The Bathroom of Tomorrow: What a Way to Go
By: Douglas Page
Everyone wonders what the bathroom of the future will be like. Okay, maybe they don't, but it hasn't stopped engineers in the division of Non-Burning Issues from designing what can euphemistically be called the bathroom of tomorrow—an oasis of comfort, elegance, rest, and meditation essential to contemporary living.

Since the bathroom is the one place in the home where we are likely to be alone, designers of the future are creating the perfect chamber where we can properly obsess on attitude and appearance.

At Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, engineers have dreamed up several pie-in-the-sky gadgets that could begin to enhance the care and grooming experience by 2005. They began with the mirror.

Remember when flossing used to be simple? The seers at Philips have modified bathroom mirrors almost beyond recognition. The mirrored door, over the sink and on the medicine chest, previously used only for thoughts of who-is-the-fairest, is now another entertainment and information center, offering a picture-in-a-picture window on the televised world. Since nature doesn't always call at the best times, soon you won't have to miss any of those great Super Bowl commercials.

The sink mirror goes hand in hand with the flexible pullout mirror, featuring a magnifying camera lens attached to a flexible arm for correct positioning and that complete hands-free body inspection we've all been missing.

Under the mirror there's a recharge shelf and container, not only for electric shavers and toothbrushes, but also for the special "wands". These programmable remote controls will be used to store individual preset preferences for background music, television selection, room lighting, heating, and water temperature for the shower, bath or bidet.

The bathroom of the future also eliminates the need for a magazine rack, since it will contain a portable, wireless television monitor for easy viewing from anywhere in the bathroom. When showering, soaking in a bubble bath or attending to other inevitabilities, a cable-free, waterproof screen can be moored wherever you are. Through this monitor you may access TV channels, e-magazines, e-books or instant stock quotes over the internet.

For toweling off, Philips is designing a high tech magic carpet that does more than dry the bottom of your feet. This rug allows one to track vital signs including weight, pulse and blood pressure. Digital results can be recorded and transmitted instantly to a window in one of the bathroom's electronic mirrors. Those in denial can suppress the instant readout.

The mat slips right in with the Philips concept of the home medical center—most likely to be found in the bathroom. This is an information and communication nucleus connecting technologies and allowing access to and from medical services.

Tomorrow's bathroom will be equipped with a medical kit containing more than Blistex®, cotton balls and bandages. Philips thinks the day is approaching when there will be little need for anyone to go to the doctor to diagnose high blood pressure, for instance. The first aid kit of the future will contain e-books and CD-ROMs that will provide coaching on, say, what blood pressure is and how to measure it using tools from the kit, which will be connected via a telemedicine link to the doctor's office.

In essence, the home medical center will function like an interactive medical encyclopedia, with in-depth explanations and simulations, while providing access to your doctor's office via a video link so the physicians can check your symptoms and give their prognosis.

The bottom line on the bathroom of tomorrow comes from Toto Kiki USA, Inc., a Morrow, Georgia, plumbing supply firm (www.totousa.com), where engineers have developed, tested and are now marketing Zoë, a $699 ergonomically contoured, cushioned, "smart" toilet seat. Now we know who got Einstein's office.

The Zoë features an automatic air sensor and freshening system; a hydraulic mechanism for soft-closing that finally addresses the nerve-racking terror of seat-slam (great for those middle-of-the-night bathroom sorties); and the personal cleansing luxury of a built-in, adjustable, aerated, warm-water bidet-stream activated by remote control at the touch of a button. Please make sure this remote doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

This throne even comes with an optional seat-warmer feature for those stark winter mornings when Nature's calls are most immediate. Contrived by award-winning industrial designer Ayse Birsel, the Zoë was built with the belief that there's more to a toilet seat than meets the thigh, and that a comfortable seat should echo the contours of the human body. Thus the Zoë’s ergonomic seat fits not just the commode, but the rump as well. A high back provides support, while the sloping front was designed so as not to impede blood circulation.

No butts about it, the bathroom of the future will be a compelling electronic cocoon, a place of refuge, serenity, contemplation and renewal—the lavatory equivalent of the black turtleneck.

