Termites

This is a cross section of a termite nest. It consists of two parts. The outer skin is made out of thick ground and absorbs the heat of the sun. The nest itself is lifted, and is cooled by air that first is led through the ground water. As a result of the heat produced inside of the nest by thousands of termites, the air rises and escapes the nest through a hole in at the top. True sustainable building.

Did you know by the way, that the total biomass of all the ants on the planet is larger than the total of human biomass? Ants however blend in the planetary organism. We disturb it. We’re not overcrowding the planet. We’re just not blending in. Yet.

Nodes

In my post ‘The End of Urban Planning?‘ I discussed with a reader that the connections between the nodes as well as the contents of the nodes themselves are of importance to a network. If we visualize this picture, it could look something like this:

This image (like these) was created by an algorithm written by Jared Tarbell called Node Garden. Except for a number of connections we also see nodes that vary in size, representing the amount of content of that particular node.

Source: complexification

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Hubs

Within a network, a hub is an interesting phenomenon. A hub could be defined as a node that is important to the network because of its number of connections. In a social network, a hub would be an important person. Within an infrastructure network, a hub could be an airport.

[Hub: Congonhas Airport, São Paulo]

Within the physical structure of the Internet, a hub is a server.

[Hub: Google servers]

And to the flow of information on the Internet, search engines are hubs as they connect the users to the information they need. Like Google.

[Hub: Google Search Engine]

In the physical world, Google would be a metropolis like Tokyo or São Paulo.

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