Your roads are wrecking your cities

 Posted by on 24 July 2010  Modern Life
Jul 242010
 

I’ve long been convinced that, even in frigid Prairie Canada, where I live, pedestrian-oriented urban design is the only way to go.

Too much of my city is a barren wasteland, from a pedestrian perspective, because the last 50 years have been devoted to making things easier and easier for the car.

Perversely, we built a gigantic new box mall (just as they’re going out of style) with humongous parking lots — only to cry and complain about the traffic chaos it generated. Oh, and did I mention that the parking lot was designed so that buses couldn’t turn into it?

Now, to alleviate that chaos, we’re in the midst of a multi-year campaign to double the traffic capacity to and from that mall.

It’s been a multi-year mess, and this summer has been the worst.

But even when it’s complete, although it might make for a smoother drive, I don’t think the new roads and big, expansive intersections will actually make the city any better.

I point, for example, to this wonderful post about what freeways (and the iconic Arch) did to poor St. Louis:

Cities generate wealth by bringing large numbers of people into proximity with one another. Two adjacent high-density neighborhoods will be richer than either could be alone because businesses at the edge of each neighborhood will be enriched by pedestrian traffic from the other. Driving a freeway through the middle of a healthy urban neighborhood not only destroys thousands of homes, it rips apart tightly integrated neighborhoods. Pedestrians rarely walk across freeways, so businesses near a new freeway are immediately deprived of half their customers. Similarly, residents near a new freeway lose access to half the businesses near them. The area along the freeway becomes what Jacobs calls a “border vaccuum” and goes into a kind of death spiral: because it contains little pedestrian traffic, businesses there don’t succeed. And because there are no interesting businesses there, even fewer people go there, which hurts the sales of businesses further from the freeway. The harms from such a freeway extends for blocks on either side.

Where I live isn’t “high-density urban” by any stretch of the imagination — we’re a fairly smallish service centre for the tiny towns that surround us. But I think you could make a case that our relationship with these bedroom communities is similar to that of a large city’s downtown with its suburbs.

Blogger Timothy Lee has a number of other posts where he re-examines urban neighbourhoods in the light of classic Jane Jacobs. They’re worth the read.

Tetris, with real physics

 Posted by on 23 July 2010  Vintage/Retro
Jul 232010
 

You know what Tetris didn’t need? Artificial 90-degree limitations when you rotated the blocks. Thankfully, that’s been fixed:

See how much harder that is?

You can download the game from here to try it yourself. And read a thread about it on Facepunch (I got a sexy Victoria’s Secret interstitial ad when I went there, mildly nsfw, but the thread itself is tame).

Climate change? Who cares if it’s real

 Posted by on 23 July 2010  Modern Life
Jul 232010
 

Here’s how to win the war against climate change by simply ignoring the petty battle:

Winning an argument by defining the terms of debate in your favour is a classic technique. It’s done well here.

This is an entry in a video challenge called Living Climate Change. It was submitted by Alex Bogusky, who might just be the 21st century’s answer to Don Draper.

There’s a ton more at Fast Company.

A camera that does away with the photographer

 Posted by on 22 July 2010  Modern Life, Photography
Jul 222010
 

If you thought that being an artist would protect you from having a computer do your work, think again:

Yes, that’s right — eschewing the view screen, a computer in this point-and-shoot camera calculates what makes a good photograph using some kind of algorithm and rates it for you.

FastCo Design says it’s really not that difficult:

Consider this: Much of what makes a picture artistic could actually be programmed into a camera. Diagonal compositions, color contrasts, foreground/background? All of these are pretty simple things for a computer to vet.

I’ll add to that, the golden photographic rule of thumb, the Rule of Thirds, is really just an approximation of a derivation of the Fibonacci sequence which has been simplified to make it easier for humans to understand. Computers would have the advantage.

Designer Andrew Kupresanin, who came up with the camera prototype, called the Nadia, says that it makes use of the Acquine engine.

