urban defects

coral - fish - erosion - destruction

2010-09-20T21:57:00.002-04:00

NYT: "What is unfolding this year is only the second known global bleaching of coral reefs."

category: urban decay

2010-09-19T22:05:00.004-04:00

All urban defects are not urban decay, and all urban decay is not defective. True. See how Wikipedia does a rather amusing job of lumping all types of unrelated city kitsch into its Urban Decay category.

urban windthrow

2010-09-18T14:17:00.002-04:00

tornados in new york city. how odd.

the eros of multitouch

2009-10-15T07:17:00.003-04:00

When Apple Inc. bought Fingerworks in 2005 nobody noticed so much, but that relatively small acquisition represented an crucial bridge crossed on the long, strange trip toward true intimacy with our machines.

Fingerworks brought multitouch into the Apple fold, and changed the point-and-click metaphor forever. Multitouch lets us tickle that perfectly smooth glass face to massage information in and out of the machine. Lots of companies implement multitouch now in different forms and flavors, but Apple blasted it into the mainstream with the iPhone.

Now there are tens of millions of opportunities to watch spidery fingers manipulate maps or 3d objects across that magical little tablet, probing and caressing their devices to coax responses from them.

It's more intimate than fingering strings or a keyboard, or driving a car or working with even the most subtle and precise types of hand tools. There is little frustration in it, since its subtleties are quickly and naturally learned. Like running one's fingers in small, gentle circles along the skin of an unfamiliar breast or other sensitive anatomical focus, the response is not initially predictable but once experienced is riveting and unforgettable.

Haptic and tactile feedback are coming, further intensifying the sensuality of the humachine. We'll feel its response and it will keep getting better at feeling ours.

All of it would seem pretty creepy if we weren't so involved and committed to this direction already. If we were looking in from 1950, say, or 1850, or from any place or time comparatively primitive we would stare open-mouthed and speechless at this unnatural spectacle of machines seducing their way into our bodies and brains.

We're often numbed to the most profound experiences while we're actively participating in them. It all just seems more ordinary and obvious while we're doing it than when we were fantasizing about it beforehand. Or afterward. So consider it a little, at least now and then. Watch the evidence accumulate. We're handing ourselves over to the machines, and while it's fun and novel and convenient and smart and even sort of erotic sometimes - it's extremely weird.

citysourced

2009-10-13T22:48:00.005-04:00

CitySourced may actually be the Urban Defects concept made kinetic. Hope so. Looks like a good start in any case. The founder's blog suggests there will be palm pre, blackberry and iphone apps running by winter, which will be vital for making the reporting and uptake component of the initiative work.

Many miles to travel still before such a system even begins to hint at an exhaustive asset accountability inventory - where reporting for any burnt out lightbulb or tagged wall is accurately brokered to the actionable owner or custodian. But CitySourced at least seems to comprehend this as a goal and be taking steps in that direction.

You will note that this initiative is not rising out of government. Crowdsourcing defects and routing them toward remedy is right smack in the middle of the government mandate, yet here it comes, springing from the happy pairing of tech and informed do-goodery, from the private side, energized by perceived need, disruptive vigor, and the whiff of possible profitability lurking somewhere downstream. And uncorrupted in its mission by even a single tax dollar.

human containment and the 11th tablet

2009-07-04T09:50:00.009-04:00

Human population growth, of course, is the core urban defect. The defect isn't that there are cities, or big ones. Really, most of us should be living in cities - urban existence is essential to the human experience. No, the problem is that there are already more than enough of us to fill enough cities, and we don't have sufficient self control to stop making more.

Here in 2009 the informed consensus is that world population tops off around 10 billion by the middle of this century and begins settling back from there. This isn't a generally held belief, and may not play out quite so predictably. But given that our population is 15x larger than it was in 1500, it should come as welcome news that a plateau is in sight.

But wait. Ten billion? Isn't that number a bit, um, heavy by any kind of objective assessment?

It would be responsible, kind of adult, if we had some target in mind - some ballpark sense of an appropriate human quantity we'd like creeping over the earth's surface at any given time. In a perfect world, I mean. Just as a benchmark. Crazy talk, right? Crazy to even suggest some sense of limit and load balancing of our raw numbers. But it would be a good exercise, wouldn't it?

Perhaps we could bang around on the stats, talk publicly amongst ourselves, discuss, debate, make maps, then maybe let the dust settle and start naming four billion, or three billion, or one billion as a target to get down to.

Think of the pressure this would take out of the system. Think of the relief this would introduce for food security and energy use. And if you look a few generations forward, encouraging small family sizes, nucleating our settlements more sensibly, it could be strikingly easy.

Think of the terror in the corporate, grow-or-die gerbilwheel mindset this would engender until the concept of technical and cultural evolution without numerical increase became internalized into our overall day-to-day operations. The horror.

So it would be a challenge. It is a challenge. But the current situation is embarrassing, a farsical failure of self control, a massive incontinence that's destabilizing global climate and extincting thousands of animal and plant species.

Humor me a little more though. Think about the situation this way: Imagine that a higher intelligence - let's call it God, for lack of a better name - imagine God wants to hand a great secret over to humanity. He's getting old and just has to unburden himself. This is the natural order of things, an event that's been in the works for a long time. And God wants to bequeath this gift, let's call it the Eleventh Tablet, as an earned inheritance to humanity. It requires a lot of control though - it's a heap of responsibility to bear and God won't just dump it into the clumsy paws of some young bungler. He has no wish to pass the secret to a reckless, hormonally drunk teenager. In fact, he can't. The very act of the hand-off requires incredibly stable hands on the part of the recipient (on God's part too, and old age is starting to make him more than a little shaky).

On one side there's humanity, uncontrolled and undisciplined, incapable of getting its shit together; on the other is God, straining against age and patience to hang on to the Eleventh Tablet a little longer until his understudy settles down. But God's still dealing with this hot headed kid who has immortality delusions and spends all day drinking beers and dreaming about getting laid.

What's God gonna do? Will he hand the secret over? Or will he die still clutching it, break the chain, and let humanity sink back into the swamp?

hello world

2009-02-04T02:29:00.004-05:00

So the Singularity University will soon open in Nasa Research Park at Moffett Field.

Singularity University will bring students together from around the world to study subjects like nanotechnology, biotechnology, human enhancements and artificial intelligence to see how the technologies can work together.

Noble copy. The actual point is to study, possibly inflect, and likely accelerate our hand off of human hegemony to the machines. The uncomfortable truth that Kurzweil and the Singulirsity folks know is that all of civilization past and current is just the larval singularity, our inevitable and accelerating arc toward the post human future. And the chrysalis is about to open. Course you can't say that in lay company without getting dismissed as Hollywood-handicapped or science fiction addled. Yet.

