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Worth a wander is down under the arcade in the carpark accessible from Drury Street

Definitely. It’s like being in a dungeon or something with the arched ceiling. All the stone/bricks have gone completely black. Compared to the purely functional design of modern car parks, it’s wonderful. I’ve only been
there in the evening; I heard they have a valet (or whatever it’s called – a guy who parks and retrieves your car) service during the day.

By public forums I meant public parades

Ok sorry that was a misunderstanding. In that case, I suggest you spend some time north of the border. It seems there is much more importance and energy there attached to people trying to “celebrate their identity in a public forum”. Personally I find Orange marches very unappealing but if you’re into that sort of thing, you should check it out.

I truly hope that our country continues to enjoy the current economic, political and military security which it enjoys and that your loyalty to your country is never fully tested.

Please don’t make assumptions about my feelings towards my country. I’ve expressed a general dislike for a particular early 19th century ideology; if you want to argue with me, you could try defending nationalism as an idea instead of making assumptions about my character. It’s typical of nationalists to suggest that only those who piously salute some particular historical figures or participate with gusto in patriotic/nationalistic public displays are “loyal and love their country” and the rest are disloyal and untrustworthy. This is the same sort of ideology which motivates the authorities in China and is similar, for example to the attitude in the US at the moment brands any critic of US policy as anti-patriotic and un-American; anyone who doesn’t jump up and down waving flags doesn’t love their country.

You have no idea what sacrifices I’d be prepared to make for my country and you’re sounding more and more like a SFer for suggesting that because I don’t share the same hue of nationalism as you, that I’m somehow less of an Irishman. In addition you have no idea what sacrifices my family or ancestors have made in the name of nationalism but I can tell you that at least one of them has a significant monument commererating their part (and death) during the birth-struggle of this state.

I don’t see what’s to celebrate about nationalism. It’s basically a form of mild xenophobia presented as some sort of moral virtue. I find all nationalistic displays off-putting – not just American and British flag-waving and pompous smug self-congratulation but also the Irish version of it.

While mild nationalism has been used as a tool for some liberation movements to create popular support for independence, I don’t know of any other positive contribution that it has made to humankind. On the other hand I can think of many many instances when modern nationalism (i.e. the form which emerged in Europe in the early 19th century) was (and continues to be) used as a tool to create human suffering on an unprecendented scale.

I’d consider myself a human first and an Irish person second. I can’t deny the appeal of nationalism, having gone through a phase of being quite nationalistic myself for a few years but I actually hate it now. You don’t have to have militaristic displays, etc. in order to appreciate Irish history, culture and identity.

Suggesting that celebrating nationalism will be a sign of our self-confidence as a nation makes little sense to me. It seems to me that it’s a lack of self-confidence which encourages people to turn to nationalism. Historically this has been the case anyway (think of Germany between the wars). It’s almost and admission that there’s little or nothing to celebrate about Ireland except the fact that we happened to be born here. Everyone in the world was born in some country – there’s nothing unique about been born anywhere. When we had no self-confidence as an independent country, we seemed to spend considerable energy “celebrating” our nationalism. Thankfully these days, people expend their energies on more productive and socially rewarding persuits. You still have the option of following a football team if you need a dose of flag waving, emblems and feeling part of an arbitrary group.

GregF, I guess it’s a matter of priorities. I couldn’t care less if foreigners “scoff” or go ooh-ah. I couldn’t care less whether it’s a good place for office christmas parties. I have no particular sentimental attachement to the place either; the east stand (my favourite bit) is relatively new. I just want to be able to get tickets to watch international rugby matches.

The single biggest and most obvious flaw with the Lansdowne FOR IRISH RUGBY SUPPORTERS is simply not being addressed by this re-development.

Also, I think you’re sadly mistake with the hope that they’ll be able to sneak an extra 20k seats into the place. The planning system doesn’t work that way.

Before condeming these structures, should we not stand back and look at them for what they are – an embodiment of rural life in contemporary Ireland (as was the cottage before them). It is so easy to be critical of the present and celebratory of the nostalgic past.

You’ve constructed an interesting argument PDLL. I don’t have time now to construct a full counter-argument now but there are a few ideas. The basic objection I have to “venacular” Irish country housing is not the architecture but the dispersed pattern of development.

