Aesthetics of Everywhere

São Paulo’s class divisions are written in black paint. The subculture that has risen around pichação, a stark, runic form of graffiti, is described in this New York Times article:

Their graffiti, called pichação, from the Portuguese verb “pichar,” or cover with tar, reflects the urban decay and deep class divisions that still define much of São Paulo, a city with a metropolitan population approaching 20 million. It is just one reminder of the social ills that Brazil’s economic boom has so far failed to resolve, and may perhaps even be accentuating, despite recent strides in reducing income inequality.

Had a great time at last night’s GeoDC meetup. Here’s a quick list of some of the cool projects at top of mind this morning, mostly to get my thoughts down in one place.

• Map Kibera and its empowerment of people living in Nairobi’s informal settlements. And on that note, next month‘s GeoDC topic is slum mapping!
• The Pacific Northwest and the ‘Last Settler Syndrome’ – one always wishes s/he were the last to discover the beauty of a place, and to keep it uncrowded.
• It’s essential to remember the user experience when creating maps, whether static or interactive. GIS developer AJ Ashton of Development Seed walked through some of the choices a designer makes in creating intuitive, easy-navigable maps.
• Andy Chosak of the Mobility Lab discussed transit spider maps, such as this spider map of the H Street Corridor and its nearby transit lines by Peter Dunn. It’s modeled after the spider maps used in London (example below). Spider maps are a great way to display these sorts of systems because they show all the modes of public transportation branching out from a single area, making it easy for a

I hope by now everyone’s wrapping up the year and spending a lot of time with family and friends. Here’s my roundup of 2011 roundups. Add your own in the comments!

• Zeitgeist 2011: Year in Review Video (Google)
• Best Maps of 2011 (Spatial Analysis)
• Best Memes of 2011 (Know Your Meme)
• Best Websites of 2011 (Time Magazine)
• 10 Worst Social Media Marketing Blunders of 2011 (Advertising Age)
• Top 10 Best TED Talks of 2011 and Top 10 Culture-Tech Stories of 2011 (ReadWriteWeb)
• Another List of Lists at Listgeeks Staff Picks for Best of 2011
• Rusty’s Top 30 Songs of the Year and Top 50 Albums of the Year
• The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011 (FlowingData)
• From one of my favorite new art blogs of the year, A Colossal Year
• Conversational Reading’s Favorite Films of 2011
• Doree Shafrir’s Top Longreads of 2011
• Ryan Little’s 10 Best Local Tracks of 2011
• The Most Important Graphs of 2011 (The Atlantic)
• The Geography of the Year in Music (The Atlantic Cities)

In 2011, I…

• Kept a running list of new things I learned almost every day.
• Read fewer books than I did the previous year, which isn’t a good thing – but I have a long commute by bus/Metro so I’m looking to up that number in 2012.
• Joined – and became slightly obsessed with - Quora. It’s the way online Q&A should be done.
• Cooked a lot and tried out many new recipes, including a bunch of kale soups, pierogies, kimchi chigae, the best sweet potato fries recipe ever, and homemade salsa and tortilla chips.
• Traveled to South Korea for a few weeks with my brother and my boyfriend. Went hiking on Soraksan, danced in Korean clubs, visited royal palaces, and made new friends.
• Took shorter trips to Philadelphia, Austin, New York City, and Baltimore. All of them are exciting cities with vibrant cultural and artistic life.
• Greatly expanded my knowledge and study of urbanism, public transit systems, and mapping projects.
• Rode my bicycle all over DC, and on fun rides like the Seersucker Social, the Tweed Ride, and bike caravans with friends.
• Started taking Capoeira classes. Fun, challenging, and an incredible workout.
• Moved to the Bloomingdale neighborhood of DC, which is definitely my favorite place I’ve lived in Washington, DC.

Looking forward to setting some new goals in 2012!

Projects abound these last few weeks. I keep forgetting it’s nearing that time to stop and take a break.