The Singularity is sometimes referred to as the "geek rapture," which is apt, as it represents a kind of millennial threshold for the tech-obsessed. But despite all of the engineering and technology grinding its way in the direction of machine intelligence and autonomy, nothing close to a consensus has emerged regarding what the situation will look like when the machine actually wakes up.

It is worth worrying about, or at least wondering, why it remains impossible to see even the rough outlines of what is supposedly getting so close.

mark your defect

2009-01-31T23:16:00.003-05:00

Respectable example of map-based (low tech but effective) collaborative data capture to address an urban defect. (except that the Globe can't keep it live)

economic nationalism

2009-01-25T21:22:00.002-05:00

Here's one I can't figure out, Mr President. Perhaps you can help:

If we're gonna spend $800B more to stimulate the American economy, perhaps there should be a bit of "containment" enacted to make sure that money doesn't just rush out of the coffers of the US treasury through the hands of grab-happy American consumers and into the pockets of Chinese gadget manufacturers and Saudi oil gluttons. Because even though global economics is fiercely complex, one simple fact is easy to convey and hard to dispute: the longer the cash sloshes around in the US economy and avoids slipping out past the borders, the more any benefits of a stimulus will be amplified.

And there are creative ways of making this happen too. Infrastructure and technology projects can be restricted from using foreign contractors (even though they are so much cheaper), money can be doled out in large, targeted dollops (rather than pissed away in millions of meaningless dribbles to undisciplined individuals), disbursements can be focused toward areas where the US economy has the tools and talent to do the work itself.

But see, this is where I get confused. Because if a strategy like this were to work - if the government actually did the due diligence to find effective ways to keep the dollars here rather than sending them abroad, then the rest of the exporting world - that outside world feeding itself on America's hemorrhaging treasury - would grow angry and antagonistic. Economic nationalism would divide the world, elevate tensions and threaten peace, even while it made us locally richer in the short term.

Thus, an ugly impasse. We can't possibly elevate the overall global living standard with exported American affluence. Certainly not now. Even though most of the world thinks we can. But if we act responsibly in our own local interest we'll infuriate our neighbors and end up cultivating enemies.

It's a tough one all right. But the idea of spending all this money to just vaguely hope that good things are going to happen on a grand scale - wow - that's embarrassing. I hope you're not thinking along those lines, Sir.

diabolicelectricity

2008-07-28T20:34:00.012-04:00

I got caught out in a downpour last week - one of dozens that passed through Boston over a few days. I'd been observing cell towers on building roofs, looking up, trying to get to high places where I could see the equipment clearly. Details would bore you - it was a mapping thing.

The storm came in fast with a lot of rain, and I took cover under an awning in University Park. The lightning quickly became constant, and the thunder was ominous and unusual - not bangs and cracks but more of a sustained hissing, like something enormous and angry struggling to form its first words.

Before long the lightning struck this...

...which was no surpise. Just look at it. The Tech-Gothic prow of the Meridien Hotel just sits there like a kind of invitation to electrical storms. And here I was tampering with RF antennas and beacons on the tops of buildings, tempting fate. That's what I thought while I stood there under that awning, getting a creepy kind of Nikola Tesla, stealing-secrets-from-God vibe.

After some particularly menacing hisses the lightning reached across the sky laterally like fingers on a witch's hand in a kind of confirmation of the storm's strangeness. The noise was outrageous. There was no sign of another human being - not even a moving car - anywhere in the Park or along Sidney Street.

The worst of the rain ended and I hopped on my bike and rode the three blocks home. When I got there I found a maple limb - 6" wide at the base, maybe 20 feet long - split from its tree high above the street and smashed through the windshield of my car.

It had pushed straight through the glass and impaled the driver's seat. The car was parked precisely where I had seen her back in February.

That was July 19, which is the day Margaret Fuller drowned in 1850.

urbanDefect: the great unpositioned

2008-07-02T00:50:00.016-04:00

The transportation swarm needs to know where all of its individual participants are.

I'm not talking about some great centralized scheme here. But in cities, in neighborhoods, the machines that are moving people and stuff around the roads want to know, with some urgency, where they are relative to all of the other machines participating in this crowded, fast-moving local relationship.

And it's sort of silly that so much of the great mobile mass remains positionally unaware, that so little has happened yet. Hence the defect. Because just about all the necessary technology is available now for cheap or free. Lots of interesting companies are converging into this meshy, swarmy, flocky future. Inrix. Dash. Zipcar. TeleAtlas - er - TomTom. Navteq - er - Nokia. Garmin. SiRF. Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. Blah.

Before very long the machines will be positioning themselves without human interference, of course. Satellite and RF signals provide location. Cruise and Lane Control handle the easy driving. We need to help with intersections and special situations, but mostly we won't be so involved with the driving details any more. Because the cars know where they are, where they're going, how to get there.

Because this is how it looks when the machines start waking up, silly passenger.

the red line is an urban defect

2008-06-30T00:34:00.012-04:00

Come on. 2011? The final fix on the Longfellow Bridge won't begin until 2011?

I hadn't been a daily red line user in five years, but now that I'm moving regularly between Cambridge and South Station this two mile stretch of track is essential to me.

And it sucks. It's not just that the Longfellow Bridge is broken and the trains are required to creep over it at 5mph. Not just that you can expect multi minute waits at multiple stations on most rides. Or the uncanny frequency of "electrical problems" or "switching issues" causing thousands of frustrated, sweating riders to squirm uncomfortably in intimate proximity as they waste their mornings and evenings trapped underground. Again.

Nope. It's that this is happening on a vital piece of urban technology running through one of the densest populations of big brains on the planet (amazingly, less than 200m from the Volpe Transportation Center). And no one can manage to plan and execute a solution that will, in the most optimistic of circumstances, take less than five years and $250 million to deliver. In the midst of an incipient energy crisis. Where dependence on efficient and dependable mass transit can only grow.

So very lame.

american teleocracy

2008-02-18T16:33:00.009-05:00

tel·e·oc·ra·cy (tµl"¶-¼k"r…-s¶, t¶"l¶-) n., pl. tel·e·oc·ra·cies. 1. Philosophy, Political Science. Design or purpose in government or society; goal directed rule. 2. The use of ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining government or social dynamics. 3. Purposeful development, as in the trajectory of a state or civilization, toward a final end; a government of objectives. [Greek teleios, teleos, perfect, complete (from telos, end, result) + -cracy.] --tel"e·o·crat"ic (-¹k) adj. --tel"e·o·crat"i·cal·ly adv.

but, other than just ever greater consumption, is there really any american purpose?

pavor nocturnus + thundersnow

2008-02-18T14:59:00.005-05:00

Some of the worst dreams of my life have occurred during thunderstorms. Often this has happened in unfamiliar places or when the storms happen unexpectedly in cold seasons. There was an opportunity for one of these the other night, a rare winter snow-and-lightning combination, but I woke up when I heard my 3-year old daughter's voice from downstairs, not from dreams of my own.