It’s not a question of hiding human existance, its the homogenisation of the landscape. The current patterns of countryside development is to dot similar bungalows at regular intervals on every patch of available land. This represents an increase in entropy. In the end we get uniformity – any constrast between wilderness and human settlement is gone – and so there is nothing to appreciate about either. Life is made interesting and enjoyable by contrasts. The reason travel is enjoyable – even involving small distances like a 100 miles or so – is the novelty of seeing differences.

This pattern is not sustainable and I don’t mean from an modern environmentally aware perspective. The Irish countryside is covered in insolated ruined houses. And I’m not talking about medieval castles or crannogs – I’m talking about many houses less than 100 years old. This represents a massive waste of human effort. Were such houses originally built in a hamlet, village or town, it is far more likely they would have been maintained thus adding to to cultural/historical stock of the country. Many of the isolated modern bungalows of today will suffer the same fate. Contrast with the prevailing patterns of country settlement in many of our european neighbours like France or Italy where the town or village is focus of development.

From a human perspective, these patterns of development have a significant social cost. Nobody should be forced to interact with neighbours, etc. but study after study has shown that the more daily social interactions a person has, the happier they are. Conversely isolation increases the chance of depression, etc. I’m surprised that nobody else has considered that there might be some connection between the fact that the west of Ireland has one of the highest rates of suicide in Europe and the fact that the prevailing pattern of living is one of dispersal and isolation.

Building out-of-town stadia went out in the eighties. It’s a terrible idea as the pre/post match atmosphere is generally dire. Many people drive so cannot drink and just disappear after the game; even if you don’t drive there is little reason to hang around a carpark near a motorway. Even in the US – the land of the automobile – all the new baseball stadia are being built in “downtown” areas in recognition of the mistake that was made in seventies when the stadia moved out of the cities. No matter how many pubs, restaurants, etc. you build into the stadium complex, it could never compete with the hundreds of pubs, restaruants, shops, hotels, guesthouses within walking distance of Lansdowne Rd. It’s one great thing about Dublin that we have two stadia within walking distance of the centre. It’s what makes Dublin possibly the most popular destinations in Europe for rugby.

Brian, actually I’m probably overstating my case denigrating pictures as a means of expression but more to counter what seems to me to be prevailing idea that text is old hat. I’m a big fan of Brooks actually – he didn’t get everything correct but his writings were years before their time.

And yes the term “fuzzy logic” sets my teeth on edge. However, there’s an interesting story which isn’t told much on why the field of AI ended up with so many highly promoted but shallow ideas (like “fuzzy logic”). It was of a result of western paranoia during the eighties. At the time the Japanese had destroyed the American car industry, consumer electronics industry and were busy buying up American assets left and right. You don’t hear about it these days but sometime in the early/mid eighties, the Japanese government announce a huge research project to create a “fifth generation computer”. This beast was to be able to “think” like humans. You can imagine the consternation in the West – the Japanese were invincible and were now going to take over the global IT industry. Suddenly all major western governments started pouring money into AI research. This was particular the case in the US. A lot of acedemics suddenly discovered that the work they were doing was really AI and a lot of silly ideas were suddenly pounced on by government agencies and lavished with cash. Things didn’t really turn out as expected obviously – Japan is in relative (maybe terminal) decline and all the aspects of Japanese organisation and society which seemed at the time to offer them unique advantages over the West, now look like serious handicaps.

Anyway, to try to steer things back on topic somewhat and try to think of using IT for transportation planning. I’ve been following some of Brian’s messages and have read a couple of books mentioned/recommended – in particular The Social Logic of Space and The Wisdom of Crowds. Ok. they are quite unrelated books but it’s piqued an interest in the behaviour of human pedestrian crowds in response to their environment. One idea which struck me is whether anyone had seriously attempted to use computer simulation techniques to model this behaviour. Simulation is a technique where you provide very simple rules of bevahiour of individual “actors” in a system and then programatically fill an environment with instances of these acotrs. Often complex behaviour will emerge and become apparent even though the rules of the individuals are almost trivial. An example is the flocking behaviour of birds (and fish); this looks quite complicated and the “reaction” of the flock to intruders for example looks as if the entire flock is operating under a single “intelligence”. In actual fact such behaviour can be simulated easily by endowing each individual with extremely simple rules.