8: There are a variety of ways that allergists test for allergies. Allergy specialists use skin tests or blood tests to test the patient against suspected allergens, and several are usually tested at the same time.

9: Vacation photos of hotels can often be misleading. Check out Oyster’s Photo Fakeouts for some particularly exaggerated ones.

10: Random Hacks of Kindness is a hackathon devoted to creating software solutions focused on disaster risk and response. Programmers assemble in groups all over the world to work on projects like raising awareness of emergency hydrants in San Francisco or this analysis of health facilities distribution in Haiti.

11: Google has a product called Fusion Tables that allows you to import your data and map it fairly quickly. Somehow I missed when this came out, even though I’m a geek about making maps. I’ve played around with the sample and though Fusion Tables isn’t what I’d call a great product yet (it’s still in beta), it’s certainly nice to see the act of mapping data simplified and opened up to the masses. See examples here.

12: In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo banned all outdoor advertising in the city – to include billboards, flyers, ads on buses, and other forms of “visual pollution.” This Clean City law was a move intended to wash away all the garish adverts that covered virtually every surface and increase quality of life for those in São Paulo. For some thoughts on how effective this has been, see the responses on Quora.

13: The Cupertino effect is a widespread error in texts of a certain time period that originated with spell-checking software. When the word “cooperation” (without a dash between “co” and “operation”) was typed on an older computer, the word would auto-correct to “Cupertino”, a word that was commonly found in the spell-checker’s dictionary.

14: A talk by Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice, always an entertaining topic. ”The way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to.”

15: The LuminAID is a solar-powered inflatable LED light designed by two Columbia University graduates, Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta. It’s lightweight and waterproof, making it ideal for disaster relief. They also position the LuminAID as “a cheaper, safer alternative to kerosene lamps.”

16: Apparently there’s a language fad among female college students called vocal fry, a kind of “creaky” sounding voice. Hear an example here. But be warned, this is one of those things where once you hear it, you’ll start to hear it everywhere.

17: Read “The Movie Set That Ate Itself” and just try not to think about The Truman Show. Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky began a mock town inside of Kharkov, Ukraine, placing cameras all around this set and making it home to over 210,000 cast and crew members for six years. They’re recorded 24 hours a day, living out their roles. This is for his film Dau, and filming is scheduled to end in 2012. If anything, it’s an undertaking.

18: Composting your food waste has benefits for the environment, because less organic matter that ends up in landfills means less methane gas produced by the landfill. Currently about 98% of America’s food waste goes to landfills according to the EPA. Reduction of food waste is even more essential, as America wastes 27% of the food available for consumption – around 30 million tons of food each year.

19: An amazing story from a researcher conducting ethnographic fieldwork in China: Street Vendor Life in China.

20: Get geeky with these 3D pixelated animals by artist Shawn Smith. He uses balsa wood which he cuts to length and paints, arranging each ‘pixel’ to form these striking figures.

“For the past few years, I have been creating a series of ‘Re-things.’ These whimsical sculptures represent pixelated animals and objects of nature. I am specifically interested in subjects that I have never seen in real life.” (via Colossal)

21: Though I am planning a round-up of great end-of-year lists, The Atlantic’s In Focus series of photos from 2011 is especially noteworthy: The Year in Photos (Part 1 of 3)

22: A third of all restaurant searches on Google are made on a mobile device. Seems obvious, since people are usually looking for directions or perhaps reading Yelp reviews on their way there, but it’s important to think about if you’re looking to improve your restaurant’s visibility in search results.

23: A good question: How much tech should be allowed in competitive sports?

24: Art has the power to transform lives. See some of the artist JR’s work, especially his famous mural of women’s eyes in Rio de Janiero’s oldest favela. He’s done a similar project in Kibera, Nairobi.