I didn't even know there was thunder when I went down to calm her. She was having night terrors, which means she wasn't actually awake, but was moaning and yelling from a submerged state of deep slow-wave-sleep. When I sat on her bed I saw the lighting and heard the thunder for the first time. It sounded so close. I pushed the shades aside and peered out into the street. Heavy snow was falling. Two or three inches was on the ground and no plow had been by yet. There was another flash and for its terrifying duration I saw a woman standing on the sidewalk across the street, looking up at our house. Her clothing seemed soaking wet. Without the flash she was invisible. I quickly closed the shade.

I lay down with my daughter for a few minutes until she settled back to quiet sleep. There were some fading thunderclaps, but no more lightning after that. When I left her room and looked out to the street there was only untracked snow in the dim streetlights. I went from window to window to look for footprints, for any sign of that woman, half expecting a face to pop into view from the darkness as I leaned toward the glass. Nothing though. No footprints. Just the snow.

the pessimist's coming rapture (an eschatological litany):

2008-01-19T22:33:00.001-05:00

us residential real estate plunge

2008-01-15T22:38:00.000-05:00

Case Shiller maintains a really nice index for tracking the value of single family homes in the US. It's a broad index, and is actually specific to only 20 US urban markets, but it contains lots of carefully vetted data points and is very dependable as a national metric. It's released the last Tuesday of every month.

The story it is telling right now is kinda bleak. If you look at the year over year change back to the late 1980's, the last year and a half are a precipice:

And if look at individual performance of the 20 individual markets over the same 20 year period you get this thing:

Click it into its own page if you want to read it, but that's not really necessary. The trend is the trick. A dozen of these cities (note especially LA, Miami, San Diego and DC at the top of the bubble) have peaked so completely out of line with their historic curves that there's no hope of getting them moving back upward any time soon. Since many of these markets are still at more than 200% of their January 2000 index value they'll probably fall for another year at least - without even considering energy or currency crisis possibilities.

If the lines settle back down somewhere near the 2000-2001 baseline and make nice, neat bellcurves of themselves, well, oops. There's something like 5 trillion dollars of value under that curve. With that gone (and the equity markets flat or falling, which seems sort of inevitable) it doesn't look like we'll be feeling so flush over the coming years.

I think it's safe to say that this sort of residential value inflation, while natural and common as a local phenomenon, is a very bad sign when it happens across the entire national economy. And perhaps we should rethink the policy of making credit so readily accessible for residential real estate speculation (like for the millions of houses that were bought not to be owner-occupied but purely to make money riding the wave up). Because it is one thing to watch your stock portfolio crash - it's a very different thing to lose your home.

the assassination of barack obama

2008-01-10T17:18:00.000-05:00

As his symbolic potency increases, so does his potential utility as a target. "We can throw the whole house into chaos. All we've got to do is knock over this tower." This is what the vandals say.

(that we don't care what madness motivates the vandals doesn't diminish their danger)

Barack Obama, already, has shown strong heroic stuff. He knows the creeping, mediocre beasts are watching him grow and he persists, thrives, in spite of this. But the risk is real and he can't leave his legacy to chance. He must not make the terrible mistake of dying without a will.

He must, in fact, acknowledge and embrace his affinity with the great martyrs who have come before him. He must be buoyed and inflated by this association. And he must be explicit, must tell his potential successors how to behave if the terrible thing happens (as his spiritual progenitors have passed it down to him):

mccain, obama + the great healing

2008-01-08T14:40:00.000-05:00

Slate talks about the curious similarity of these two guys, how they are both anti-politicians focused on addressing partisan flaws in the American political process, how they are more authentic than their rivals.

Behold my electoral fantasy: Democrats nominate Obama without a running mate on August 28. Republicans nominate McCain without a running mate on September 4. On September 11, 2008 the RNC and DNC simultaneously announce their tickets. Republican: McCain and Obama; Democrat: Obama and McCain.

Over the next two months, America fights hard to determine who sits in which chair, but regardless of outcome, bipartisianship is internalized into the White House and we can all breathe a sigh of relief as a composite agenda begins moving forward at respectable speed.

I know, this is so far beyond the realm of the imaginable that it hardly rates a chuckle. Because in America it's more fun to be about the ride than the destination. And easier to define ourselves against the other guy rather than against the sharp claws of the real enemy.

But a lot of us could be inspired by a government that went all the way to the bottom of the well to find its center, to weave its opposite ends together, to capture the collective national sentiment and slingshot America into its destined role. Pity that this concept sounds so foreign and foolish.

energy myopia

2008-01-05T13:48:00.000-05:00

For your consideration, a simple graph...

...depicting global, commercial energy production since 1800. Despite a few small hiccups, all of the lines, and especially all of them taken together, move in only one direction. Up.

And it's pretty easy to interpret the big story from this little picture: the entire viability of the Developed World, since industrialization's first meek stirrings in the 1840's, has been premised on an ever increasing consumption of energy.

What with oil over $100 a barrel now and all the talk about clean and sustainable energy development, you'd hope this picture was familiar to the people who stand to do most with it (like maybe the head of government of the world's largest economy). Let's see what America's presidential candidates would do about our looming energy predicament.

First, the Democrats:

Clinton would: decrease US foreign oil consumption by 50% by 2025; develop 20% renewable energy standard for power companies; make federal buildings carbon neutral;

Edwards would: reduce fossil fuel dependence through $13B "New Energy Economic Fund"; develop 25% renewable energy standard for power companies; allocate $1B for automakers to apply latest technology; raise fuel economy standard to 40 mpg by 2016; promote ethanol use

Obama would: decrease US foreign oil consumption 50% by 2025; support ethanol and blended fuel initiatives; support coal to liquid fuel legislation

Richardson would: "make the US the Saudi Arabia of wind, solar and biomass"; move vehicles toward 100 mpg; push for 20% improvement in US energy productivity; reduce foreign oil to 10% of total

Hmm. Richardson actually seems to have a sense of the magnitude and urgency of the situation (though you'd hope so since he used to be the Energy Secretary). Too bad he's not sufficiently "presidential" (read: slightly chubby) to have any shot at the nomination.