Simulation is used extensively for traffic engineering but traffic can be modelled easily with simple behaviour models for vehicles. Pedestrians obviously (to me anyway) have far more complex individual behaviours so the problem would be far more difficult. However I did some cursory googling and it doesn’t seem that anyone attempting to do this; the best I found was some fire safety research done using simulation to model how long it would take for people to escape a building. However, I’d be more interested in pedestrians in an urban environment – interacting with shops, roads, each other obviously, transport modes, parks, footpaths and other significant features and whether such modeling could be used to predict the effects of altering the environment on how crowds behave. It’s something I might try to explore if I get some time.

Agreed on that building; it’s vile and possibly my least favourite in the city especially because of it’s affect on what is largely a very attractive, lively and interesting street. I’ve a vague memory of reading that the building was never designed for Georges Street – it was designed as a stand alone building in a business park. The builders bought the plans to save money. I also remember seeing plans a few years ago for its replacement – I didn’t really fancy the replacement personally but I guess it couldn’t have been worse. It was to incorporate a new entrace into the Castle and would have formed part of a new pedestrian route from Grafton St. via Wicklow St. to the Castle. It will be very hard to replace that building because the scale of any replacement is not going to match that of the rest of the street and it will also have to follow a slope. The latter is something that the existing building does horribly. Also it’s far longer than the new Dunnes one. I agree that the new Dunnes building beside the Long Hall is not bad but I was absolutely disgusted when the earlier buildings were leveled; yes they were run down (deliberately so) but they still fitted into the context of the street perfectly. From what I recall they were all similar in age/style to the Long Hall building. I was shocked to see them suddenly gone, being under the impression that historic building stock was valued by planners these days.

This is not really archictecture related but I’ve wanted to write something about this subject for a while and why not here. I may actually expand this a bit and put it somewhere else – I’m not sure an Irish Architecture messageboard is a natural host for it.

The Transmeta idea sounds far more innovative than it turned out to be in practice. The idea was pretty trivial to anyone with a historical/technical perspective of IT and the evolution of hardware and software. From the software side virtual machines were in vogue for a period in the 70s. These programs simulate the operation of another particular processor and can run programs designed (or compiled) for such on a different computer with different features. The idea generated plenty of interest for a while (particularly P-code) but died because of a basic flaw. Despite the notional appeal of the idea, it is no more difficult to write a “native compiler” (i.e. a program to convert a high-level description of a program into the 1s and 0s that the hardware can understand) than it is to develop a “virtual machine” but the former will always allow programs to run far faster and more efficiently. I’m being deliberately superficial concerning the precise technical nature of compilers and virtual machines.

So it was an idea that came, generated interest for a while, was discovered to have flaws and more or less quietly died in the late 70s/early 80s. Then the idea was rebranded as something magical in the earlyish 90s when a very unimpressive language called Oak was renamed Java by Sun and captured the imagination of an IT community by piggybacking on the emerging mania for the world wide web (this was a few years before it became a public phenomena). At the time web pages were very basic and Java was first used as a way of adding exciting features like animations, sounds, dynamic menus, and the like. It did this after a fashion but quite poorly and was soon superceded by better alternatives and now is hardly ever used on web pages. Before people realised that this virtual machine idea was flawed (there was general grumbling about it being “slow” but the fundamental idea was never challenged), Sun had moved on and started marketing it as a general purpose language for writing user applications. The original excitement followed even as Java on the web was failing and dying. As it started to prove to be a poor tool also for writing GUI based applications, the focus switched to the “back end” – i.e. on the servers. It currently has carved a niche here but only by using amazingly complicated “virtual machine” implementations (“hotspot” compilers and the like) to compensate and through the huge mindshare created by the initial hype and excitement. Basically the same flaw which saw the idea abandoned in the 70s dogged Java from the start. To be fair, the language has evolved significantly which generally disguises the flaws in it’s reason d’etre. Microsoft are now offering a competitor fo sorts having seen Java gain ground but are pragmatic enough to make use of their “virtual machines” optional.

In the same way that – until the mid 20th century – big wars in Europe seemed to happen every 25 or 30 years as, I imagine, a new generation came along and promptly forgot what was learned by the previous and felt that going to war might be a good idea, the IT world is full of people with no interest in history. This is why failed ideas are surprisingly easily repackaged and sold if an appealing metaphor can be invented to carry them even if there are obvious technical flaws. And, no, there is no point telling people about the previous incarnation – usually the metaphor often has taken on a life of its own.

