In a rather puzzling overreach by the California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists, they are fining a California man $1000 for... drawing lines on maps.
They're claiming that the resulting images are "unofficial surveys", despite the site he sold them through literally having "THIS IS NOT A LEGAL SURVEY, NOR IS IT INTENDED TO BE OR REPLACE ONE" written at the top. Plus, if drawing lines on maps is illegal, I may suddenly be one of California's Most Wanted. Maybe that's why I moved to Colorado.
There's echoes of the time when the Oregon engineering board sued an electrical engineer saying he couldn't call himself an engineer - a case that, fortunately, the engineer won. Because, you know, he had a degree in electrical engineering and had been doing engineering for decades.
As the world warms up and climate change occurs, we have to both seek to prevent any further change as well as adapting how we live to the world around us. And, it turns out, living in giant steel and glass boxes and then having an air conditioner humming away to undo the massive greenhouse effect is somewhat less useful than just building the house right in the first place.
This article looks at the particular design of India's lattice buildings - where the lattice does a particularly interesting job of letting natural light in while cutting out a lot of direct sunlight. The older building designs also use the technique seen in many hot countries' traditional buildings of employing the stack effect (or wind suction) to draw cold air in through a building and up and out of the top.
I love seeing buildings like this that work with their climate, rather than one specific design style that works well in temperate regions but not elsewhere.
The Aztecs were well-known for their engineering, but maybe one of the less famous achievements - but one that still works today - are the chinampas, "island" farms in the lakes around Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City).
Built out of soil piled on reeds, and with retaining walls built from ahuejote (a willow species), they're really not that different from what we do today - albeit without the same need to support large buildings. What's even better is that they're still actively farmed - the lake being right there has a very positive impact on the nutrients and groundwater in the farms.
As the article mentions, they also saw a resurgence during the COVID pandemic - few things are better for avoiding a respiratory virus than giant, open-air farmers' markets on a lake, I imagine. Definitely adding this to the list of things to see when I finally get to Mexico.