And the Republicans:

Giuliani would: support increased use of nuclear power and probably lean heavily on the advice of the fossil fuel-oriented energy companies he's consulted for or represented legally

Huckabee would: support increased use of nuclear power, drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and "promote alternative fuel technologies"

McCain would: promote a system of greenhouse gas tradeable allowances and greatly increase the use of nuclear power

Romney would support drilling in the ANWR and the Outer Continental Shelf, increase energy efficiency in government buildings and vehicles, promote biofuel development, increase the use of nuclear power and "work to make the US energy self-sufficient in the next couple of decades"

The collective dedication to nuclear by the Republicans should raise a red flag. I'll be the first to agree that fission has its role to play, but blurting this out to the exclusion of a truly considered policy suggests magical thinking of the "salvation by technology" variety.

Yes, the Democrats come off as somewhat more enlightened, but that's not the point here. My point (which none of these good folks cares to address) is that for 200 years the core assumption of our stability and affluence is sustained growth through ever greater energy gulps. Yet all anyone wants to talk about is use reduction and source swapping. Which makes no sense, since if you're basing forecasts on current use you're bucking every trend of the last two centuries, so what you should be talking about is how we're going to manage the seismic consequences of bucking every trend of the past two centuries.

There's such an opportunity here to frame this energy/environment/growth plateau issue and make a stand. Real hinge of history stuff. Yet no one even hints at it.

And I wish someone would get this issue, this do we really think we're gonna grow forever issue, out in public. Because the time is coming when the climate vs. comfort question has to get answered - when some combination of economic and political pressures forces a decision about whether we backslide to dirty energy or suck it up and do the hard work it takes to transcend the carbon lifestyle for real. And when that day comes it would be nice to have a president with the backbone to make the hard choice.

the coming age of waterwalls

2008-01-03T01:41:00.002-05:00

All vast, massive systems trace ultimately to a central emptiness. The center cannot hold, a small thing shifts, motion starts. It is the same for a crowd, a storm, a galaxy or water spiraling down a hole.

The vortex is a hungry and dangerous beast. And whenever the basic act of maintaining balance starts requiring greater and greater effort we have to wonder: is one of these beasts beginning to consume us?

The current global climate situation (and technology's relationship to it) has this feel. Since most of us live in cities close to the ocean now there is cause for worry. As sea level rises, our only practical, local option will be to build walls against the water. Significant triage will be necessary; entire continents cannot be walled off against the sea.

In America it will mostly be big cities that get the walls. These are the likely candidates:

As things fall apart, waterwalls will need to be erected quickly using enormous resources and a good deal of technology. Their construction represents the first serious battle of the Nature Wars, where construction and innovation are used urgently and aggressively not to advance civilization but to maintain equilibrium against a deteriorating ecological foundation.

We don't win this one. Treating the symptoms will not make us better. And listen: do you hear the hissing sound? We are already inside the tightening vortex. We are committed to the losing side.

methane hydrate

2007-12-29T23:46:00.001-05:00

Perhaps I'm a neophobe, but to me this doesn't sound like a resource we should be rushing to exploit.

A couple of notable excerpts:

Billions of tons of methane hydrate, frozen chunks of chemical-laced water buried in sediment some 3,000 feet under the Pacific Ocean floor, may help Japan win energy independence from the Middle East and Indonesia. Japanese engineers have found enough "flammable ice'' to meet its gas use demands for 14 years.

Impressive. But then:

"Methane hydrate was a key cause of the global warming that led to one of the largest extinctions in the earth's history,'' says Ryo Matsumoto, a University of Tokyo scientist who has studied frozen gas since 1987. "By making the best use of our wisdom, knowledge and technology, we should be able to utilize this wisely as a new energy.''

Hmm. These two sentences don't really go together so well, do they? He goes on:

"A mass release of methane into the sea and the atmosphere is a risk for global warming,'' he says. "Massive landslides at the ocean floor must be avoided when drilling at the Nankai Trough.''

It seems the best way to visualize this material is as a huge, iced fart. And Japan isn't the only place that has its fart reserve. They're in continental shelves all over the world. A couple of maps [1, 2] are available.

Methane hydrate is the gas produced from decay of dead things that have settled in the oceans. That's what we've come to. Graverobbing down 800 meters to slake the thirst for energy. For a resource we can subsist on for a few decades at best.

I could be wrong - maybe the farts can be extracted safely and odorlessly; maybe a big, sustained input to the global energy pool can be used economically and geopolitically to redirect energy policy in a clean, clever way. Maybe. It clearly has market attention now - capitalism does love a cheap meal.

But ... another fossil fuel? Maybe this methane hydrate bridge loan is not where we should be pinning our hopes just now.

the antidote to greatness

2007-12-27T23:54:00.001-05:00

Benazir Bhutto, killed by yet another Islamic body-bomb. Hard to believe Allah's happy about this, but who knows?

Assassination is mediocrity's antidote to greatness. I know this.

And since, by the laws of nature and statistics there's always going to be a lot more mediocrity, mobilizing the thugs against a public meritocracy tends to be a pretty potent drug to push. It's working swell, too:

A former Taliban intelligence official, Mullah Ehsanullah, told The Associated Press this year that there were more than 500 men training as suicide bombers in 50 sites across the region in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These camps he said, are run by al-Qaida and include Pakistani jihadists and Arab militants.

Meanwhile, we in the Empire are doing our little part to try to keep this in check:

With enactment of the FY2007 supplemental on May 25, 2007, Congress has approved a total of about $609 billion for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the three operations initiated since the 9/11 attacks: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) Afghanistan and other counter terror operations; Operation Noble Eagle (ONE), providing enhanced security at military bases; and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

But do the math: our little effort has cost $1.5 million for every square mile in the combined area of Iraq, Afghanistan and that shadowy border region of southwestern Pakistan.

As a farm subsidy, that sort of outlay could re-fertilize the original fertile crescent for centuries. Or pay to litter the landscape with new schools. Or at least clean up the landmines poisoning Afghanistan's soil.

And if you chose to allocate it by individual suicide bombers that's more than a billion dollars each.

A whole lot of money. But somehow not enough to protect one woman from the barbarians.

kill some time with geography

2007-12-27T16:20:00.001-05:00

Bone up on world geography with this simple yet engaging widget.

biggerer and biggerer

2007-12-24T00:19:00.000-05:00

From the Architectural Record way back in 2004:

In scale and pace, the building boom currently sweeping over China has no precedent in human history. China is spending about $375 billion each year on construction, nearly 16% of its gross domestic product. In the process, it is using 54.7% of the world's production of concrete, 36.1% of the world's steel, and 30.4% of the world's coal.