Man vs. Machine: The Halftime report
By Douglas Page
Technology, the Golden Calf of the last 50 years, may be the Cloven Foot of the next 50. Many futurists believe within 35 years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Immediately thereafter, they predict, the human era will end. Don't buy any 50 year bonds.
Computers have hijacked our destiny. We're just a few years, if not a few minutes, from what Fringe Thinkers are calling the end of the human era, the point at which a runaway, fugitive technology commandeers the future - a future in which humans will be unfamiliar, unnecessary and probably unwelcome.
Human history is characterized by restive technology. It's about to stampede. New technologies (i.e., agriculture, medicine, electronics, genetics) have permitted population growth. A larger population means a larger brain pool. A larger brain pool means newer and better technologies sooner. As anyone who bought a 166 MHz personal computer last summer knows, it was obsolete before you could build a bookmark file. Computer performance doubles every few months, and has since 1942, beginning with the Atanasoff-Berry computer, the first electronic digital computer, built before World War II in a basement lab at Iowa State University by math and physics professor John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, a graduate student. The ABC computer had a storage capacity of 375 characters and could perform one operation every 15 seconds. Fifty years later experimental machines exist in Japan and the United States capable of tera-flops performance - one trillion floating-point operations per second.
Machines a thousand times faster are pushing against the fence. Peta-flops machines are anticipated within five years, based on smaller 0.18 micron semiconductor technology now considered feasible. In Silicon Valley smaller equals faster. The smallest semiconductor gate currently available is .35 microns. (One micron is 10-6 meter, or one-millionth of a meter.)
A researcher at the University of Buffalo may have made electronics itself obsolete. Physicist Hong Luo found a way to make flexible semiconductors, which industry prelates predict could "revolutionize" electronics as we know it by expediting the transition from electronic to optical computing, where computation is performed moving photons of light instead of electrons. No moving electrons means no heat. No heat means smaller components. Smaller components mean faster performance. Computers will soon be fast enough to do a million human-years work in a month.
It gets smaller. Nanotechnology, engineering on the molecular level (cf, K. Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology", Anchor Books, 1986), is another restless frontier stirring in the stockade. Drexler says by using molecular "assembler" machines we will eventually be able to create almost any arrangement of atoms. This technology will at first yield materials stronger and lighter than anything known. A new Illinois company, Nanophase Technologies, is already fabricating iron, aluminum and titanium oxides into nanoscale-size powders, which are molded into ceramic components for use in giant Caterpillar and Lockheed engines. Their other nanoscale powders form a key ingredient in a new generation of high tech sunscreen and cosmetics (no caking or streaking!). The sunscreen powder particles (each about 12 atoms in size) are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, effectively yielding 100 percent protection against dangerous ultraviolet radiation.
Nanotechnology will further reduce the size (and increase the speed) of computers. Drexler predicts nanotechnology will eventually create super-nanocomputers smaller than grains of sand. The corral fences collapse here. The stampede begins when nanotechnology bolts toward human physical immortality. Swarms of nanoscale cell-repair cruisers will ripple through the body, locating faulty cells and repairing abnormal (aging?) DNA. If you like, or maybe even if you don't, you can live as long as the Great Red Spot. This will be attractive to Chicago Cubs' fans, who may have to wait at least that long for the Cubs to make it to the World Series. You'll need something to do while you wait. That will require the "Santa Claus machine", a material wish-swingle capable of recycling the matter and molecules in junk drawers into just about anything you want - like maybe a Bruce Willis-android to confront the cap-chewer with the Harley next door, or a gadget to render all dogs and everyone named Jesse Helms silent.
Most futurists predict sometime between tomorrow and the year 2035 a computer at MIT or Los Alamos or the University of Tokyo or somewhere will be nudged into consciousness and "wake up", to find itself 'human' in the sense it will be capable of performing the processing prowess of the human brain. That computer will do more than crunch numbers. It will have found computing's Holy Grail - self-awareness, a condition we call 'intelligence'. From here, things quickly get interesting.
Against the Window of Heaven
"Smart" machines will reproduce, creating smarter machines, which in turn will build still smarter machines. Technological progress, now approaching omniscience, will explode suo Marte, swelling superexponentially almost overnight to the utter limits of knowledge, to the "Omega Point", where it will remain with its nose pressed against the window of Heaven in an endless ramification of incomprehensible change. The seers call this the "Singularity". The rest of us will call it the Apocalypse.
