attraction

Water Wisdom
Our human attraction to water is well documented, observes Lauren Stack, but none of us are automatically comfortable around it, nor do we often learn to swim without access to lessons. That's a pair of issues this article addresses while pointing toward a compelling aquatic future.    
Public Participations
People don't usually have trouble with boundaries and will honor requests to "Keep Out," for example, or leave certain doors to "Employees Only."    But there are also cases where we generally take issue with limitations on behavior whether stated or implied, and I can think of no better instance in which this takes place than with water in public spaces. Despite designers' best efforts over the years to make it clear where bathers are welcome and where they are not, the public has steadily defied boundaries by trespassing into waters that were never directly designed for human interaction.  In fact, you might say that formal, decorative fountains are a forbidden fruit from which many of us have taken the occasional bite. During the past two decades, watershape designers have looked very specifically at the irresistible urge we have to touch water in an effort to shape all-new boundaries between public nuisance and design nuance.  Along the way, we've learned which elements offer a deliberate, positive signal - a real "permission to play" - and are now wielding this power of interactivity to create and define a broad range of
Ben Franklin, Electrician
Why does the current flow? That was the question we left on the table at the end of our last session.  We had pretty well nailed down the ampere as being the basic unit of measurement of electric current, in that it describes the quantity of flow of electrons from one place to another.  We were about to examine the volt, the ohm and the watt when the current-flow question arose to command our attention. To get a firm handle on this, we are forced to backtrack a bit.  Actually, we have to go back a long, long way - about 60 million years, to when a particular species of pine-like trees grew along the Baltic coast.  Over the millennia, the resin from those trees became fossilized, producing the beautiful, beer-colored material called anbar by the