Four hundred billion bucks buys a lot of cool architecture. Some of it would look great integrated into the Emerald Spine. Take a look at the CCTV Headquarters Building in Beijing:

And the wild flatscreen for the folks hanging out down in the garden underneath.

Hopefully they'll landscape in plenty of room for people to lie around under there, or there's gonna be a whole lot of neck strain in that neighborhood.

epa-bomb

2007-12-21T00:48:00.001-05:00

Oh Stephen L. Johnson, for shame, for shame.

FACT:
California and seventeen other states want to tighten regulations for greenhouse gas emissions from cars. These states represent half of all cars sold in the US. They have been waiting two years for the EPA to grant the Clean Air Act waiver necessary to start this process. In California alone the cutbacks would keep 31 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the air over the next decade.

FOLLY:
Johnson says:

The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution, not a confusing patchwork of state rules, to reduce America's climate footprint from vehicles.

But, but... this was not what the EPA technical and legal staff wanted. They all seemed to think it was a good thing - enlightened, forward thinking, and that, if denied, it would certainly be legally challenged by the states, and probably overturned in court. But no matter. EPA is the Decider in this matter. No waiver.

So now California and its merry band of followers will sue the federal government. I'm no expert, but it does sound like the EPA will get smacked down on this one. The Bush administration will look silly. Again. Some lawyers will make a bunch of money. And the only upside in the whole affair for the White House will be its ability to say "See big automakers? We really tried. We're really on your side here. So give us your votes."

Will Detroit go for this though? I mean, come on. Are they really dim enough to keep buying into this hapless dynamic, over and over again, year after year?

Yes, big business is the engine of our economy. Yes. But we're looking at the very crux of our leadership vacuum here: a rudderless government, directed only by the immediate whimsy of what feels good to the engine.

"Oh no," says the engine, "we don't want to head that way, not up into the wind. That's too hard. We'll just cruise along with the wind at our back. That's much more comfy, don't you think?"

"Anything you say," says Captain Bush, "anything that keeps us moving. As long as I'm up here on the bridge." And First Mate Johnson just lets the wheel roll into the direction of least resistance.

Except, er, there are big, sharp rocks over there, and, um, aren't we getting kind of close? And isn't the captain, the Decider, supposed to be the one who sees those things and steers around them? And wait - what's that smell on your breath? Have you guys been drinking?

It's interesting to look at the states involved here. Very blue. Very proactive. Just trying to work creatively, trying to move things in the right direction.

No one wants to cripple American automaking - completely the opposite. The point is to pressure those folks down in the engine room to re-tool things a bit, to get the machinery humming more efficiently, to make this old ship less of a gas guzzler. It's a tough love thing.

And just one other small item: This is the administration that wastes no opportunity to tell us that certain things, like reproductive rights legislation, belong not in the hands of the federal government but at the state level. Why again? Because when we're talking about health and medicine what we're really after is a confusing patchwork of state rules!

gods in the garbage

2007-12-19T11:06:00.001-05:00

Hosting the dead. Cute.

Here's the thing about reincarnation though: it is the most defining and sublime talent of our species. But for some reason it gets marginalized into a kind of a voodoo cartoon and dumbed down to a B-movie horror gimmick that only goth dolts are supposed to dabble in. Like if you say the right incantation you can make Aleister Crowley or HP Lovecraft inhabit your body.

This is so wrong. When it comes to transmitting information across time there is nature and there is culture. Nothing more. Nature carries the code using the genome. Culture is everything else, everything we've made, all of our artifacts. And if you study to comprehend the culture created by someone else - specifically someone who is dead - you are reincarnating him. Simple. And magical.

To the extent that I study the works and words of Margaret Fuller, she begins to inhabit me. Maybe this is a little spooky, I don't know. Considering that until development of written language 6,000 years ago no reincarnation of this sort had been possible anywhere in the known universe, and now everything and everyone is utterly dependent on it - it is kind of profoundly defining. But no one seems to give that much thought unless they're experiencing it as some science fiction or horror conceit.

Anyway, reincarnation is merely one example of vital and profound truths pulled down to blithering nonsense by association with fantasy dreck. Some others:

We take the sacrament that is the flesh of animals then factory farm and sanitize this into tasteless pucks to be gulped down thoughtlessly or tossed away uneaten.

We take the miraculous vessels that are children's minds and assault them with random noise and light until they clog and close and grow angry.

We take the beautiful and mysterious mechanics of evolution and through some absurd contortion trivialize these and position them in opposition to divinity and religion.

We take the magic of nature, technology and intellect that crackles and shimmers everywhere and blind ourselves to it, insisting that there is no magic.

We make trinkets of our sacred things, put our gods out with the garbage.

Am I missing something, or is this just incredibly lame?

beg to host the dead

2007-12-18T23:28:00.000-05:00

With the other band and concert propaganda pasted and scrawled on the walls of the Rainbow Alley in Central Square there was this today:

Search for meaning only makes you thirsty
Eat salt, drunk fucker

Beg to sacrifice, beg to serve
Beg to host the dead

Gratitude?
They will laugh and haunt your shack

darkhovin and bushehr

2007-12-17T21:30:00.001-05:00

Three Mile Island. Diablo Canyon. Millstone. Comanche Peak.

I don't know exactly what to call it, but there's frequently something about nuclear reactor names that strikes a discomforting chord when you first hear them. Like a deja vu thing, like you've heard them before, or as if some weird premonition backblast is going on, where they're recognizable because we'll all be hearing so much about them in the future.

The enrichment and reactor site names coming out of Iran now sound especially ominous in this regard: Darkhovin and Bushehr. Darkhovin is right out of Lord of the Rings. And Bush-err? Seriously?

Call me superstitious, but you have to admit it's a touch unsettling that these names are so malign sounding and so easy to remember.

howe singer poe fuller

2007-12-17T11:35:00.001-05:00

In 1846, about 200 feet from the bedroom where Margaret Fuller grew up, Elias Howe invented the sewing machine.

OK, he didn't invent it precisely, since like all good machines it was the product of much tinkering by many hands over time. But he had enough of the details worked out and patented that when Isaac Singer brought his version to market ten years later the courts made him pay Howe real cash for every unit sold. Very Microsoft. Very DOS. Very Bill Gates. Howe got very rich.

The same year Howe filed his patent, Margaret Fuller was examining the work of a strange poet named Edgar Allan Poe. Poe had a career trajectory like Kurt Cobain - he scored huge, immediate fame when The Raven was published in 1845 but had gone crazy and died (under mysterious circumstances) four years later. Oh yeah, but Poe didn't make any money.