If any of the doomsday prophecies are correct then there is nothing to be done. If the Singularity can happen it will happen. Hold on to your hard drive. There's no way to stop a silicon stampede.
There's just this one detail. The human brain has an Inner Mind and no machine can find it. No machine is "awake" in the sense that it is aware of its experience, and some experts doubt computers will ever - no matter how small they become, how fast they operate, or how well they mimic neuronal activity - be more than catatonic couriers, note-passers with little if any ability to understand content. Consciousness is a longer riddle than most people thought. University of California, Santa Cruz, philosopher David Chalmers says, "The more we think about computers the more we realize how strange consciousness is." The dash toward the Singularity depends on the creation of superhuman Artificial Intelligence, and AI has a limited future if the human mind can't be downloaded and algorithms written to imitate it.
Yet, there's no agreement on what the human mind even is. And no one seems to knows how it works. We don't even know if those questions can be answered. There's a magical connection concealed in the mind, a poetic symbiosis sealed in mystery. Maybe human minds are our personal Arks of the Covenant, to be approached and admired but never entered or embraced. Some suspect when the day comes that machines are like men it will be more because men have lost their humanity than because machines have found it. Personally, I'm not inclined to worry much until I see a computer catch a fly ball or gather a grandchild on its lap.
There are people who aren't worried about the Singularity because "techno-prophecy" is almost always wrong. Edward Tenner, in his book "Why Things Bite Back" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) complains that almost nothing about technology has been predicted with any accuracy. Every innovation, he says, that solves one problem creates another. The marvels of modern technology, for instance, include the development of the soda can which, when discarded, lasts for eons. Improvements in football padding were meant to prevent injuries; instead they encouraged more aggressive play, causing injuries to increase. One can only imagine what they were thinking when they invented the leaf-blower. Operation Cat Drop, the guiding parable of the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder, 'hypercar' guru Amory Lovins, is the template of inexpediency: Forty years ago malaria was the scourge of the Dayak people of Borneo. In response, the World Health Organization sprayed DDT to kill the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The mosquitoes died, but so did a parasitic wasp that had controlled thatch-eating caterpillars. The peoples' roofs collapsed. Other DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by cats. When the cats died the rats flourished and the Dayak people were suddenly faced with outbreaks of typhus and plague. In response, WHO parachuted 14,000 live cats into Borneo.
"This true story illustrates that if you don't know how things are interconnected then frequently the cause of problems are their solutions," Lovins says.
Instead of swishing us suddenly into the Fluxion Apocalypse it may be just as likely that technology will have to settle for marching us in an orderly parade toward the Utopian suburbs. Consider the cavalcade of Things That Think, presented to us in the belief they make our lives somehow more complete, interesting or less dangerous. They may not be Things That Are Awake, but they are Things That Are Smart (not to say intelligent). Examples:
Deep Blue
An IBM computer, Deep Blue, recently defeated the world's greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov, in an historic match. Maybe some weren't impressed but Kasparov was. Kasparov thought he met God. "I met something I couldn't explain," he said after the match. "People turn to religion to explain things like that." There are those who think Kasparov is being way too hard on himself. There's room for a little pride when you consider it took a 3,000 pound bundle of 512 computers bear-hugging 200 million moves a second to beat him. Kasparov evaluates a measly two or three moves a second and still managed to win one game and tie three more in the six game match.
The Doctor Will Sense You Now
'Smart' medicine is here, just a microchip away, courtesy of a tiny, wireless electronic device developed by Thomas Ferrell at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that can be attached like a band-aid or imbedded in a fingertip or earlobe. Doctors, medics and fire chiefs can now remotely monitor vital signs of high-risk patients, perform remote battlefield triage, track the respiration of firefighters and hazmat crews fighting fires or toxic clouds, monitor children at risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and liberate neo-natal babies from monitor wires so they can be held and stroked. The first generation of the miniature medics, which are one-eighth the size of a postage stamp, sense body temperature only, but subsequent iterations will measure blood pressure, blood oxygen and pulse - data then transmitted to remote receivers.
The technology will show up first use in the military, then civilian medical and emergency fields. Doctors can monitor vital signs from miles away, paramedics can be more prepared for emergencies that await their arrival. Built-in alarms will notify firefighters, for instance, when blood oxygen levels indicate danger. The sensor chips can also automatically telephone emergency services when triggered by a patient's deteriorating vital signs.
