signs that fell within specific exemptions. The court held that the ban was an unconstitutional restriction on the freedom of speech.
  3. Metromedia, Inc. v. San Diego (1981): This Supreme Court case involved a challenge to a San Diego ordinance that banned off-premises advertising signs while allowing on-premises signs. The court held that the ordinance was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech, as it discriminated against certain types of speech.
  4. City of Ladue v. Center for the Study of Responsive Law, Inc. (1980): In this Supreme Court case, the court upheld a municipal ordinance that prohibited the display of signs on public property, but only if the signs were posted for longer than 10 days. The court held that the ordinance was a valid time, place, and manner restriction on speech.
  5. City of Boerne v. Flores (1997): This Supreme Court case involved a challenge to a municipal sign code that regulated the size, location, and content of signs in the city. The court held that the sign code violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as it burdened the exercise of religion without a compelling government interest.

 

Merlin’s Owl: A Charge to Graduates

“It is at leaving the college and entering the world that the education of youth begins…

It is less uniform than that of childhood but more dependent on chance, and doubtless more important.

The youth is then attacked by a greater number of sensations: all that surrounds him strikes him,

and strikes him forcibly.”

—  Claude-Adrien Helvétius (A Treatise on Man)

“The supply of government

exceeds the demand”

— Lewis Lapham

If I bear in mind the syllabus with which the class of 2003 has been engaged over the last four years, I don’t know how else to think of your invitation to deliver a commencement speech except as the proverbial praise from Caesar. I count it both as an honor and as a piece of luck because I’m always glad of the chance to try for an answer to the question, “What in God’s name are the humanities, and why are they of any use to us here in the bright blue, technological wonder of the twenty-first century?”

The standard set of answers read like funeral orations—newspaper columnists mourning the death of Western civilization, editors of alumni magazines likening the humanities to a suite of virgins set upon by Philistines or dogs, college deans talking about the precious ornaments of ancient art and modern literature buried in the tomb of a medieval library. The sanctimony is traditional, and invariably reminds me of a poem by Archibald MacLeish: “Freedom that was a thing to use / They’ve made a thing to save / And staked it in and fenced it round / Like a dead man’s grave.”

A mistake to think of the humanities as luxuries or as a decent appearance that must be kept up, like the country club membership or the house in Palm Beach. Necessities. I can think of no other set of studies more relevant to our present circumstance. Our technologists bear comparison to the sorcerer’s apprentice, producing continuously improved means toward increasingly ill-defined ends. Unless we look to the humanities to clean up the mess, we stand a better than even chance of killing ourselves with our new toys.

In its Renaissance usages, the word humanist connotes resourcefulness, skepticism, irony, and self-reliance, “refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.” A character played by Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart, not by Hugh Grant; more to do with the cunning of Ulysses, great-hearted and wide wandering, than with the dithering of the cultural endowments in Washington or with the intrigues behind the arras of the English Department at Yale. Humanism is about the passion of thought and the will to understand, about Darwin sailing for the Galapagos or Dostoyevsky in trouble with the police, about Condorcet dying in a garret and hunted by agents of the guillotine, writing his outline of human progress so that he might hearten mankind by his vision of its possible perfections.

The imaginative taking of experience of the past can be put through as many paces as a well-trained circus horse. When I’m at a loss to remember why I read Tacitus or Molière, I think of the magician Merlin in T.H. White’s Once and Future King, seated under a willow tree and presenting the young Prince Arthur with a certain cure for melancholy:

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.

Among my own teachers, the one nearest in spirit to T.H. White’s Merlin turned up forty years ago under a potted palm tree in a New York City restaurant under the name of Otto Friedrich. In the heyday of what was then called “The New Journalism,” Otto was the managing editor of The Saturday Evening Post, and I was one of the magazine’s newly recruited contract writers. When I first met him in the autumn of 1962 he seemed a remote and professorial figure—tall and heavyset but with the stooped posture of a man accustomed to bending over books, taciturn, unsentimental, and matter-of-fact, given to wearing the same rumpled suit for days on end, not yet fifty but seeming as old as Merlin’s owl. Over the course of the next five years, listening to him talk about the last months of the Roman Empire or Mozart’s attachment to the key of E flat with the same degree of certainty that he brought to a discussion of the Kennedy administration’s geopolitical game theory, I understood that he joined a scholar’s love of learning with a journalist’s boundless curiosity. Free of cant and incapable of hypocrisy, Otto taught by example instead of by precept, patiently and with an unstinting kindness that he took a good deal of trouble to conceal behind a show of churlishness. He was as suspicious of metaphors as he was of politicians, and because he was a better writer than all but a few (a very few) of the more famous authors whose work he ushered into the light of print I seldom quarreled with his judgment. Otto never indulged a writer with the sloppy display of adjectives that he associated with publishers’ blurbs and lipstick advertisements, and the best that could be hoped for was that the manuscript might pass inspection without attracting a scourge of marginal notes (“empty phrase,” “wrong word,” “absurdity”) that indicated not only a redrafting of the text but also the jettisoning of its presumed topic. By the time the Post ceased publication in the spring of 1969 I had come to recognize him as a man who summed up in his life and turn of mind what I take to be the meaning of the word humanist.

