January 2012
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June 2011
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May 2011
3 posts
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Old Urbanist: A History of Street Standards →
kenyatta:
One of the interesting things to learn is that the first regulations for very wide streets long predated the automobile, and were in fact a reaction of debatable justifiability to conditions in the mid-19th century English industrial city rather than the spatial needs of the car (those regulations in turn drawing inspiration from the Baroque city planning of the previous two...
March 2011
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February 2011
6 posts
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“A sou sou is structured where one person will be in charge of collecting monies...”
– From a Global Voices post by Janine Mendes-Franco
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Watchcuriositycounts:
Bitcoin – anonymous decentralized P2P currency. For when, you know, banks don’t let you donate to Wikileaks.
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January 2011
6 posts
Ruin value - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia →
kenyatta:
Ruin value (German: Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. The idea was pioneered by German architect Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as “The Theory of Ruin Value” (Die...
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leh4:
Via @NPR
The Club From Nowhere: Cooking...
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“Doozers are small, communal creatures in the land of Fragglerock, and make a...”
– Terry » Archive » Pondering the Residence Time of Supermarket Green Peppers - or - On The Similarities Between Environmental Chemistry, Yuppies, and Jim Henson’s Fragglerock (via moleitau)
Watchtktc:
Rooftop farms on top of grocery stores which then sell the fresh product. No idea what the feasibility might be but could not love the concept more.
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Melody roads →
bobulate:
The speed limit now has a soundtrack:
If you’re driving faster than the speed limit, the app makes your music slow down. If when you’re exceeding the speed limit by more than 10 km per hour, the music stops completely.
Over in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, they’ve take to the streets, literally, and placed a groove in the road, resulting in “Melody Road”:
Another version of a...
December 2010
5 posts
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The New Inquiry: In Defense of the Scene →
thenewinquiry:
Saul Steinberg, Techniques at a Party (1953)
“One of the narcotizing blessings of online sociality is that you can ignore when you are ignored and make it feel mutual. People can’t turn their back to you; they just disappear. Internet sociality for now dulls the the experience both of…
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“It has become commonplace to regard the high-tech and creative industries as...”
– The Intercultural City, Phil Wood & Charles Landry (p. 144)
(for me to study more on, thanks, Tricia!)
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November 2010
4 posts
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The Body Breathes: Quantum Honeybees solves the... →
thebodybreathes:
craziest part is that the bees calculate the sun’s movement!
From Quantim Honeybees, Discover
“Von Frisch’s Dance Language and Orientation of Bees was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, there…
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“A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small...”
– John Thackara: Cultural Theory | Metropolis Magazine (via kenyatta)
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“Wall Street is basically dedicated to eliminating jobs or outsourcing jobs in...”
– David Korten (via azspot)
yup.
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Watchslavin:
I have the biggest crush on Julian Bleecker, and he may know it but I don’t care. With the background behind this project (Tricia reblogged his post here) you can see why.
But even just looking at this video, you can see how his brain works, and also how the world works.
Union Square Farmers Market Grid Distortions (by Julian Bleecker)
Damn. Definitely read the post. Really like...
October 2010
4 posts
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“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
– Herman Melville cf. [T]rap streets, or deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms. In other words, if a competitor’s map includes your “trap street” — a geographic feature that you’ve simply invented — then you (and your lawyers)...
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“The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable...”
– Single most interesting thing I’ve read in ages. And makes me slap my head, staring down the etymological origins of the Brazilian Real.
How Fake Money Saved Brazil : Planet Money : NPR
(via slavin)
September 2010
4 posts
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“In school, my favorite subject was geography. Not just mine, it should be said....”
– “Second Lives” by Daniel Alarcon, fiction from the New Yorker. (via slavin)
August 2010
2 posts
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“That’s exactly like Airbnb for people’s homes, and Square for credit card...”
– “What if UberCab pulls an Airbnb?” - Michael Arrington on Techcrunch
this requires the driver to be an auctioneer as well with their device.
interesting. more interesting is Weels (no real site yet) that is about to launch in Brooklyn.
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June 2010
2 posts
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May 2010
2 posts
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Psychogeography →
bobulate:
Defined in 1955, psychogeography is:
“The study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” [Or] “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities … just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness...
March 2010
4 posts
“Many other street food advocates pointed out that street vending isn’t just a...”
– Metro Mag on problems with the current street vending ordinance. Via chriseats, who also has a fantastic summary of the city meeting on bringing food trucks to downtown Minneapolis.
Street vending is so close I can almost taste it! But I agree, more time is needed and a better approach should be...
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Cartography for an audience of one →
bobulate:
Paul Stiff, a reader in typography and graphic communication, has been studying wayfinding — not in the maps from professionals — but in the handmade maps that people draw for one another:
Stiff believes that we amateurs have something to teach the pros. Our maps are efficient — they edit out unnecessary information. They often include what Stiff calls “an error detector, something...
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February 2010
7 posts
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“The Obama Administration said it would provide $400 million for its Healthy Food...”
– “U.S. launches program to end ‘food deserts’,” February 19, 2010. Reuters.
We’ll see how legislating this works; likely a much larger structure needs to be supported and reconstructed for this to flourish within.
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