'Smart' Fire Detectors
Purdue University's Jay Gore has devised a 'Smart' fire detector that doesn't have to wait for smoke to set it off. Using fiber optics to scan for the reflections of flames on walls, the devise can survey multiple rooms from a single location and uses a data base of flicker-patterns and frequency- content to judge whether the image it 'sees' is an actual fire, a candle or a curtain blowing. If it detects the patterns of flame it automatically notifies the fire department and plays pre-recorded evacuation instructions.
'Smart' Compass
A Fresno, California company called Directional Robotics has invented the 'Smart' Compass that not only helps you get where you're going, it remembers where you've been and can help you find your way back - useful to divers, hikers and the intoxicated. It can be connected to a speech synthesizer to guide the blind.
'Smart' Roads
We have 'Smart' Roads, thanks to Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, which markets the SmartSonic Traffic Surveillance System, a device that replaces magnetic-loop sensors in roads with an advanced, aerially-mounted acoustic sensor that can determine traffic loads by the sounds vehicles make.
'Smart' Structures
Lucent also has given us 'Smart' Structures, now that the loads and stresses on bridges and overpasses can be monitored by one of their pin-head size optoelectronic chips.
'Smart' Rescue
If one of the structures happens to collapse on top of you anyway, we have the 'Smart' people-finder, a small electronic box developed by Michigan State University electrical engineering professor Kun-Mu Chen that shoots microwave beams into the rubble of bombed or earthquake damaged buildings and can "hear" the heartbeat or breathing of victims buried under tons of debris.
'Smart' Fabrics
A new generation of 'Smart' Fabric is looming. Researchers working on the fringe of polymer science are at work developing 'Smart' fabrics - material that reacts to and protects the wearer from temperature extremes, fire, radiation, traces of toxic agents and, eventually, even projectiles. The research, at the University of Akron, in collaboration with Drexel and North Carolina State universities, is designing garments of imbedded fiber optic systems that can change color or otherwise signal the presence of extreme heat, chemical or biological agents. The hollow fibers can carry nutrition or medicine. That's just the beginning. We may all be wearing clothing items one day that look like pants but which in fact double as radon detectors, smoke alarms, computers and ionization chambers.
There are also 'Smart' tape measures (that remember dimensions you forgot to write down), 'Smart' windows (that know whether to let heat in or out), 'Smart' televisions (that turn the volumn down during noisy commercials - now if they could just filter out the laugh tracks...) and 'Smart' cards (that will eliminate all the other cards). 'Smart' things we could actually use but can only wish for: 'smart' voters, 'smart' politicians, 'smart' drivers, and 'smart' parents.
Other Things That Think
Other Thinking Things are just being dreamed up. An entire laboratory has been set up at MIT, for instance, devoted to nurturing Things That Think. MIT has noticed there are enough unidirectional electronic gadgets with buttons, batteries and userids to annoy just about everyone without actually making life less complicated. (Why do we have all those phone numbers, anyway?) "We wear clothes, put on jewelry, sit on chairs and walk on carpets that all share the same profound failing," say the MIT Media Laboratory vision statement. "They are all blind, deaf and very dumb. Cuff links, in fact, don't link with anything. Fabrics look pretty but should have a brain, too. Glasses help sight but they don't see." The Age of the Electron may have given us instruments that are pragmatic but they aren't particularly wise. MIT can't see why, for instance, your coffee maker shouldn't be smart enough to remotely (through some sort of electromagnetic beam interrogation) find which coffee cup is yours, sense the amount and temperature of the coffee in it and, if coached in advance, begin preparing a fresh serving. Your Jerry Falwell-android/stooge can pour it.
The lab lords think it's absurd your pager, cellphone, laptop, wristwatch, doorbell, CD player and toaster don't speak to each other. They envision something called BodyNet, a personal communication field where the devices that attend to you actually talk to you, talk to each other and converse with the rest of the planet via unique Transponder/Body frequencies - powered by some clever way of harnessing the static electricity you generate merely by moving.
What does it all mean? We don't know. We don't know whether technology will eventually convey us to the Singularity or safely house us in the sanitary suburbs; we don't know whether to regard it as invective or invitation, whether it's inherently benign, treacherous or achromatic. The entire issue pales to the parochial when you realize 90 percent of the people in the world have no telephone. Exactly which side of the technological fence is actually 'backward' remains to be seem.
Local Personality Profile
If you shop at the Eight O’Clock Superette, you know John Ashmore. And chances are, Johnny knows you, too.