Gallery

Over the course of a life that didn’t allow him much time to write, he published fourteen books, and when he died at the age of sixty-six in 1995, he had a list of twenty other books in mind, among them biographies of Richard Wagner, Saint Paul, and Attila the Hun, a man whom he regarded as “much misunderstood, and far more worthy than his Roman enemy.” Otto wrote books in the way that other people wander off into forests, chasing his intellectual enthusiasms as if they were obscure butterflies or rare mushrooms—books about roses and Édouard Manet’s Olympia, extended essays about Scarlatti, the Albigensian Crusade, the siege of Monte Cassino and the fires of Auschwitz, books about Berlin in the 1920s and Hollywood in the 1940s, biographies of Glenn Gould and Helmuth von Moltke—a historian in the amateur tradition of Henry AdamsBernard DeVoto, and Walter Karp. Otto ignored the apparatus of academic scholarship and approached the study of history in the same spirit that he approached Mozart’s piano concertos. “The only way to understand a Mozart concerto thoroughly,” he once said, “is to sit down at the piano and play it, which I do with his number twenty-seven, humbly, every six months or so.”

Otto was never at a loss for a story to tell, if not about drifting ships then about earthquakes, or flowering trees, or the company of the Christian miracles gathered on the island of Iona. His life was not without sorrow—two of his children born disabled, his right eye gone blind with disease, none of his books profitable enough to release him from his chores as an editor, a siege of mental illness so severe that for a year it brought him near insanity—but like the Merlin imagined by T.H. White, he found that the best thing for being sad was to learn something. Although he was well versed in the “trembling of the anatomies,” I never once heard him complain of his misfortunes, and I suspect that he had little liking or patience for the kind of people—quite a few of them writers of large reputation—who display their afflictions as if they were made of gold lace. Otto believed that we are all caught up in the telling of stories (some more complicated and more beautiful than others, many of them incoherent, a few of them immortal), and he assumed that no matter how well or how poorly we manage the plot, we are all of us engaged in the same enterprise, all of us seeking evocations or representations of what we can recognize as appropriately human.

On the afternoon of May 24, 1995, in Saint Peter’s Church on Lexington Avenue in New York City the memorial service began with the playing of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and as I listened to the theme presenting itself in a succession of different rhythms and voices, I thought of Otto setting the libretto of human feeling to the counterpoint of time. The music shifted to an aria from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, and I remembered that two years before going to Paris in the summer of 1948, Otto had traveled around Europe to pay his respects to various artists in whose work he had found inspiration. “Barging in on living monuments,” he once said, “a tourist collecting a generation.” At Rapallo in the north of Italy Otto invited himself to tea with Sir Max and Lady Beerbohm; in Rome he found George Santayana, reclining in striped pajamas on his bed at the Convent of the Blue Nuns. In Munich he briefly took piano lessons with Joseph Pembauer, who was said to have been a pupil of Liszt, and on the terrace of the Grand Hotel in Lausanne, he accosted Richard Strauss, by then a bent and white-haired man of eighty-two, with the first pages of a piano concerto he had begun to write on the voyage from New York. The elderly lady accompanying the composer on his afternoon walk angrily waved Otto out of sight, never guessing what it was that Otto had come to say or that forty-nine years later, on Lexington Avenue and East 53rd Street, the music of Der Rosenkavalier would oversee the departure of Otto’s civilizing spirit.

Within the profession of journalism I often have heard it said that the truth shall make men free, but it was Otto who taught me what the phrase means. The truth isn’t about the acquisition of doctrine or the assimilation of statistics, not even about the chicanery in Washington or the scandal in Santa Monica. It’s about the courage to trust one’s own thought and observation, to possess one’s own history, speak in one’s own voice. Most of Otto’s books never sold more than a few thousand copies, but although he knew that the reading and writing of history settles nothing (neither the grocer’s bill, the argument in the faculty lounge, nor next year’s election), he also knew that the study of history is the proof of our kinship with a larger whole and a wider self, with those who have gone before and those who will come after, and that we have nothing else with which to build the future except the wreckage of the past. Time destroys all things, but from the ruin of families and empires we preserve what we find useful or beautiful or true; on our way to death we make of what we have found the hope of our immortality.

