Robot Monkeys

It’s that time of year again, where we (and by “we,” I mean “The Marin County Coroner’s Office”) tally up the number of jumpers from the World’s Leading Suicide Magnet, YOUR GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE!

A drumroll please….

If you chose 31, congratulations! You win a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni – The San Francisco Treat *ding* ding*. Yes, 31 successfully took the plunge in 2009 (That’s one every 11 days!), and another 77 managed to screw it up (like everything else in their miserable lives) and got stopped by staff. (Another year without a local Lai Jiansheng “helping” anyone.)

So what about the $50 million net that was approved back in aught-eight? Well, that’s still in limbo, since the Bridge District has forbid local money to be used for the nets, and now the Bridge Rail Foundation is trying to get federal funds.

Is 31 a lot? The Pro-Net folks would no doubt saying something vacuous like “Even a single jumper is one too many,” but let’s look the numbers. 31 is 72% more than then average since the bridge opened in 1937, but is that number really meaningful? The Bay Area’s population has been steadily increasing, so what about the “success” rate? There are over 7 million people in the Bay Area today. In 1940 there was less than 2 million. Perhaps if we want more informative numbers, we should look at this instead in terms of suicides per capita.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the number of jumpers per decade, but
the SF Examiner, provided a helpful table of the number of jumpers over the last eight years, that show that every year was “above average.”

UPDATE: Tue Jan 26 00:23:45 PST 2010
I realized that I did have the number of “splash hits” each year that the bridge opened, thanks to the Chron. The Chron’s count differs slightly from the Examiner’s, but not enough to matter. (The Chron counts one more in both 2002 and 2004.) Coupling this with Bay Area population stats, I calculated the GGB Suicides Per Capita.

While I haven’t bothered to do any sort of significance testing, it appears that for the last 30 years, the number of successful suicides has remained constant after controlling for population. In fact, it appears pretty much constant for 4 of the last 5 decades. So just as I suspected, the “above average” statement is a bit misleading.

If anyone wants to look at the numbers, I’m posting a CSV of the numbers.

With the Bay Bridge, seemingly always in the news^*, the question is becoming, what to do with the old eastern span? (You remember the eastern span, don’t you?) Current plans are to simply demolish it, but architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello has proposed something different. They wants to convert it into a housing and a park.

He calls his proposal, “The Bay Line,” is a combination of the Florence’s Ponte Vecchio and New York’s High Line. The upper deck would be converted into a greenway, while the lower deck (originally designed for freight trains) would contain commercial and residential spaces. Since the deck can support much weight than a typical home, additional space can be hung directly underneath the bridge.

Rael’s graduate studio, have come up with other similar ideas, but they’re all essentially the same thing.

It’s an interesting idea, but I do have some concerns. First, there’s going to be another earthquake. There just will be. So why would you want to be suspended a couple of hundred feet above the water, in a box that has been bolted onto a structure that is over 70 years, that is literally falling apart. (Well at least it’s not as bad as the old Cape Girardeau bridge. Yet.) Rael points out most of the damage back in 1989 was on the approach, not the cantilevers, but I still have my doubts. My other concern is that it’s right next to new bridge. Which means, you’re living right next to a freeway, and that’s got to ruin your view.

But really, I’d just be happy if they name the eastern span the “Emperor Norton I Span”, but Oaklanders are such killjoys.

Kisa Kawakami has designed for the Japanese interior design store Yamagiwa, a ceiling lamp [Google Translate] that allows the owner to play with light and shadow by folding the gauze panels that surround the bulb.

I guess what attracted me to this design was the simple lines of each of the panels, the central lighting hood, and the idea that owner can easily play with light and shadow.

Because of the inherent dynamism of the wings I think it might be interesting if the wings slowly moved over the course of the night, causing the artificial light to move around the room, mimicking how sunlight moves around the room during the course of the day.

This lamp can be yours for only 93,500¥ ($1,014).

I’ve posted about my morbid fascination before, but today the Chron wrote about the demographics of a jumper. (Well actually, it’s just a press release from The Bridge Rail Foundation dressed up as news, but it’s fascinating none the less.)

The report, examines 15 years of jumpers, and answers some of my long standing questions about jumpers.

How many people travel from outside the Bay Area simply to jump?

83% are from the bay area, with just under half (49%) coming from Marin, Napa, San Francisco, and Sonoma counties. 6% come from outside of California, and only 3 (less than 1%) came from outside the US.

Follow Up Question: How does the 6% outside of the state compare with other popular suicide sites? Is the bridge truly a “suicide magnet?”

What does the typical jumper look like?

White (80%), Male (74%), Never Married (56%), 40 year old student.

In case you’re wondering: I’m against the rail and the nets. I think it will just move them behind closed doors and away from the tourists. Plus, there’s something romantic, and yet simultaneously incredibly selfish, about doing it in public.