25: Urban planning in Africa still largely follows adopted models from the global north that often don’t apply to African cities. Urbanized areas in Africa need to be assessed according to their own needs. That is the aim of the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS), an organization that seeks to reform Africa’s urban planning education. Nancy Odendaal, project coordinator of AAPS, explains that the colonial planning strategy that is traditionally taught “simply does not have the built-in flexibility to accommodate the diversity of livelihoods pursued in a typical African city. Conventional urban plans typically criminalize the informal economy, for example, where street vendors are harassed by police and have their incomes curtailed.” Therefore it’s important to understand the unique features and issues associated with each place. An African city should not be designed to imitate the cities of British tradition (or otherwise).

26: Starlings, when they talk, are pretty creepy. They’re loud and spend a lot of time mimicking sounds, including human speech.

27: The Where’s George bill-tracking data is available online. Where’s George is a long-running project to track the movement of dollar bills as they exchange hands throughout the nation. The dollar value of all the tracked bills totals over $1 billion.

28: Cycling more just makes sense. Commuting by bicycle costs less in dollar spend, but takes more of your time. You can think of that extra time spent as an investment in your health. I have a coworker who used to ride his bike two hours a day to work – now that’s active transport. Via Streetsblog, “Can America Afford Not to Bike More?“

29: Map Kibera is a project to map one of Nairobi’s largest slums. The central goals of this crowdsourced effort, as outlined in the Map Kibera proposal, are:

• Raise general awareness of the living conditions in Kibera by mapping, as much as possible the extents of navigable streets and other mappable features within the informal settlement.
• Catalyze the local community and expand the capabilities local participatory mapping, expanding previous work and initiating mapping parties within Africa starting with Kibera.
• Test the licensing mechanisms of multiple mapping platforms by making raw data freely available and uploading that data into multiple systems.

30: A toy that has seen more of the country than I have, in the cross-country adventure Address is Approximate by Tom Jenkins. (Navigation using Google Maps Street View.)

I spent this past weekend in Austin, Texas, filling up on lots of Tex-Mex and seeing more cowboy boots in two days than I usually see in a year. The temperature was in the high-80s and it was sunny, which was a little shock to the system in late October – I’d already been bracing myself for fall weather in DC. I’ve always heard good things about Austin and found it to be a pretty cool city. Although it has a higher population than DC proper, Austin is larger so things are more spread out. It also has a smaller surrounding metro area – less than a third the size of the Washington, DC metro area. This lack of density made parts of the city core feel somewhat empty at times. There are a few buses but not much other public transit to speak of. Didn’t see as many bicycles as I’d expected, either. I’d say most people drive.

Austin has a lot of colorful murals, a constant schedule of events, and some interesting architecture (check out the Arthouse at the Jones Center, right in downtown). Muted tones under the hot Texan sun and fun art deco touches on buildings made up the unique aesthetic of the city. The bars are kind of quirky – we went to a dive bar with a huge jackalope replica that you could sit on and another place with a mechanical bull and an extensive list of shooters. South Congress Street has a row of boutiques and antique shops, including Uncommon Objects, the best antique store I’ve ever stepped inside. And the University of Texas at Austin has the largest college football campus I’ve seen in my life.

One highlight of our visit to Austin was seeing the incredible display of 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats flying out from the Congress Street Bridge to catch their dinner. We watched them from the bridge, but there’s also a park nearby where many Austinites and visitors gathered to watch the nightly ritual. Some others opted to take a tour boat, kayak, or paddle-bike on the river, which looked fun too.

Despite its slogan as the live music capital of the world, we unfortunately didn’t make the time to catch any shows. The streets (especially Sixth Street) are lively, though – you hear music streaming out from the bars onto the sidewalks. Since most of the bars have live music, it’d definitely be feasible to hear a band every night if you wanted to. Austin is also home to a couple of the most popular music festivals, including South by Southwest (SXSW) and Austin City Limits (ACL). The Austin Film Festival was ongoing while we were in town, and the city has several beautiful historic theatres.