Stories move from truth to facts, not the other way around, but in the attempt to convey the essence of a thing the teller of tales must give it a name, an age, and an address, and when I see the world devastated by evil lunatics, I think of Otto Friedrich, sick or in pain, blind in one eye, playing Bach’s Partita in C Minor on a winter night on a piano badly out of tune, planning his next raid on the kingdom of the past, wondering how he might hearten himself and his fellow men with a story not yet told.

Most of what I know about the composition of English prose I learned from Otto Friedrich, who also gave me to understand that very few of the world’s powers can do you irreparable harm if you don’t make the mistake of running a con game on the unique character and specific temper of your own mind, and that most of the political arguments going on in the world at the present moment are the same ones that enlivened the scaffolds of Renaissance Italy and the annals of Imperial Rome—the old and bitter quarrels between time past and time future, between the inertia of things as they are and the energy inherent in the hope of things as they might become.

The former and more portly faction invariably commands the popular majority. It is the party of military parades and Late Night with David Letterman, of Time magazine, Steven Spielberg movies, and the oil-company lobbyists working the halls of Congress. All of you belong, by definition if not by choice, to the party of things-as-they-might-become. Don’t underestimate the guile of your enemies. The servants of the status quo like to say that nothing is seriously amiss, that this is the best of all possible worlds, that the wisdom in office, whether at the White House or on the set of Nightline, brooks neither impertinence nor contradiction.

The authorities rest the case for their assurance on two lines of false reasoning. First, that the future is so dangerous that only football captains need apply, that everything is very difficult, very complicated and very far beyond the grasp of mere mortals who never have sailed up the Nile with Henry Kissinger. Second, that because this is the best of all possible worlds, nothing important remains to be said or discovered. The media have a hand in both of these deceptions, and I speak from some experience when I say that the fear of the future sells newspapers and bids up the market for cheap miracles and expensive cosmetics. The enormous acquisitions and disseminations of knowledge over the past twenty years (about nuclear physics, cancer cells, the history of Germany, terrorism, and the chemistry of bats) have brought forth corresponding gains in the levels of anxiety. Hardly a day passes without somebody naming yet another substance (previously thought to be harmless) that can kill or maim everybody in downtown Los Angeles. The evil omens decorate the seven o’clock news, and every self-respecting newsletter announces the depletion of the reserves of deutschemarks, sunlight, and conscience. The seers who look into the abyss of the millennium predict catastrophes appropriate to the fears of the audiences they have been paid to alarm. During the span of a single week at Harper’s Magazine I once received the galley proofs of three new books entitled, in order of their arrival, The End of NatureThe End of Science, and The End of History.

The rumors are as exaggerated as the ones about Saddam Hussein’s inventory of nuclear weapons. It is the business of the future to be dangerous, and most of the people who magnify its risks do so for reasons of their own. Jealous of a future apt to render them ridiculous or irrelevant, they bear comparison to the French noblewoman, a duchess in her eighties, who, on seeing the first ascent of Montgolfiers’ balloon from the palace of the Tuileries in 1783, fell back upon the cushions of her carriage and wept. “Oh yes,” she said, “now it’s certain. One day they’ll learn how to keep people alive forever, but I shall already be dead.”

To disprove the second proposition, you have only to consult the listings in any newspaper—any week, any edition—to know that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are still at large on five continents and seven oceans. The headlines give the lie to the assertion that the servants of the status quo know why the word wags and who or what wags it. Quite clearly, almost everything remains to be done, said, or discovered; also quite clearly, the world stands in need of as much help as it can get, and if it doesn’t get that help from people like yourselves, then in whom does it place the hope of a new answer, or even better, a new question?

As a student at Yale in the 1950s I was taught to think of the twentieth century as the miraculous and happy ending of the story of human progress; I now think of it as a still primitive beginning. From the perspective of the thirtieth century, I expect the historians to look back upon the works of our modern world as if upon sand castles built by surprisingly gifted children.

When I was your age, I made the mistake of imagining the future as a destination—like Paris or Baltimore or the Gobi Desert—and I thought that in the so-called real world the people who ran the place were made of Greek marble or Gothic stone. As I grew older I began to notice, first to my surprise, and then to my alarm, that the more loudly the Wizards of Oz claimed to know all the answers, the less likely that they knew even a few of the questions. The walls of the establishment are made of paper, as often as not the fortress manned by soldiers already dead, propped like sandbags on the parapets of office. The party of things-as-they-are stages a great show of its magnificence in order to conceal its weakness and fear, and it makes small complaint if all the voters in California, New York, and Michigan wander through their lives in a passive stupor. As a nation we now spend upwards of $500 billion a year on liquor, pornography, and drugs, and the Cold War against the American intellect constitutes a more profitable business than the old arrangement with the Russians or the new arrangement with the viceroys of terrorist jihad.