In the 1970s the Soviet government, built a series of lighthouses around the Arctic Circle to aid in navigation. Since these were built in the most godforsaken parts of Siberia, they were not only automated, but nuclear powered. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, people began to strip them for metal, including the radiation shielding.

When I read about this. I couldn’t help but think of Russia’s floating nuclear power plants, perhaps plying the seas past the lighthouses.

But, what I really think of when I see the sea ravaged edifice is something out of a Life Without People episode. Nuclear powered autonomous lighthouses guiding nuclear powered autonomous ships to ports, where where they are loaded with ore from continuous conveyors, that are supplied by autonomous freight trains, until the day that there’s just nothing left to load on the trains, or on the ships, and the entire system shuts down and rusts.

via JWZ

I’ve always been fascinated with hiding places. When I was little, my dad put a wall safe in my room for me. To this day, it still hold my pirate booty, a small brass chest containing a variety of foreign coins, and a collection of uncirculated commemorative coins from the US Mint. But what I really wanted was a hidden room. The closest I ever saw the house my friend Josh and his mom moved to. All the bedrooms on the top floor were interconnected via doors in the closets. Kind of strange, but pretty cool, or at least it was cool to 12 year old Jonathan.

Portland OR’s (or “Portland West,” as I have just decided it should be known as) Panic Software moved into new offices at the beginning of the year. Normally, this wouldn’t be newsworthy, but the offices have a very stylish hidden room. The leather chairs, and the worn leather bound books just call out for drinking a sherry while wearing an ascot, french cuffs, a monocle, and a cigarette holder.

Colonel Noseworthy and the Haberdashery Campaign indeed.

Since previous project, I’ve been thinking about creating a new cabinet. Something lots of little drawers. Sort of like either a Chinese pharmacy cabinet or a secretary cabinet.

The problem with secretary cabinets is that they’re not useful as furniture today. They used to be used as the nexus of all bills and correspondence of the house, but now the laptop has replaced this. I kind of like the look of an open secretary, but it’s completely useless due to the specialized nature of the furniture.

I think what I like about the Chinese pharmacy cabinets is that mystery they project. All the drawers look the same, but no matter what ails you, the pharmacist can open up some seemly random drawer and give you a potion to cure you. As a design per se, the cabinets are just more stylish filing cabinets.

I have no idea what I would do with a drawer cabinet, but I think I want one.

After the jump are some cabinets that I’ve been trying to draw inspiration from.

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Jon Stam has designed an RFID curiosity cabinet. The cabinet is lined on both sides with drawers and boxes. The drawers contain objects, while the boxes contain a USB memory stick and an RFID chip. Placing the box near an RFID reader, causes the digital content to be displayed.

matandme has more photos info about this. DesignGuide.tv interview with Jon showing the cabinet off is after the jump.

The thing that drew me to this cabinet was the clean lines of it. When I first saw this, I had no idea it was RFID enabled. I particularly like the pulls on the drawers, or more precisely the lack of them. Many times when there’s pull-less drawers, the outer panel is beveled for fingers to. In his design the pull is simply the main drawer face, with a second panel inset slightly inside to completely close of the drawer when it’s closed.

One thing I don’t like about his design is that the digital curios are separate from the physical curios. I’m don’t think that distinction needs to be made. Digital objects don’t completely replace physical objects, (recordings, both audio and visual, excepted) but are complimenting them. For instance, when I traveled to Beijing, all my photos were digital, but those aren’t my only souvenirs. I have a Mao Book, a wad of cash, receipts, and tickets. It’s this collection, both physical and digital that commemorate my trip. It seems that a cabinet that attempts to recognize this dual nature of modern memories, should completely integrate them, rather than treat them as different things. If the each drawer contained the digital memories associated with the physical object contained in it, then this would be the case.

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For Core77’s 2009 Greener Gadgets competition, Vincent Gerkens of Belgium applied photovoltaics (similar to the ones seen before) to one side of venetian blinds and a electroluminescent foil to the other side to create Blight. During the day, it blocks light, but at night it releases it (so to speak).

A couple of years ago, just before I moved to California, I made a cabinet to store my CDs and DVDs. Ironically, I never took it with me.

I grew tired of my CDs and DVDs simply sitting a shelf, and appearing nothing but a big wall of media. I wanted something that could store the CDs behind a door, but not use those individual slots, since they can’t handle double CDs, and keeping CDs in order when new CDs are purchased is just too annoying. This meant I needed shelves, but I didn’t want huge shelves. I solved this problem by creating a series of bins, each of which can hold either 20 standard CD jewel cases, or 8 standard DVD cases. (8 DVD cases are almost exactly the width of a CD case.)

This cabinet has 24 bins, for a total capacity of either 480 CDs or 160 DVDs. The bins are wider than a standard CD jewel case, so that they can store the widest CD case in my collection, Johnny Cash’s Unearthed Box Set. (My other box sets have to sit on top due to their book-like formats.)

Below are the initial plans I made for the cabinet, along with photos of the final project.

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