Under NDA

Is Building Information Modelling the catalyst of improvement in all things Architecture, Engineering and Construction? Is "BIM" the Midas touch for all innovation projects? This article explores the boundary conditions of BIM and suggests reasons for resisting its adoption. A new look to an old discussion. Introduction I am a confessed BIM enthusiast. Early adopter or visionary, I embraced the technology as soon as I was exposed to it, approximately 10 years ago, and have been trying to convince anyone willing to listen about its benefits. Now, a decade into my struggle to make a better world through BIM, I would like to step back and ask myself if there are good reasons why other people have not jumped at BIM with the same conviction... My logic is structured around the three letters of the acronym, hoping to identify the boundaries in these three dimensions. Boundary 1: Building Is Buildings  the only target of BIM? " We don't do Buildings, we do roads ...

Back on the saddle after a long silence, this time bringing a list of books that have kept me busy... is this a good excuse for not writing blog entries??? With a deadline for this afternoon I cannot spend a lot of time describing each book... yet I want to push myself to communicate some of the mind-opening good reads I came across recently. Most are not new books, and probably you will recognise them. Without further introduction, here's a list of books about maths, with a twist: Godel, Escher, Bach: and eternal golden braid by D. Hofstadter The_Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart Introducing Chaos, a graphic guide Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker So, these are some of my current and past reads. Have you read them? Any recommendations down these lines? In future entries I will explore books about design and programmi...

A couple of months ago, and a couple of weeks ago I have presented  a quick primer of Python scripting on the Revit Platform at the Manchester and London Revit User Groups. Both have been fantastic experiences, summarized the evening I was having a beer (or #BIMbeer) and heard someone say "I've been told that the other day there was an interesting presentation on Python at the Manchester Revit User Group", to what I replied "That was me, thanks!". My main objective is to trigger curiosity and push at least some people to discover that the programming edge is not that hard to climb, and things appear much nicer from those heights. I have to clarify that among non-programmers I can pretend to be one, but in all ernesty I am a wannabe noob of a programmer, despite a few lines of code I cannot understand does not stop me from trying to understand it!! Following a recent request on Twitter to share the presentation and thinking that they are probably available so...

It's been some time since I started to think on this post. Basically, every time I hear people talk about forms of energy, or saving energy, or Green Energy or the like, I wonder if those people have the same understanding of Energy I have. Also, when I read how many calories a chocolate bar has, again I think about a proper definition of Energy and its implications. Without further introduction, here is my question: What is Energy? From a pure physics definition, Energy is the ability of a physical system to perform work. Work in turn is intended as a force acting along a distance. All this was described by Sir Newton 324 years ago, in his Principia. An object is capable of storing Energy because its particles are taken to a position (requiring Energy to do so) and will be able to release that Energy later. Imagine you raise an object, then let it go. That's your Force x Distance on the way up stored in the "Potential Energy" and transformed to kinematic Ener...

Diverting from any standard path (as if I had one!) I came accross this text regarding this typically Spanish letter (alt-165)... Translating it to English would make little sense, so here it goes in Spanish! Thanks to Caro, Maia and Lele for forwarding emails :) Con un texto que hizo historia, la fallecida compositora argentina María Elena Walsh había encabezado la lucha por la defensa del lugar de la letra insignia del idioma español en Internet. Aquí el texto: No nos dejemos arrebatar la ñ La culpa es de los gnomos que nunca quisieron ser ñomos. Culpa tienen la nieve, la niebla, los nietos, los atenienses, el unicornio. Todos evasores de la eñe. ¡Señoras, señores, compañeros, amados niños! ¡No nos dejemos arrebatar la eñe! Ya nos han birlado los signos de apertura de interrogación y admiración. Ya nos redujeron hasta la apócope. Ya nos han traducido el pochoclo. Y como éramos pocos, la abuelita informática ha parido un monstruoso # en lugar de la eñe con su gracioso...

I am going to start this post with a few easy quotes: "The 21st century is all about communication", "We live in a global world", "The world has shrunk because of ease of communication". For many years I've heard these phases and effectively not only believed in them but also enjoyed the meaning of them. From the good old brick mobile phones, allowing to keep talking (or shouting repeatedly "CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?!???") while on the move, to the sophisticated cloud computing technology, unleashing collaborative addition of "unlimited" computing power regardless of geographic location, there have been many shades and variations of the way we exchange information. And Information is another concept that has become key to modern life: access to information, freedom of information, building information... anything makes the cut under the "information" label. As I've been promising for weeks now, today I have done my AU...

It's been a great first week as a blogger, adding 15 followers, nice comments and references from other blogs. I am also very happy that the point I made in my first post about trying to meet people with same interests or chasing similar goals have already paid off! In the meantime Alistair from the office sent me a quick note that got me thinking: in the BIM community we generally talk about drafting tools that deal with drawings separately as "2D", and then the ones where all the information gets stored in a single model as "3D". All clear up to that. Then we get about 4D (time) and even 5D (money) to describe the advantages of meta-data and database capabilities in our beloved Building Information Models. But in modern physics there is a diferentiation between "Spacetime", where time and distance measurements are combined in a single manifold, in the Relativistic approach and multi-dimensional Euclidean space (which is the geometry we are taught...