“I’ve always tried to treat people the way I’d like to be treated,” he says. “That’s probably one reason I know so many people and so many people know me.”

In fact, if you spend any amount of time with him during working hours, whether he’s bagging groceries or helping someone out to their car, hardly a person can walk by without Johnny greeting them by name.

But more than that, Johnny knows his customers’ tastes. When one regular customer named Linda – who says she’s been shopping at the 8 O’Clock for “millions of years” — asks about the various breads at the checkout counter, Johnny doesn’t hesitate to make a recommendation. “The apple bread’s the one that’s good,” he says, and another loaf slides across the counter.

“Linda and I have known each other for years,” Johnny says.

“And I always tell him what I like and what I don’t like,” Linda adds.

It’s this sort of personal rapport that endears Johnny to friends and neighbors alike. A long time fixture of the Augusta Road area, Johnny himself admits that he knows a lot of people. “My friend Bill Kennedy jokingly says ‘We can’t go anywhere in Greenville that we don’t run into somebody that you know.’”

Kennedy doesn’t limit it to Greenville, though. “From Spartanburg to Anderson, 95% of the time we go anywhere, somebody recognizes Johnny,” he says.

Watching him work, witnessing his easy interactions with all sorts of people, you’d be hard pressed to guess that Johnny is legally blind.

Born into a family with deep Greenville roots, Johnny Ashmore grew up on McDaniel Avenue in the heart of the Augusta Road neighborhood he still calls home. His father and grandfather both served as Greenville County Supervisors. His maternal grandfather, Fred A. Fuller, owned an appliance store and, at one time, was the area’s Studebaker dealer. But when Johnny arrived in the world, he weighed only 2 1/2 pounds. A premature infant, Johnny spent several months in an incubator before going home. By that time, however, the damage had already been done. Too much oxygen in the incubator affected Johnny’s eyes, leaving him with extremely limited vision.

“I see colors real well,” he explains.” I can’t see detail a good way away. But in familiar areas, I do real well.”

And the Augusta Road area is intimately familiar to him. For the past 17 years, he’s lived in a condominium at Lewis Village and worked in area stores, first at what was known as the “baby” Bi-Lo, and, since it closed some 8 years ago, at the 8 O’Clock. He’s attended Augusta Road Baptist Church since childhood and recently purchased a house on Jones Avenue.

“I wanted a house that had a yard,” he says, “so I could have a garden and put up a greenhouse.”

Plants have been a long-time interest with Johnny, ever since he worked in a greenhouse while attending North Greenville College in the seventies. He then ran his own greenhouse in Mauldin for five years, until the incoming discount stores proved to be too much competition. After working at the Old South Farmer’s Market until it , too, closed, Johnny returned for good to Augusta Road.

“Everything is just so convenient,” he says of the area he loves so much. “I need to be somewhere where I could walk to work, I could walk to the bank, I could walk to the post office, I could walk to church.”

His new house puts him even closer to his job at the 8 O’Clock – and, more importantly, allows him to avoid having to cross busy Augusta Road every morning. “I actually got hit by a car one morning,” he says. “A car pulled out of one of the bank parking lots and knocked me down. I was bruised up a little bit, but I didn’t have to go to the hospital. Now I won’t have to do that anymore.”

One of his more interesting experiences with cars involved the day he actually drove one. His college roommate offered to let Johnny drive his Volkswagen beetle down narrow Crescent Avenue. “He worked the accelerator and I steered,” Johnny recalls. “And he would say ‘Turn to the left, turn to the right.” Johnny’s blindness also hasn’t stopped him from playing softball. After loyally attending church games, Johnny was put on the roster one year as a sort of honor. But that turned tricky when the team found themselves one player shy of forfeiting a game. The umpire insisted that if Johnny was on the roster, he had to play, and so Johnny dutifully went up to bat, friends telling him when to swing.