Poe frustrated but fascinated Fuller, not least because of the literary powers he had exhibited as a child:

"The poems written in youth, indeed, in childhood, before the author was ten years old, are a great psychological curiosity. Is it the delirium of a prematurely excited brain that causes such a rapture of words? What is to be gathered from seeing the future so fully anticipated in the germ? The passions are not infrequently felt in their full shock, if not in their intensity, at eight or nine years old, but here they are reflected upon -

"Sweet was their death - with them to die was rife
With the last ecstasy of satiate life."

It is noteworthy that Poe and Fuller were born within a mile of each other and shared nearly identical, unnaturally short lifespans (1809-1849 vs 1810-1850). She clearly had a thing for prodigies and the fast burning, obsessive, kinda damaged types. Beethoven, Goethe, Shelley and Napoleon all fell into her focus in the mid-1840s.

palimpsest and pelham

2007-12-17T01:18:00.001-05:00

A manuscript that has been used more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and partly legible - that's a palimpsest.

While the Margaret Fuller house maintains a strong similarity to its original appearance, the neighborhood does not. So much has changed that it is a challenge to even locate the present location on historical maps.

The Fuller house is in the little red circle. To the east is MIT, Kendall Square and the Charles River. If you want to orient yourself in the larger landscape, go here.

Before the original landscape had been erased, there was actually an island under this red circle. Pelham's island was the last solid land before the meadows, marshes, Charles River and Boston. Back during the Revolutionary War it looked something like this:

Pelham was a cartographer - the 1777 image is actually from his most famous American map - and also a Loyalist. He fled Boston for London a month after the Declaration of Independence in order to escape the attacks of thugs.

Anyway, by the time Fuller's house was built Pelham's Island was gone, absorbed into the body of Cambridge, and the lattice of roads was beginning to impose itself on newly made land:

And twenty five years later:

By this time the marshes had been pushed ten blocks to the east, the Grand Junction Railroad was built and running along what would become the boundary of the MIT campus, and Margaret Fuller was dead at the bottom of the sea.

urban defect: snowjam

2007-12-14T12:36:00.000-05:00

It snowed hard in Boston yesterday - about 10 inches starting in the early afternoon - and it was fast falling and poorly predicted. By some unfortunate combination of bad timing and slack preparation a rush hour gridlock developed that crippled surface transportation throughout the city for six hours.

On roads all over eastern Massachusetts prisoner's dilemma scenarios played out with confounding consequences. As traffic thickened then stopped, cars waited through cycle after cycle of changing lights without forward movement. Frustration and impatience compelled some into the intersections. With the precedent set, many broke ranks, stopped ceding legal right of way, drove against one way traffic, piled into breakdown lanes and parking spaces. Exits and intersections clotted completely until the entire network seized. Cars continued to flow into the stagnating soup until the act of starting a trip - leaving parking lots, garages and side streets - became impossible.

Lessons?

Beyond a certain level of congestion the rules of the road dissolve. It doesn't take much to push the urban population into acts of immediate self interest, actively thwarting the interests of others
Civility evaporates, but not entirely. There wasn't a lot of shouting or blowing of horns. Police were nowhere to be seen, but a few people tried to jump into the breach and direct traffic. With the gridlock fully established though, this accomplished nothing
The machine can't save us. Once laws are ignored and the social contract has been broken, the inanimate mechanics of traffic control are entirely worthless. It wasn't possible to untangle the knot until pressure began to diminish from the extremities.
No leaders, no team. We have no social experience with or preparation for subordinating self interest (at least where transportation is concerned) to a greater whole. People are not trained to pull over and direct traffic. Motorists are not prepared to respect civilians who do.

The experience was not confidence inspiring. When competing individual urgencies get too numerous and intense the fragile nature of the Contract becomes frighteningly apparent. If the sudden need should arise for a mass evacuation of the city, none of us will be able to get out.

meat as murder

2007-12-11T22:53:00.000-05:00

Maybe you've heard of the Qingping wet market in Guangzhou, China. This was the first market to be permitted by the Communist government in 1979 and until SARS in 2002 it was a notorious but completely legal and public free-for-all. There you could find anything that walked, slithered, swam or flew, pick it out of a cage or a box and have it slaughtered on the spot. Not just pigs, goats and chickens, but rabbits, kittens, dogs, monkeys, snakes, turtles, large insects, rare marsupials - everything and anything.

The thought of noisy market hucksters hacking the heads off kittens for a couple of coins is repugnant and naturally despicable. But don't tag the Chinese as uniquely cruel and villainous just yet.

In the 1880s things weren't so different in Boston. There was a resort then, Tafts, out in Winthrop where the city's sewage treatment plant is now. You could get pretty much anything there too. Tafts would hold huge banquets where thousands of wild birds including owls, plovers, curlews and eagle chicks would be eaten in grotesque quantities. On one occasion Taft staked one thousand dollars on the spot to anyone present able to name an edible North American bird that he could not produce instantly, and had no takers. To top off the feast, he served hundreds of guests hummingbirds "cooked to delectation and tucked into walnut shells."

And this wasn't some haunt of savages. Boston's biggest literary names: Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne and others, all dined repeatedly at Tafts.

Point is, this sounds absurd (to most of us) now, and that the Chinese are doing it renders them culturally retrogade. But the trend is so obvious. The civilized world will not continue to consume animal flesh at its current rate, with such shameless gusto. There is evil in it and we all know this despite our continued participation. But if the future belongs to the better angels, this systemic defect will be relegated to the furtive realm that sex shops or cock fights inhabit now, and only a small, remnant population of carnivores will continue to lurk among us.

twelve dollar gas

2007-12-11T12:30:00.001-05:00

Because what we pay for energy is just way too little.

Most of us feel otherwise, since gas and oil are more expensive than ever and not much is changing to make us need less of them. And of course there's our collective optimism and faith in eternal economic growth and technology's impending miracle that will replace petroleum with some new clean fuel too cheap to meter.

But what's the probability of this really? How likely is it that we'll stumble into another societal energy feedstock that can provide the equivalent of 80 million barrels of oil per day at the cost of extraction? Coal, oil and natural gas were the three matches we were given to ignite a perpetual, clean energy future. These matches are burning down pretty close to our fingers (or we're coughing on their smoke) and we haven't done such a great job getting that fire lit.

Energy use is notoriously inelastic - we don't use less as the price goes up - but twelve dollar gas would cost the average driver in America a buck every two miles and it wouldn't be long before this giant sucking sound started to change our driving habits. And the way we heat and cool our homes. And perhaps it would sober us up to the fact that we've been tapping a trust fund for the past century that's stopped earning interest.

