When we take a moment to think about these anti-oases; most of us would be happy if the parking spaces were a little closer to where we needed to be, a little cooler for our cars, less expensive to our wallets (where we have to pay), a little nicer looking and a little friendlier to walk through. But there is more going on than what we see; these lots affect the overall well being of our waterways and our cities.

Let us first take a look at the shade-less, heat absorbing, heat reflecting lot.  Immediately we can feel the increase of temperatures in our vehicle, there is a minimum of 10°F difference between shaded and non-shaded areas.  The heat deteriorates car interiors and tires.  Furthermore, our vehicles loose gas by evaporation as the temperature in the gas tank rise.  Overall temperature in the neighborhood also rises; the heat absorbing surfaces can contribute to a 2 to 8°F rise in summer temperatures in urban areas.  This “heat island effect” in turn calls for more air conditioning in our businesses and in our homes.  In turn, more energy is consumed and more emissions produced.

Stormwater runoff on your typical black topped impervious surface is another concern.  The U.S. Geological Survey reports that an impervious man-made surface can generate two to six more times the runoff than a natural surface.  These man-made surfaces are equipped with drainage systems to quickly remove the stormwater and deposit it into local bodies of water.  These systems can speed up the flow of the water, increasing erosion and quickening flooding effects.  In the case of combined sewer and stormwater systems, the rapid runoff of stormwater, could cause them to overflow and discharge raw sewage into receiving waterways.  Not to mention that the water flowing across the surface picks up whatever might be there.  In the case of parking lots, this includes motor oils, leaked antifreeze, carbon deposits, debris, animal waste, trash and more.  All to be deposited straight into the nearest body of water, in our case, the St. Johns River.

So it is no wonder that parking lots are not only a concern to the individual, but also, a big part of urban concern and design.  It is a domino effect that touches the whole city.  But, it is possible, with conscientious green designs to build parking lots that are user friendly, environmentally friendly and economically friendly.

To do this the “green parking lot” attempts to behave as if it was no parking lot at all.  The design of the lot mimics the natural ecological and hydrological systems that were in place prior to development – even if we cannot remember when that was.  That means; there are plants, including trees, the surface and the soil below is “connected” and a natural dispersal of rain water occurs.  A cooler environment, more wildlife habitat, natural stormwater control, along with a cost savings is all possible.

Next time: Part II: How The Cummer has ‘Greened” its Parking Lot

‘Don’t throw that away! Keep it’; exclaimed Arthur, as he seemingly reached for a shard of a broken bottle on the classroom floor.  Moments before, Mrs. Sigh, Arthur’s teacher, had accidently knocked the bottle to the ground.  The once useful glass object now was spread across the floor, shattered into a multitude of potentially dangerous pieces destined for the landfill.  ‘No’, answered Mrs. Sigh, not wanting Arthur to cut himself on the sharp edges of the broken bottle.  Yet, Arthur insisted, that there was something special about this fragment, even though it had lost all its former usefulness.  The debate went back and forth until Mrs. Sigh finally thought to ask, ‘Why?’  ‘Well’, Arthur excitedly offered, ‘I saw some sea glass at the beach – it looked neat; I want to see if I can make sea glass.’  ‘Wow’, Mrs. Sigh thought, ‘what a wonderful observation’, as her pragmatic approach met the same fate as the bottle.

And so it began – ‘Where did the glass come from, how did it get into the ocean?  How do you think the glass got that way?  What makes it “look neat”?  Can we duplicate what has happened?’

‘Is it chemical; did it dissolve, was it affected by acid; is it physical: did waves, sand, or wind smooth the edges?  Is sea glass good for the ocean, what if an animal eats sea glass?  …’

And so it continued – the excitement and the experiments went on until sea glass was defined, detailed and created.  But there was chemistry, and history, and physics, and weather, and biology, and learning, and art all along the way.  Arthur inspired Mrs. Sigh to see something she had not seen before and Mrs. Sigh in turn opened worlds not thought of.

Art inspires science, science encourages art.
Science and Art, together, seek out the answers to what creates the wonder.