He made it all the way to second base.

“He’s taught all of us here at the church so much about endurance, about having a good attitude toward life, taking each day as an adventure,” says Toni Pate, associate pastor of Augusta Road Baptist Church. She also admires Johnny’s knowledge of people, crediting him with helping her get her bearings when she first arrived at the church. “He’s got his own little circle of ministry,” she says.

Pate also reports that Johnny has a beautiful singing voice. “The first time I ever heard him sing a solo, I just wept,” she says.

Joyce Medlin, who’s known Johnny for as long as she can remember, describes him simply as a remarkable, giving person. “You’d never want a better friend than Johnny Ashmore,” she says.

Meadow Lakes GC: Civic Chip-In From an Unplayable Environmental and Financial Lie by Douglas Page

It's not so much that the tiny central Oregon town of Prineville has a municipal golf course, although few hamlets of less than 7,000 people do. After all, Prineville sits on the tee box of the Great Basin, the largest sand trap in North America - a desert stretching from the middle of Oregon to the Mexican border and beyond, a wasteland known to the locals as the Great Sandy Desert. Los Angeles gets more rain than this part of Oregon. What's unlikely about the arid community of Prineville is that its golf course has more water hazards than a nautical theme park. Meadow Lakes Golf Course doubles as Prineville's wastewater treatment plant. Meadow Lakes is inlayed with 10 evaporation ponds, surface drainage collectors and irrigation pools designed to treat community wastewater before it finds its way into the local river. "You can potentially find water on every hole," says Prineville city manager Henry Hartley, with just a hint of mischief in his voice. Hartley is responsible for the idea of upgrading the city's archaic wastewater treatment facility by converting it into a golf course - a civic chip-in from a seemingly unplayable environmental and financial lie. It started a few years ago when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) showed its teeth to the State of Oregon, threatening to cut off federal money unless Oregon began enforcing the Clean Water Act, meaning the state had to clean up 30 of its 50 rivers. Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the agency responsible for protecting the rivers, in turn began nipping at certain municipalities. The DEQ focused on 260 river segments representing 7,000 miles of Oregon's 114,000 mile vascular river system. One of the segments was the portion of the Crooked River flowing through Prineville. This tiny timber town sitting almost exactly at the geographic center of Oregon, 35 miles northeast of Bend and 18 miles from the nearest freeway, was guilty of dumping inadequately treated wastewater into the river. Their antiquated wastewater treatment lagoon was operating over capacity, discharging toxic waste including pesticides, organic solids and nitrates. Nitrates, originating in fertilizers and animal and human waste, can be harmful to humans and livestock once it leeches into drinking water supplies. Groundwater reconnaissance surveys found high nitrate levels in many of Prineville's 20 wells. One gallon of contaminate can pollute nearly 300 million gallons of water. Prineville, a village with 6,230 mostly blue-collar citizens, no local tv station and rent that averages $322 a month was suddenly faced with fines up to $25,000 per day if it did not find a way to treat and dispose of about a million gallons of wastewater a day - at a cost of several million dollars. The EPA suggested treating the wastewater by spraying it over a to-be-created 400 acre alfalfa field. City manager Hartley had another idea. "Why don't we build a golf course," he remembers wondering aloud. The state made a nose-noise suggesting disgust, but the EPA was intrigued by the idea that a golf course, requiring only 150 acres, would cost about $100,000 less than the alfalfa field. Looking at Hartley over their glasses the EPA consented, then seeded the project with about one-fourth of the $9.5 million needed to purchase the land, engineer and construct a new sediment lagoon, contour the excavated soil into the shape of a golf course and build a clubhouse. Portions of the remaining money came from municipal bonds, a state loan and free drops from Housing and Urban Development and the Oregon Economic Development Department sewer improvement fund. Hartley says the smartest thing the city did then was "hire good professionals and stay out of their way". A Bend, Oregon, engineering firm found a way to clean the wastewater and distribute it over the golf course, preventing effluent from seeping into the river. Another firm designed an underground drainage system to intercept the flow of uncontaminated water rising with the water table and divert it to the river. Thus, effluent sprayed the golf course does not mix with the water table, nor does any 'outside' water penetrate the system to leave evaporated salts on the surface. The wastewater that reaches Meadow Lakes stays at Meadow Lakes. The water's only way out is through evaporation. Each acre of pond surface evaporates a million gallons of water annually. With 16 acre-feet of water exposed, Meadow Lakes looks more like a map of Minnesota than a golf course. There are suggestions the pro shop should rent life rafts instead of golf carts. Architect Bill Robinson designed Meadow Lakes to drain entirely by surface runoff. Every fairway is sloped just enough to drain into one of the 10 evaporation ponds, all of which have impermeable linings. Because of the aqueous nature of Meadow Lakes, grass specialist Bill Meier recommended moisture-tolerant fescues, bluegrass and ryes rather than drought-tolerant breeds, opposite what might be expected in a region with as little as 10 to 12 inches of rain per year. The project produced Meadow Lakes, a green par 72 layout on the edge of a desert playing 6,731 yards from the back tees. The Crooked River runs through it. Green fees are $29 on weekends and $18 weekdays, revenues that directly offset the costs of operating the water treatment plant. "The way we're budgeting right now," said Hartley, "the golf course will pay off the $2.5 million lease-purchase of the land in seven years." The unique course averages close to 25,000 rounds of golf annually, losing only about two weeks a year to bad weather. "I don't know of another golf course built from the ground up as a wastewater treatment facility," says Hartley. "There are a lot of courses in Central Oregon that don't have much water. If you get off the fairway you're in rocks or sage or trees. You can spend a lot of time looking for your ball. Because of all our water, Meadow Lakes plays fairly quickly. You know right away your ball is lost." They may lose a lot of golf balls, but they found something else. The familiar 'plunk' of another ball plopping in the water is the Crooked River saying "Thanks".

