twenty-four.

Brasilia - Project gone 'wrong'?

This is an interesting article about Brasília, the capital of Brazil, and how (urban planning & design-wise) it came to be (around 1960).


(Image: Wikipedia)
It was designed to resemble an airplane or a butterfly when viewed from above.

Read about the origin of Brasília here.

And make sure to lookup some of the buildings (of Oscar Niemeyer's) which the writer discusses in the article. Like this one...


(Photo by Styliane Philippou, from Oscar Niemeyer: Curves of Irreverence, Yale)
The Supreme Court by Oscar Niemeyer - Brasília.

These are also interesting to see:
- Cathedral Brasilia Niemeyer
- 3-D model of the Pampulha church

Natural disasters...can help us?

...economically. Although, not always.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/06/how_disasters_help/?page=full

Similarly, but on a much grander scale (according to Bill Bryson):

Crises in the Earth's history are invariably associated with dramatic leaps afterwards. The fall of the Ediacaran fauna was followed by the creative outburst of the Cambrian period. The Ordovician extinction of 440 million years ago cleared the oceans of a lot of immobile filter feeders and somehow, created conditions that favoured darting fish and giant aquatic reptiles. These in turn were in an ideal position to send colonists onto dry land when another blowout in the late Devonian period gave life another sound shaking. And so it has gone at scattered intervals through history. If most of these events hadn't happened just as they did, just when they did, we almost certainly wouldn't be here now.