On the hardware side, re-programmable chips have been around for decades with varying degrees of complexity and sophistication and have always had an important niche if not as the main processors on computers. Meanwhile the historical trend since the 80s has been for the all processor chips to become simpler (even Intel has bowed to the trend buy carefully architecting their Pentium processors) as “native compiler” technology has advanced and taken up the slack of converting software expressed in high-level “languages” into the low level bits that processors can execute efficiently.

Like Java on the web, Transmeta sounded better than it was because you could make appealing claims about “updating the processor by an email attachment” (in Java’s case it was “write once, run anywhere”). In reality the claims are pretty vacuous and the technology offered little real advantage – they are solutions looking for problems. It may not be as exciting to talk about getting a fix for your broken native compiler in an email so that your programs get converted without bugs appearing in them but it’s pretty much equivalent from a software point of view. So Transmeta used the re-emerging fashion for virtual machines which Java kindled and perfectly traditional hardware techniques but found a beautiful metaphor to make the idea sound revolutionary. As it turned out the metaphor proved to be a bigger breakthrough than the actual idea.

Unfortunately for Transmeta, while Java got it’s initial leg up by hitching onto the exploding world wide web, the technologies they chose to piggy back turned out to be duds – i.e. tablet PCs, low powered laptops and the like. The idea had no redeeming technical advantage and without the hype (and critical mass that Java generated) is dead.

The link here to Linus Torvalds and the “open source” movement is that Linus took up a position with Transmeta. Linus unfortunately has demonstrated, through his well publicised opinions about this and that related to technology, that he is intellectually shallow and was basically extremely lucky with Linux. Nothing he has said or done since releasing the first verions of Linux and generating excitement behind it has been impressive. The growth of Linux has been largely the result of the effort of others. At this stage, there is an emerging feeling (though few articulate it) that Linus is out of his depth technically and as a leader. Again without historical perspective, Linux may seem miraculous or revolutionary. I use it all the time and have both been involved in building large IT systems on it (involving thousands of computers) and very small computers using it – so I’m a big fan.

However the idea that “open source” is something new couldn’t be further from the truth. The software world was traditionally “open source” – you bought the source with the program. It was also shared and free – most of Unix was developed as a colaborative effort from the 70s on. Endless software has been produced and given away for free, improved apon by others and given away again. Most of the software behind the internet (on the servers), email and the world wide web was developed this way and even earlier most of the first very basic tools were developed this way too. So, the only way that “open source” and collaborative distributed development is new is in the way that it has developed a profile outside of the nerdy world of computers in the last few years. On the other hand, Linus was lucky because at the time the “real” Unix (BSD Unix) was caught up in a weird legal battle (which would be too complicated to explain here but basically a tiny core – probably less than 10% – of an entirely free and collaboratively developed operating system was claimed to be proprietary). By the time it’s status was extricated from the legal system so that version could become available for the first PCs capable of supporting a proper operating system (ones using Intel 80386 processors), Linux’s somewhat technically inferior and certainly less robust copy of an pedagogical operating system called Minix (a crippled version of Unix used to teach operating system basics) had caught on and had generated a following. The BSD variants for PCs (such as FreeBSD) are still going strong but mostly in the background and are never mentioned in the popular press.

I’m not even going to try to make an attempt to link this to transportation planning.

The thing is that we are in the odd position that it suits the proponents of all ideologies to suggest that we’re richer than we are. The left want us to feel guilty about being rich so they can justify funnelling income into the pcckets of their pals – the unionised public sector – while the right want us to think that things are great as a result of their policies and that we should support them continuing to enrich their particular pals – for example the vitners or the construction industry. Neither really care about the general welfare of the country or are keen to face the fact that we are not really wealthy (despite highish income) but as I get older I find I have less and less tolerance for the snootily morally superior attitude of the Irish left having read of spouses of labour politicians pocketing 300-400K a year from the public purse for treating wealthy 70 year old medical card holders in Foxrock. FF are a shower of evil ignorant pr*cks but the fact that they seem to find it difficult to keep a straight face while trying to express similar levels of hypocritical false indignation about this or that is strangely redeeming. I still can’t make myself vote for them, ‘though.