The discussions in the newspapers about the sorrows of American education assume the existence of what the editorial writers like to call “the educated citizen.” To the best of my knowledge I have never met such a person; even the idea of an educated citizen strikes me as preposterous. I can conceive of a self-educating citizen, and I have had the good fortune to meet a number of people who can be so described, none of them fool enough to proclaim themselves educated. Without exception they possess the valor of their ignorance, conceiving of education neither as a blessed state of being (comparable to membership in the Cosmos Club) nor as a material good sold in a store (even at Harvard’s rate of $34,000 per annum) but rather as a ceaseless process of learning and relearning. Few pleasures equal the joy of the mind when it’s being put to constructive and imaginative use, and if not to people like those of you on this lawn, to whom do we turn for a new equation, a new line of economic or political theory, a new lyric and a new song?

Mark Twain referred to such people as “the makers of the earth after God,” and you are lucky enough to have inherited not only the writings of Twain but also the mechanism of democratic self-government. Democracy allies itself with change and proceeds under the assumption that nobody knows enough, that nothing is final, that the old order (whether of men and women or institutions) will be carried offstage every twenty years. The plurality of democratic voices and forms assumes a ceaseless making and remaking—of laws and customs as well as of fortunes and matinee idols. Democratic government is a purpose held in common, and if it can be understood as a set of temporary coalitions among people of different interests, skills, and generations, then everybody has need of everybody else. To the extent that a democratic society gives its citizens the chance to chase its own dreams, it gives itself the chance not only of discovering its multiple glories and triumphs but also of surviving its multiple follies and crimes.

No matter what the season’s top billings in the American political circus are, the argument between the past and future tense falls along the division between the people who would continue the democratic experiment and those who think that the experiment has gone far enough. The freedom of thought and expression presents society with the unwelcome news that it is in trouble, but because all societies, like most individuals, are always in some kind of trouble, the news doesn’t cause them to perish. They die instead from the fear of thought and the paralysis that accompanies the wish to make time stand still. Liberty has ambitious enemies, but the survival of the American democracy depends less on the size of its armies than on the capacity of its individual citizens to think for themselves. Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement, but a democracy stands in need of as many questions as it can ask of its own stupidity and fear. Idealism rescues cynicism, and the continued comfort of the party of things-as-they-are depends on the doubts placed under their pillows by the party of things-as-they-might-become. The future turns out to be something that you make instead of find. It isn’t waiting for your arrival, either with an arrest warrant or a band, nor is it any further away than the next sentence, the next best guess, the next sketch for the painting of a life portrait that might become a masterpiece. The future is an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper, and if you have the courage of your own thought and your own observation you can make of it what you will.

Below we feature a commencement speech by Lewis H. Lapham delivered on May 11, 2003, to the class of 2003 at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where the curriculum centers on the great books.

 

 

What Is A Standard Drink?

 

“It’s a fine line between Saturday night

and Sunday morning” – Jimmy Buffett

 

“Rather a bottle in front of me

than a frontal lobotomy” — Some guy

 

Many people are surprised to learn what counts as a “drink”. The amount of liquid in your glass, can, or bottle does not necessarily match up to how much alcohol is actually in your drink.  Even before the United States federal government withdrew from regulating alcohol, the conversation, and degree of agreement and  attitude, remains remarkably regionally specific:

Missouri University of Science & Technology: What is a Standard Drink?

University of South Alabama: What is a Standard Drink?

Stanford University Office of Alcohol Policy and Education

Other nations serve alcohol to students on campus in university owned facilities.

Maynooth University Student Union County Kildare


College students create the ultimate hangover cure


Amphitheaters

“Panoramic View of the Greek Amphitheatre at Syracuse” 18th Century Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros

From from time to time — particularly in the months of fairer weather, when many events are hosted outdoors — we break form from the grind of responding to c0nsultations to simply enjoy these spaces  See our CALENDAR for our periodic Lively c0lloquia when we drill down into technical specifics.

서울대학교

University of Melbourne (Architect rendering of project in process)

Furman University

High Point University

George Fox University Oregon

Globe Theater / Southern Utah University

Point Loma Nazarene University

Augusta University / Georgia

Singapore Management University

Swarthmore College

Silliman University Amphitheater / The Phillippines

University of Colorado

South Dakota State University

University of Mary Washington / Virginia

California State University San Marcos

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Clemson University

University of Virginia

College of Idaho Centennial Amphitheater

Texas Woman’s University

Swarthmore College

Pomona College

Oakland University Meadowbrook Theater / Rochester, Michigan

More coming


LEARN MORE:

Standing Agenda / Event Standards

 

Layout mode
Predefined Skins
Custom Colors
Choose your skin color
Patterns Background
Images Background
error: Content is protected !!
Skip to content