But really, if you need one reason other than the music to visit Austin, it’s the food. Austin is at the top of the heap when it comes to Tex-Mex and BBQ. Most Tex-Mex restaurants had veggie options; one taco joint on South Congress even had a vegan menu. We ate so well – and so much. Everything’s bigger in Texas.

Headed to Austin, Texas today for a friend’s wedding!

Tonight and tomorrow night we’ll be staying about 45 minutes outside the city in the Texas Hill Country, close to the vineyards where the wedding will be held. Then Sunday and Monday we’ll be in downtown Austin by the Texas Capitol, exploring the city for the first time. I’ve never been to Austin (or anywhere in Texas), so I’m not sure what to expect – but I only hear good things from my friends who used to live there.

I’ve asked friends for Austin recommendations and their responses include:

• Get some proper Tex-Mex at the Chuy’s on Barton Springs. It’s also where Jenna Bush got arrested for underage drinking.
• South Congress Avenue has a lot of good food.
• Go to 6th Street for bars and music – but live music is to be found all over the city, every night.
• Mozart’s is an excellent coffee shop that has beautiful views over the lake.
• Take a hike up to Mt. Bonnell and watch the sunrise/set!
• More recommendations for good eats: Las Manitas Diner downtown. Ruby’s BBQ on Guadalupe. Chuy’s in multiple locations. The Saltlick BBQ in Driftwood (outside of the city).
• See the nightly bat extravaganza at the Congress St. Bridge.
• Try Gourdough’s donuts.
• Bows + Arrows is an amazing boutique. And there are plenty of other good boutiques around there.

Add your own suggestions as a comment here if you’ve ever been to Austin!

8: The Alamo was a mission in modern-day Texas built by the Spanish empire in the 18th century, though it is better remembered as the site of an important battle in the Texas Revolution to gain independence from Mexico. Though the siege by Mexican troops on the Alamo ended in defeat, many joined the forces fighting for independence afterwards, under the rallying cry “Remember the Alamo!“

9: Familiar with the great Velib’ bike-sharing system in Paris? The French are at it again with the launch of Autolib’, a car sharing program with all electric vehicles. It’s run similarly to Zipcar – pay a yearly membership fee then rent the car by the hour when you need it with a small cost for each rental. Hopefully it leads a lot of Parisian drivers to ditch their cars. The lower environmental impact and energy savings spell progress in our relationship to driving; the Bluecars of the Autolib’ program seat 4 and are zero emission. (NYT)

10: Check out this fun infographic of ingredient pairings created by David McCandless and Willow Tyrer using data from over 1,000 recipes: Taste Buds (clever title!)

11: Tightly-knit communities tend to fare better in most of the quality-of-life indicators that have been studied, but research by two sociologists in Louisiana have found that in communities where people have stronger attachments to each other, disasters may be, well, even more disastrous. Read more at The Atlantic‘s Cities blog.

12: From 6 billion people on the planet 12 years ago to 7 billion (on October 31, 2011), a lot has changed.

Oil prices shot from a low of $13 a barrel in 1999 to $113 a barrel earlier this year, and they’re now hovering around $86. The prices of grains and other essential foodstuffs have more than doubled. Hunger and severe poverty have made a comeback. The fight against climate change has been nearly abandoned. The global economy has been battered. Economic development assistance has fallen short of expectations. Water scarcity and resource limitations have grown more acute. And the transition to a green economy has not been as swift as many hoped. In the meantime, world population keeps on growing with no end in sight. If fertility rates don’t continue to fall, population could soar as high as 15 billion by the end of this century.

It’s a scary thought, so there’s your Halloween gift. (Via Grist)

13: Plant a tree to raise your property value? A study by the U.S. Forest Service shows a positive correlation between number of trees on a property and the property value.