It will really hurt. Bad. The entire global economy will convulse and spasm through the detox. But maybe, though only maybe, if a significant slice of this massive capital reallocation can find its way into renewable energy investment, maybe we will get that fire going before those matches are just smoldering ash in our cold hands.

content and form

2007-12-11T01:48:00.002-05:00

The Margaret Fuller House was built on the edge of Pelham's Island in 1807, midway between Boston and Harvard. This was a little more than a decade after the first Longfellow Bridge and causeway were built to halve the distance from the Beacon Hill to Harvard. The house is within the orbit of Central and Kendall Squares now, but then it was isolated and marginal, on the edge of a marsh.

This house exhibits extraordinary external fidelity to original design even though features have been added and removed, the landscape and surroundings have changed, and many original materials have been replaced. To those who built it two hundred years ago it would be very recognizable, at least from the outside, were they to see it now.

This exemplifies a seminal but seemingly paradoxical design principle: content is subordinate to form.

In architecture like biology, like computer science, like, well, everything, pattern persists throughout many deaths of constituent materials. If historic houses are incrementally maintained or restored to their original appearance and proportions, but with modern materials, their essence is hardly compromised. Centuries after its construction, wood in the beams of the house may be of trees planted long after the original structure was built, fitted into place by small corrections fixing rot or wear, year by year. This is unimportant to the building's architectural integrity. The design persists. Content perishes.

In fact, preservation of content is often overly precious, a type of perversion, and indicates a failure of the preservationist to adequately understand the form he serves. And this applies to culture in a more universal sense. How does one most accurately pass an idea forward for two hundred or two thousand years? Or for vastly longer periods than that?

Go ahead and build with granite - make a pyramid, make a sphinx. You're doomed to dust if you favor the concrete over the abstract. The answer to eternity is in your form, your pattern, your proportions. The design is everything.

urban defect: facebook

2007-12-09T15:49:00.000-05:00

More of a social defect really, the current flap over Facebook-Beacon highlights our latest acceleration toward the Privacy Free Society. The convenience of digital communication has made us all complicit, but Facebook really gets it out there in your, well, face.

Facebook is kind of the digital equivalent of gay sex in the 1970s. There's a new freedom that's fun, exhibitionist and promiscuous, and "all of my friends are doing it, so where's the harm?"

The voyeurism feeding our irrepressible exhibitionism is pandered to so expertly in Facebook that we can't help but gulp it down, browsing through those ever growing lists of "friends" and hungrily slathering for more delicious but never-quite-satisfying details.

But with intimacy comes vulnerability. Beacon broadcasts your purchases out to the Facebook cohort you're a member of. Groovy if you're shopping at Dolce and Gabbana I guess, but if you're buying "Dating for Dummies" or adult diapers it's everybody's business too.

Really, do you want to see all of those inputs from everyone around you? Do you want all of them to see yours? It's like wireblight around your brain. The only folks it's really useful for are those who want to tap in and analyze or modify these inputs. I think it's safe to assume that most of these probably won't have your best interests in mind.

let them be trimtab-captains

2007-12-08T23:05:00.000-05:00

Jessica Lipnack writes:

Richard - I just read your intriguing post about the, uh, post cards. I have been a "Margaret person" for a long time and these stories seem to abound. I met a Swami about a year ago who ended up moving from London to Cambridge to live next door to MF House and join its board due to some sort of strange thing happening...

A swami now. Curiouser and curiouser, but somehow not so surprising. There's an uncanny aspect to this woman and her echoes in my neighborhood and elsewhere.

You don't have to dig far to learn that Margaret Fuller was actually the great aunt of Buckminster Fuller. Check the link. He was more than just the geodesic dome guy. He was tuned into the urban defects mindset throughout his life in a fairly profound and highly public way. He also seems to represent a technical incarnation of some core Trancendental beliefs - stuff like respect for truth through simplicity, disregard for convention and dogma and a holistic, universal attitude toward thinking and design.

Perhaps I was off base with my "nobody knows who Margaret Fuller is" bit a few days ago though. She seems to be sustaining a healthy audience, at least in some circles. This doesn't explain who's dropping the propaganda on my stoop but it does make me feel a bit late to the party. Except ... whose party?

urban defect: wire blight

2007-12-07T00:44:00.003-05:00

The nervous system belongs underneath the skin.

The guys who climb the utility poles and all of the people who drive past these nests of linear clutter will tell you this is merely an aesthetic consideration, that keeping the communication, power, and entertainment infrastructure out in plain sight and easily accessible is just fine, thank you very much.

Hmmm.

This was how things looked in Manhattan in 1888 during the worst blizzard of that century. It was back in the day, when Edison and Nikola Tesla were still duking out AC vs DC power distribution strategies. No question about the wireblight back then, friends.

That storm made big trouble and blew out much of the young network. When visiting NYC today you will note that the nervous system is entirely under the skin.

Extreme weather tends to expose our weaknesses. Probably a safe bet that freakish future weather (much amplified by our accumulated environmental misdeeds) will be the boot that kicks our ass into burying the current blight.

evolution is not design churn

2007-12-06T16:54:00.001-05:00

Q: Why in the Age of Dinosaurs was there never anything as large as a blue whale?
A: Because nature hadn't learned how to build a beast that big yet. Because it's a lot easier to scale up to a large flesh eating monster if you're starting as a small flesh eating monster than it is to fashion a giant plankton sieve on a hippo. Which is pretty much what happened evolutionarily with the whale, when you get right down to it.

Just a guess here, but I'm thinking that the finely tuned stuff, the grace at the extremities - quality of vision and articulation of digits - all the refinement that really lets God in - this gets progressively clumsier the further back you go. Which should be taken to mean that things are actually moving in a positive direction, at least as far as complexity goes.

Q: What is the greatest urban design crime?
A: Tearing down something solid to build something fashionable.

Design churn is the unholy duo of ignorance and arrogance tricking you into abandoning best practices of the past. Evolution is kaizen.

the sins of moses and boston's emerald spine

2007-12-05T16:16:00.001-05:00

Even though the work that made him famous was pretty much local to New York City and its environs, we're all heirs to the legacy of Robert Moses. He set the bar for building highways through the older American cities, opened up circulation for the cars to get everywhere at high speeds (before the rush hour throngs put an end to that). And in the process he wrecked more housing stock and ruined more communities in this country than any war or natural disaster ever has.

Boston took some hard knocks with Moses-esque road building from the Second World War to the 1970s. There was the Central Artery of course, that has recently moved under the skin. A lot of resources have gone into healing those old scars. The worst wound still open is I-90 as it punches east from the tolls in Allston to the I-93 interchange at the edge of Chinatown.