Now, for debate: Is this more about computers getting smarter? Or humans getting dumber?

How compostable are those Sun Chips bags, really?

 Posted by on 22 July 2010  Modern Life
Jul 222010
 

I was pretty impressed when I saw the new bags from Sun Chips — they’re advertised as fully compostable:

This comes on the heels of my city starting a curbside pickup experiment for compostables, and I’ve been going to folk festivals for a couple of years now and seeing compostable beer cups, and, if you’re in the right establishment, there are even “plastic” utensils that are actually made out of potato.

So all this is great. But how compostable are those Sun Chips bags, really?

Well, I don’t know. But I’m going to find out, thanks to the work of one Drew Odom, on his blog, anotherkindofdrew:

I intend to contact Sun Chips and let them know the result and my feelings on the subject. So, on Monday, August 30 I will dig up the final of the three holes to see if the bag is gone or not. In the meantime I will dig up 1/3 after 3 weeks and then another 1/3 after 6 weeks and report on my progress.

Here’s his photo of the bag after three weeks.

I’ll be checking in to see how it ends!

(via Fast Company)

Man re-opens shuttered bar, forgets to buy it first

 Posted by on 22 July 2010  Modern Life
Jul 222010
 

A glowing profile in the local paper said that Travis Kevie was a rodeo cowboy who had chosen to give a local landmark a new lease on life:

Kevie said that paperwork on the bar sale hasn’t been finalized but that he has moved into living quarters at the bar and will be keeping it open seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m.

“It’s a dream come true,” Kevie said ….

He’s looking to the future, with plans for an Elvis impersonator on Aug. 1 and a vision to give residents and patrons what they want in a bar.

There’s only one thing wrong with the story — Kevie doesn’t actually own the bar. Nor is he renting, leasing, or otherwise legally occupying it.

I don’t think he has a liquor permit.

According to one witty commenter, he’s “America’s first ‘small business squatter.’” According to another, it was “like an alcoholic version of a kid’s lemonade stand.”

Gawker reimagines it as a 1980s Steve Guttenburg comedy, and fills in some details:

Travis Kevie, a 29-year-old “transient” who claims to be a rodeo cowboy, broke into the Valencia Club in Auburn, Calif. on July 16 and put an “open” sign in the window. His first sales were from a six-pack he’d bought; apparently, he made enough profit off of his resold store booze that he was able to keep the bar open for four days, serving around 30 customers a day.

Then a police officer, who recognized his picture in the paper, came by and shut the bar down again. Sigh.

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Grandfather is a tough guy to kill

 Posted by on 21 July 2010  Modern Life
Jul 212010
 

One of the big arguments against time travel is the ease with which a paradox can arise.  The most commonly used example is the “grandfather paradox” where a time traveller goes back in time, kills his (or her) grandfather, negating their own existence which means the murder could not have happened.

Back to the Future-like slow fades out of existence notwithstanding, this particular paradox illustrates the complexities of time travel.  The post-selected model of time travel, however, forbids these paradoxes outright.

By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence. “In our version of time travel, paradoxical situations are censored,” Lloyd says.

Recently, scientists developed a series of experiments using photons to test this post-selected model.  Although there was no time traveling involved, the experimenters placed the photons into quantum situations similar to those that might be experienced in time travel.
As the photons got closer and closer to being in self-inconsistent, paradoxical situations, the experiment succeeded with less and less frequency, the team found, hinting that true time travel might work the same way.
What does this mean in regards to the grandfather paradox?  It means strange things would happen:
For instance, a bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used later to kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or “some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd says. In this version of time travel, the grandfather, he says, is “a tough guy to kill.”
To read the full Wired article, check it out here.

Party tips from Andrew WK

 Posted by on 21 July 2010  Modern Life
Jul 212010
 

If you follow Andrew WK on Twitter, you can enter contests, submit song ideas, learn about bananas (?) and get all kinds of party tips.