New Museum Educator Karl Boecklen

In January, Karl Boecklen joined the education staff as a Museum Educator.  His job will be to continue the integration of the Gardens and our riverfront campus into our arts education programs.  Karl is a native of New York City and a graduate of SUNY-Stony Brook with a degree in the biological sciences.  He has worked as a classroom educator, a scientist and most recently for the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens as their supervisor for educational programs.  At the Zoo, Karl coordinated the outreach, After Dark Programs and animal encounters as well a “tour” as the supervisor for their interactive areas.  He specialized in interdisciplinary programs such as “ZooTrek”, the Zoo’s partnership with the Jacksonville Public Library.

Known throughout the local public school systems as “Mr. Karl”, Karl brings a great enthusiasm and joy to introducing children and adults to the natural world through art, language arts, math, and science.

The question: Why do people see art differently?

There’s a multitude of explanations, ranging from psychological to socio-economic, but those explanations are messy. I proposed a rather mundane approach to  attempting to answer this question.

For my reasoning, let’s start with light.

courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light

Visible light is a very narrow band on the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation situated between Infrared and Ultraviolet radiation. Visible light is estimated to be less than one percent of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. My reasoning focuses more on how our eyes perceive light and our brain processes the information, rather than the radiation itself. Our human eyeballs have cells, called cones, with which we perceive color. We see items as a certain color because the pigments in those items reflect those particular components of the visible spectrum and absorb all others. For example, we see red apples as red because the pigments present reflect only the red components or wavelengths, of white or visible light. Now some of you may already know where I’m going with this, but for those of you that need a hint, a quick internet search of “Colorblind” will net “about 3,790,000 results”, thank you Google. Adding the keyword “statistics” will give you another “361,000”.

courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye

The general consensus is 7 to 10 percent of the male population has some form of color blindness, which is actually more properly described as color vision deficiency. Now, the color vision deficiency genetic markers are both, recessive traits ,and linked to X-chromosomes. The combination of these two properties, with some cool biology charts and math, mean that less than .4 percent of the female population, by most calculations, has a color vision deficiency. Daughters are likely to inherit the recessive genes from parents, but thanks to more cool biology, math, and charts, both parents would have to exhibit a color vision deficiency for a daughter to have color vision deficiency, whereas a son can exhibit a color vision deficiency where both parents lack one. As you can see, with .4 percent of female population being color vision deficient if you iterate the situation it becomes less likely the longer you look at it. While these percentages are not alarmingly large, they are such that it is highly likely that you are acquainted with a person who has a color vision deficiency.

It has been conclusively proven, that as human individuals we are all different in some way shape or form. An easy answer would be that since we are all individuals it would be in our individual nature, to have a distinctly individual interpretation of art. As a human, I, of course, made this assumption.

However, as an engineer, I made a metric.

For a 6,973,738,433 world population we factor in a color vision deficiency modifier. Using [(7+10)/2] +.4 = 8.9 percent, as rough average of color vision deficiency on a world scale, we have a modified world population of 6,973,738,433 x (1 – .089) = 6353075712.46. This rounds to 6353075713 people, but for the sake of being rigorous we will keep it as a decimal. On average there are 4.5 million cone cells per human eyeball. The wavelength of Red visible light is 750 to 620 nanometers (a range of 130nm). We chose red wavelength because it is the largest ranged wavelength in the visible spectrum and because the majority of color vision deficiency is in the perception of the colors red and green.

I submit to you that the reason why people see art differently is that, according to my calculations, there exist [6353075712.46 x (4,500,000 x 2)] / 130 = 4.398 x 10¹⁴ possible personal cellular per nano meter (pc/nm) interpretations of the color red.

The next time you’re enjoying looking at some works of art, try counting how many different personal cellular interpretations of the color red you see!

Are you color vision deficient?

References:

http://science.hq.nasa.gov/kids/imagers/ems/visible.html

http://missionscience.nasa.gov/ems/09_visiblelight.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_light

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_spectrum

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye

http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_pop_totl&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=world+population