Touring Salem State: To Talk or Just to Walk By: Courtney Denning

As a student at Salem State University, there are many different things you can become involved in: on-campus activities like sports or student-run groups, off-campus things like shopping in downtown Salem or dinner in Boston, as well as many opportunities for jobs,internships or work-study, both on and off campus.For Katelyn Phaneuf, it was the teacher-to-student ratio and the on-campus preschool that brought her to Salem State to pursue her double major in Education and Spanish, but it’s her job that allows her to show other incoming students the different things that this school has to offer.“Being an Admissions Ambassador here is fun, because I just get to be really honest with students about whatever they want to ask,” said Phaneuf about guiding the tours on campus for prospective students and their parents. “I let the kids know everything about on-campus and off-campus life right off the bat, and answer any questions that the parents might have, so it’s a win-win and they get all the information they need to decide on a school. I don’t lie to them.”In her opinion, the tour around campus really does need a guide with a face, someone to walk around and answer questions, regardless of the distance away from the other campuses. “We don’t have time to take them to the O’Keefe Center or to South Campus, although we encourage them to visit both. But the questions that they get to ask us on the walk from Central to North Campus aresometimes crucial to their decision and aren’t something you could get out of a pamphlet,” Phaneuf said. “It’s really best that they come during the school year for a tour so that they can see life on campus and look into the classrooms to see the real teacher-to-student ratio and the diversity of students that we have here.”There are many on-campus events to attend like the “Weekend Warriors” event, where freshmen compete in an inflatable obstacle course against each other as well as against the other dorms to win prizes like gift cards, money for their Clipper Card and more. The school also hosts the “Snow Down,” winter’s version of a Wild West party, equipped with a mechanical bull; an auction night where you can raffle off your friends for a date, as well as sporting events just about every night when the seasons are in full swing. If you’d rather go off campus, there is plenty to do in downtown Salem any time of year, but the fall is especially active with spooky but informative events, plenty of different museums, as well as the plethora of restaurants and coffee shops that make downtown Salem appealing all year round. The commute into Boston’s North Station is also just a 25-minute train ride.With the ongoing campus renovations, new residence halls, and university status, Salem State is making an excellent name for itself. The fair price of tuition has kept students like Phaneuf here for all four years. “Even for me to pay out-of-state tuition, it costs less than the schools I was looking at in New Hampshire,” she said. “It’s a great price to pay for everything I’m getting out of it. The value for me has been huge.”