…

In personal news, I’m moving to Bloomingdale (the neighborhood in DC) at the end of this month, which I’m very excited about even though I’ll have a longer commute. I’m also going to Austin, Texas for the first time next weekend! It’ll be my first time in Austin and my first time in Texas.

A lot of moving and shaking this month. Let’s make things happen and learn something new every day. Here’s what I’ve learned on each day of the first week of October.

1: East African elephants are terrified of bees, and will emit a rumble as an alarm call in response to the sound of the African bees.  Science Magazine reports that this is the known finding of an alarm call amongst elephants.

2: Who knew watching paint dry could be this entertaining? Watch Pipe Plant by Sasha Aleksandrov.

3: China is absolutely riddled with what are known as ghost cities – entire cities devoid of residents – which if occupied could house over 200 million people. Some photos from Quora user Brian Roemmele help drive this point home. Nevertheless, China continues to build at the rate of something like 16 new cities per year, many of which lack the most essential resource to a city: its people.

4: HTML microdata is information about a web page that can be added to reduce ambiguity by providing semantic meaning to online search results. Schema.org provides guidelines on how to markup your web content using microdata. The benefit to doing this is that it indexes your web pages more accurately by the major search engines, like Google and Bing.

5: Because of the way English bulldogs been bred to select for certain traits, such as their wide shoulders and narrow hips, they are unable to reproduce naturally. They require artificial insemination and a cesarean section to give birth. This intensive breeding process also makes them expensive dogs to purchase.

6: You can sign documents electronically. It’s likely that I knew vaguely that this was possible, but I’ve never e-signed a document before and it was exciting to see how simple the process is. They’re legally treated the same as regular signatures in the U.S.

7: Pasta carbonara involves a specific process of cooking with an egg. I assumed it referred to a type of sauce, but real carbonara involves a raw egg that needs to be handled in a way as not to clump up or overcook when it’s added. The egg is added after the pasta is cooked and drained – it’s cooked by the residual heat of the pasta. After looking through a few recipes, I’ll try my hand at making this soon.

It’s been a busy week. Here are a few things I’ve learned in the past few days.

08: Specific to Washington, DC… DCist explains ghost buses! Ghost buses are those ones that seem to disappear off the NextBus online tracker (which uses GPS data for Metrobuses). The explanation is that not all of the buses are GPS-enabled, therefore some of the NextBus ‘tracked’ buses are simply predictions. There may be a specific bus that was scheduled for that time, but for whatever reason it never ran. So then there’s you, wondering why you’re standing at the bus stop with a prediction for “Arriving” with no bus in sight.

09: Here is probably the most plain-language explanation of your health plan: Health Savings Plans: Making Sense of HSAs, HRAs, and FSAs Unless, of course, you’re part of the 16.7% of Americans who are uninsured.

10: Go read this long-form story, On Change in India by Siddhartha Deb. It’s hard to point to a “lesson” here.

11: David Choe has a very entertaining documentary called Thumbs Up! about his adventures hitchhiking. He explores a lot of desolate places, plays a tiny travel drum set, and meets many people along the way.

12: Jiang Pengyi makes miniature stills of the demolition and urbanization in Beijing. See image at left; click to see more.

13: Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13. It explains why many buildings don’t have a 13th floor (by name), instead numbering their floors from 1-12, skipping 13, then 14 on. This is true of many residential buildings and of my office building. Also, interesting to note that the 13th floor of hospitals is usually mechanical.

14: There’s a WiFi-free zone in the mountains of West Virginia, where people who have a debilitating fear of electromagnetic radiation go to live, as wireless technology is banned by law there. Here is an excerpt from the article:

The wireless association, CTIA, says that scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that wireless devices, with the limits established by government regulators, do not pose a public health risk or cause any adverse health effects.

And the World Health Organization, while acknowledging that the symptoms are genuine and can be severe, says: “EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF (electromagnetic field) exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.” (BBC News)

15: The biggest dam removal project in history, on the Elwha River in Washington, begins this week. Via Matador Network.