Some of the party tips are great, others are bizarre. And a surprising number of them are positive life affirmations.

Buzzfeed has collected 101 of them. Wow. Here’s a selection:

Party on, Andrew WK, party on.

Weirdest book title ever?

 Posted by on 21 July 2010  Vintage/Retro
Jul 212010
 

Lately, I’ve been on a kick where I’ve been reading (almost exclusively) novels about journalism. There are lots, apparently because many journalists not-so-secretly dream of being novelists.

As soon as I saw this one — “Dwarf Rapes Nun, Flees in UFO” — I knew it would make its way to the top of my list.

Best of all, copies are going for a cool $0.01 on Amazon.

In Mad Men, sometimes women get the last word

 Posted by on 20 July 2010  Modern Life, Vintage/Retro
Jul 202010
 

If you’re like me, the aching feeling in your gut that is the loss of Lost has only been replaced by a longing for Mad Men, which starts its next season this Sunday.

I won’t be watching.

But I will be PVRing. And I’ll be watching it later that week, as part of a Mad Men party, where we all dress up, and drink Mad Men drinks, and serve Mad Men appetizers. Good for us.

To help tide us over, though, here’s a collection of great bon mots from the ladies of Mad Men:

Previously, Amy posted about the best from the men.

Pre-Revolution French Champagne found perfectly preserved undersea

 Posted by on 20 July 2010  Vintage/Retro
Jul 202010
 

It sounds too good to be true — 230-year-old premium Champagne, possibly part of Louis XVI’s personal supply, missing since it was sent to the Russian Imperial Court as a gift, but found recently at the bottom of the Baltic.

And, here’s the too-good-to-be-true part — the darkness and the cold of the northern sea has kept the champagne in pristine condition. Experts tasted it on July 17:

Cromwell-Morgan described the champagne as dark golden in colour with a very intense aroma.

“There’s a lot of tobacco, but also grape and white fruits, oak and mead,” she said of the wine’s “nose”.

As for the taste, “it’s really surprising, very sweet but still with some acidity,” the expert added, explaining that champagne of that period was much less dry than today and the fermentation process less controllable.

There are at least 30 bottles left on the seafloor. Lottery win, now?

Feminism in 1992 — as seen from the past

 Posted by on 19 July 2010  Vintage/Retro
Jul 192010
 

To my mind, there is absolutely nothing funnier than hilariously dated predictions of the future. Also, they are awesome.

I’m kind of a sucker for vintage pulp paperbacks, and this looks like the kind of thing that would be right up my alley — if I could afford it. Used copies are going for $70 on Amazon right now.

(from Retrospace)

William Faulkner, writer in residence

 Posted by on 19 July 2010  Vintage/Retro
Jul 192010
 

In the late 1950s, William Faulkner accepted an offer to become the first writer in residence at the University of Virgina.

Now, recordings from the talks he gave have been digitized and posted online for all to hear:

The quality of the audio you’ll hear at this archive is uneven, for a number of reasons. By our standards, the equipment used was fairly primitive, and being run by academics, not technicians; background noises on some of the tapes are forms of static from the recorder itself. Only one microphone was used, and because Faulkner was so soft-spoken, it had to be placed immediately in front of him, which means questions and comments from others in the room are often difficult to hear, and frequently inaudible. And the tapes themselves, nearly 40,000 feet of fragile plastic strips, had held onto the magnetic records of voices and coughs, laughter and applause for almost half a century before the Library began to digitize them, further degrading their fidelity to those moments in 1957 and 1958.

Despite that, the recordings are evocative, and they show an author who is fully engaged with his audience. He seems to give thoughtful answers, and he never seems impatient or bored with the young students who are asking him questions.

Thanks to the University of Virginia for thinking to record theses sessions, for holding onto the recordings so long, and for putting them up online.

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