The Emerald Spine will finally heal this slash across the face of the city. There's nothing like it anywhere in the world yet, not at this scale with fully harmonized engineering and design all the way through. When it is complete Boston will have a signature skyline, globally recognized and unmistakable. The Spine will run from Fenway Park to Fort Point Channel and integrate all of the neighborhoods in between.

Massively green not just in appearance but also in principle and practice, the Emerald Spine will exploit photovoltaic, wind and geothermal technologies to achieve a totally carbon neutral footprint.

And its miles of malls and walkways weaving through a graceful parabola of towers will signal the end of the automobile's dominance of America's cities.

laf-central buildout

2007-12-04T23:25:00.003-05:00

OK, no one calls it this yet, but pretty soon the new Lafayette Square Park will be done and the Central Square Theater will be up and running and (especially if there's comedy there) Laf-Central will just seem like a natural name for it.

Anyway, this is precisely the area I was talking about in the post about the sloppy Central Square parking situation. Check out the unsightly rash of hideous blue parking lots in the top image looking down Main Street and Mass Ave toward MIT and Boston (these are the same polygons used in the Dec 3 map).

And then imagine it with about 2 million extra square feet of residential and commercial development, building on nothing but existing asphalt.

Yes, yes. I hear you. This is the kind of massing monstrosity that inspires rage in planners and local traditionalists, but it looks cool in google earth. And think about the energy this would introduce - not to mention continuity with Kendall - Portland Street and Prospect.

The Lafayette-Central Buildout should serve as the pilot project for creating Boston's Emerald Spine.

By the way, all of the little brown buildings are accessible via the good work of the Virtual City Collective and MassGIS. Thanks guys. You make mapping fun again.

rattus margaret fullerus

2007-12-04T22:12:00.001-05:00

Out in front of the Margaret Fuller House a rat gave me the once over before disappearing under a fence and into the cold night. He was a good looking one. Probably weighed a pound. It's true, you know, that rats navigate by a kind of muscle memory, and if you remove an obstruction they're used to they'll continue to avoid the spot as if the object is still there. Very insect like. Very mechanical.

And it's fairly unusual seeing a rat around Margaret Fuller. A lot of good stuff happens at that place and it's tightly run. They give out food, but I don't think there are a lot of opportunities for rodents to get any. It's been a charitable institution for more than a century, so there's been plenty of time for the rats to get used to it. It's named for Margaret Fuller who was born there in 1810.

You can ask 100 people even right around here who Margaret Fuller was and you'll be lucky if even one has anything to tell you about her. Which is more than a little lame, since she was a literary prodigy and a groundbreaking feminist and an editorial glass ceiling smasher and Transcendentalist, among other things. And she was hooked up: When she died in a shipwreck off Long Island in 1850 on her way back from Italy, Henry David Thoreau was actually sent down (by Ralph Waldo Emerson) to look for her body. Never found her though.

Anyway, it seems someone wants us to know more about Margaret Fuller. I've been getting a bunch of mostly cool looking, Margaret Fuller branded postcards hand delivered lately. This one was left in my mail slot a couple of days ago, though without any text or address identifying who dropped it off.

I don't know what Abe Lincoln, the bug or the little yin/yang deal are about, but the woman is definitely Margaret Fuller.

Has anyone else seen this stuff?

life with rattus norvegicus

2007-12-03T12:22:00.001-05:00

Living in the city means sharing space with rats. I know this and don't have a big problem with it. If every once in a while I see a rat ambling along the curb or poking its pointy little nose out from behind a dumpster, oh well; small cost of dwelling in the urban context.

At some point though, the happy prospect of peaceful coexistence is no longer appropriate. In Cambridge, or at least my part of it, that point has been passed.

Look - I have a great deal of respect for the rat as a marvel of nature and one of evolution's great success stories. Urban rats are consummate generalists, experts at adaptation and making the most of meager resources, and they are tireless workers. But too much success frequently begets enmity, and in my neighborhood the rats are too successful.

I have seen them dance across Washington Street in pairs in the morning, I've watched them capering near uncovered trash cans in bright summer sun, and I have chased them from my small vegetable garden upon discovering their assaults on my tomatoes at dusk. On garbage night they are legion. It is a genuine problem and I am not the only one who has noticed it.

So: If we could just see a map of where they are, what they are doing and when they are doing it we'd be well on the way to controlling this problem. To that end I've posted a collaborative map that can be used to track sitings of these busy little devils and their handiwork. If you go here you'll be able to add your information and help grow this map into something genuinely useful for understanding the scope and specifics of this problem.

cambridge parking lots, again

2007-12-03T11:29:00.001-05:00

Hey you wizards at the googleplex with your $200 billion market cap and all of the technical brain power and tweaking time that buys ... why is it that my first post to this blog, using two of your core products and a simple cut and paste - why is it that this humble little effort fails? Why can I not paste a nice, simple google map into my blog without the blogger editor choking on it? Why do I have to start a new entry because my original is dead to me now as an editable document?

Help? Tips? Suggestions?

.... crickets ...

Anyway, the point I was trying to make before I got hamstrung was not that there is necessarily too MUCH parking in Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It's that the placement and distribution are needlessly diffuse. If you (can actually, without technical hiccups) look at the map inserted in the previous entry, you'll see that the east side of Mass Ave (essentially the whole Bishop Allen corridor) is a sloppy rash of parking on the Central Square landscape.

Back in the 1960s maybe this was appealing, back when folks thought mass transit was just some doomed artifact and the automobile was civilization's great, gleaming hope. In those deluded days you wouldn't get much argument when planners told you the commercial prospects of any urban downtown were hopeless if 80% of available land wasn't allocated for parking spaces. But that blockhead logic is pretty far behind us now, isn't it?

I know, I know - there's a large and vocal contingent out there twitching and squirming at the idea of vertical development in our lovely Republic of Cambridge, but wouldn't you prefer to see living and commerce and maybe even entertainment built a few stories up, perhaps with a bit of green space around it, instead of this bleak desert of asphalt?

a plague of parking

2007-12-03T11:07:00.000-05:00

What's with the all of the parking lots in Central Square? I mean, look at this:

View Larger Map

All of the blue areas are bulk (more than 10 spaces) surface parking. Red areas are parking garages. Hit the Sat button to get confirmation of what's actually under these shapes.

It's a blight, really, and no one seems to notice it. Some of the lots have nice young trees planted at the curbs and medians to pretty things up a bit. Some of them are public lots. A bunch of them are owned and used by Quest Diagnostics - which is all well and good. But really now - what a ghastly waste of urban land.