Not exactly. "Mass timber" is a newer construction material made from wood, but put together in a way suitable for tall buildings, including structural elements for skyscrapers. Currently, the tallest timber skyscraper is the 25-story Ascent MKE building in Milwaukee.
The fire safety challenges are real, though. It's just that timber as a building material has different characteristics. It's under a lot of study from fire safety researchers, as they work out the tradeoffs and how to best mitigate the weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
And it's not all bad. Timber is actually stronger than steel at high heat, and the beams don't contain voids that allow fire and flames to travel along the structural elements as steel or concrete elements might. So the key is that the engineers need to design things with the timber's properties in mind.
"Mogging" as a term originated in the early 2000's and went mainstream-ish in the late 2000's when the "pickup artist" community started getting attention in places like the New York Times. The people who originated it are probably like 45-50 years old now.
Quick etymology: comes from these pseudoscientific douchebags trying to name the phenomenon where a man tries to subtly belittle another man in front of women, establishing that he's the AMOG (alpha male of group), eventually became a verb amogging or mogging, and then various specific types of this behavior earned prefixes: heightmogging, etc.
The fact that it has this kind of staying power, 20 years later, is the surprising part.
It sounds like the thesis to David Epstein's book, Range. When I read it, it was a game changer for me.
If I recall correctly, the main examples were Roger Federer (who played a lot of sports and didn't choose to specialize in tennis until much later than the typical tennis pro), jazz legend Django Reinhardt, Vincent Van Gogh, and a bunch of other less famous, but much more typical examples.
Sampling is important, and has value beyond just the things they sampled and abandoned. The act of trying many different things is itself helpful.
Van Gogh wouldn't have become the artist he became if he didn't fizzle out of multiple career paths beforehand.
David Epstein's Range really explores this idea and puts forth a pretty convincing argument that sampling and delaying specialization is helpful for becoming the type of well rounded generalist whose skills are best suited for our chaotic world.
Blues Brothers and Wayne's World were successful enough that people forget that they originated as SNL sketches. And, because they were the first, they kept on trying.
I'm a subscriber to their monthly print copy, and a lot of the stories in the print version don't make it to the website as quickly. I've got the February copy on my desk with the following headlines:
Trump Administration Offers Free At-Home Loyalty Tests: Tool That Diagnoses Disobedience to be Mailed to U.S. Households
U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat - Wars Will No Longer Be Fought By Male Shannons, Terrys, or Carmens
Baby Saves Affair: Illicit Relationship Rekindled by Out-of-Wedlock Birth
As far as I can tell, these articles never made it online. And they are funny. Good coffee table material.
Permanence isn't required or expected, although in some instances permanence is valued, in defining success.
Permanence itself does not require continuing effort. One can leave a permanent mark on something without active maintenance.
Taken together, success doesn't require permanence, and permanence doesn't require continued effort. The screenshot text is wrong to presume that our culture only values permanence, and is wrong in its implicit argument that permanence requires continued effort.
All I'm saying is that continuing effort is not necessary. Permanence/longevity can be achieved through other means, in situations where permanence is important. The lack of need for continuing effort is even more obvious in situations in which permanence isn't even a desired or intended outcome.
we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
I really don't agree with the premise, and would encourage others to reject that worldview if it starts creeping into how they think about things.
In the sports world, everything is always changing, and careers are very short. But what people do will be recorded forever, so those snapshots in time are part of one's legacy after they're done with their careers. We can look back fondly at certain athletes or coaches or specific games or plays, even if (or especially if) that was just a particular moment in time that the sport has since moved on from. Longevity is regarded as valuable, and maybe relevant to greatness in the sport, but it is by no means necessary or even expected. Michael Jordan isn't a failed basketball player just because he wasn't able to stay in the league, or even that his last few years in the league weren't as legendary as his prime years. Barry Sanders isn't a failed American football player just because he retired young, either.
Same with entertainment. Nobody really treats past stars as "failed" artists.
If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you're a “failed” writer.
That is a foreign concept to me, and I question the extent to which this happens. I don't know anyone who treats these authors (or actors or directors or musicians) as failures, just because they've moved onto something else. Take, for example, young actors who just don't continue in the career. Jack Gleeson, famous for playing Joffrey in the Game of Thrones series, is an actor who took a hiatus, might not come back to full time acting. And that's fine, and it doesn't take away from his amazing performance in that role.
The circumstances of how things end matter. Sometimes the ending actually does indicate failure. But ending, in itself, doesn't change the value of that thing's run when it was going on.
| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good.
Exactly. I would think that most people agree, and question the extent to which people feel that the culture values permanence. If anything, I'd argue that modern culture values the opposite, that we tend to want new things always changing, with new fresh faces and trends taking over for the old guard.
It's immunotherapy that prevents the cancers from deactivating the immune cells that would ordinarily kill the cancer cells. So it's like a traditional vaccine in that it causes changes to the immune system to better equip it to fight disease, but it's a pretty new methodology of accomplishing that.
That paper reads like it was written by an undergrad going through cargo cult motions of sounding like a scientist. And the evidence is still weak: many of those studies being summarized are studies where they poisoned rats and investigated whether onion juice has some kind of protection against the poison, as measured by testosterone levels.
Not exactly. "Mass timber" is a newer construction material made from wood, but put together in a way suitable for tall buildings, including structural elements for skyscrapers. Currently, the tallest timber skyscraper is the 25-story Ascent MKE building in Milwaukee.
The fire safety challenges are real, though. It's just that timber as a building material has different characteristics. It's under a lot of study from fire safety researchers, as they work out the tradeoffs and how to best mitigate the weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
And it's not all bad. Timber is actually stronger than steel at high heat, and the beams don't contain voids that allow fire and flames to travel along the structural elements as steel or concrete elements might. So the key is that the engineers need to design things with the timber's properties in mind.