Day: January 26, 2021💾

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Visiting Tionesta’s Unusual Sherman Memorial Lighthouse – UncoveringPA

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Visiting Tionesta’s Unusual Sherman Memorial Lighthouse – UncoveringPA

Over the past few years, I’ve done a lot of traveling throughout every corner of Pennsylvania, and, without a doubt, one of the strangest things I’ve seen is the Sherman Memorial Lighthouse in Tionesta.

Located on a peninsula at the confluence of the Allegheny River and Tionesta Creek, the lighthouse is certainly an odd site. Since it’s located near water, it takes a second to realize that it provides no assistance to navigating ships. In fact, Tionesta’s lighthouse sits roughly 60 miles from the nearest navigable body of water, Lake Erie, which is home to its own lighthouses.

The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone

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The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone

But the suburbs, in the sense of the idyllic American pastoral Trump and Carson referenced, have been changing for some time—not necessarily the physical homes, stores, roads, and offices that populate them, but the people who live there, along with their needs and desires. Previous mainstays of suburban life are now myths: that the majority of people own their homes; that the suburbs are havens for the middle class; or that the bulk of people are young families who value privacy over urban amenities like communal spaces, walkability, and mixed-use properties.

This mismatch has led to a phenomenon called “suburban retrofitting,” as documented by June Williamson, an associate professor of architecture at the City College of New York, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They have a new book out this week: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges. Money Welcome to Metropica, a Supposed City of the Future Allie Conti 08.29.19

Since the 1990s, Williamson and Dunham-Jones have been watching the suburbs evolve. They have found that much of the suburban sprawl of the 20th century was built to serve a very different population than the one that exists now, and so preserving what the suburbs once were doesn't make sense.
Map: Severence Hill Trail

Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt Over the Millennia

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Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt Over the Millennia

You can’t decide what’s normal and what’s abnormal until you understand the ordinary function of any trait—whether it’s vomiting or cough or fever or nausea. You start with its normal function and in what situation it gives selected advantages. But there are a lot of places where natural selection has shaped mechanisms that express these defenses when they’re not needed, and very often that emotional response is painful and unnecessary in that instance. Then there’s a category of emotions that make us feel bad but benefit our genes. A lot of sexual longings [extramarital affairs or unrequited love], for instance, don’t do us any good at all, but they might potentially benefit our genes in the long run.

So it’s not saying that these emotions are useful all the time. It’s the capacity for these emotions that is useful. And the regulation systems [that control emotion] were shaped by natural selection—so sometimes they’re useful for us, sometimes they’re useful for our genes, sometimes it’s false alarms in the system and sometimes the brain is just broken. We shouldn’t try to make any global generalizations, we should examine every patient individually and try to understand what’s going on.