Aesthetics of Everywhere

Montage of cleaning articles arranged on a roof top, Jakob Hunosøe

7: Scientists Juliano Laren, Amy N. Dalton, and Eduardo B. Andrade conducted an experiment in which they discovered that although brands cause priming effects in line with the intended behavioral effect (brands such as Wal-Mart led to more frugal behavior, while luxury brands led to increased spending), slogans actually cause the opposite of the intended effect. This suggests we’re less vulnerable to certain kinds of advertising than traditionally believed. We may subconsciously recognize and resist marketing tactics, especially those we identify as outright attempts to manipulate our behavior.

8: The U.S. income tax is a result of Prohibition. Before Prohibition, the federal government derived a significant part of its domestic revenue from the excise tax on liquor. Without the money from that tax, the federal government needed to establish an income tax – which it did with the income tax amendment of 1913. (Last Call by Daniel Okrent)

9: Among 3D printing’s many uses: creation of prosthetic limb casings.

10: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a field of study that explores the interface between man and machine (computers). Experts in this field are essential to jobs related to user interaction design, in high demand today. I have several coworkers with degrees in HCI, which I had never heard of before.

11: Farm raised shellfish may be one of the most sustainable seafoods we can eat. Barton Seaver, a DC-area chef, recommends eating as many oysters, clams, and mussels as you want. Quoth Seaver:

It’s the only seafood that I recommend overconsumption of. Oysters are an absolutely decimated wild population, and they provide a very necessary and vital ecosystem function of helping to filter the waterways. When an oyster farmer plants a clam or an oyster, that farmed oyster is the exact same species that goes in the wild, and it performs the same vital functions. In fact, in some cases, those oysters will actually breed and reproduce, thus helping to replenish and restore native populations. Every time you eat one of these farmed oysters you’re incentivizing the farmer to plant at least one more. And that creates a vital economic lifeline for areas that are devastated by overfishing. (via Grist)

12: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) plays an essential role in the construction of a U.S. smart grid. Here’s a discussion with Bill Meehan of ESRI on EarthSky.

13: Speaking of shellfish, the greenshell mussel is native to New Zealand. My uncle, who’s from NZ, tells me you can identify a New Zealand mussel by its unique green color on the edge of the shell. Green mussels are also larger than the kind we find elsewhere, one of the largest species of mussel.

14: As useful as ‘walk scores’ (such as www.walkscore.com) can be in grading the accessibility of a neighborhood on foot, there are many details that don’t get factored in and should be for a useful grade. Though the algorithm measures distance to amenities, these amenities are all weighted equally in the score.

I’m curious: What’s the walk score of your neighborhood? Do you think it’s accurate? Mine’s 86 out of 100, and from the few I’ve cross-checked, seems like a decent assessment. Less walkable than the heart of Adams Morgan, more walkable than Bloomingdale.

1: Painting the roofs of buildings white is one strategy for reducing energy costs. In the summer, this allows more sunlight to reflect off of the roof (as opposed to a dark-colored roof) keeping it cooler inside the building.

2: Labor omnia vincit is a Latin phrase that is also Oklahoma’s state motto. It means “Labor conquers all” and appears in a work by Virgil in encouragement of Caesar’s back to the land policy (to promote farming as a profession). According to USDA’s Economic Research Service, almost 80% of Oklahoma’s land area is farmland.

3: As we know, there’s a great disparity in America in terms of transportation. Lack of good mass transit in the U.S. is one critical barrier to employment. A recent report on transportation states that for Americans in the lowest income bracket, approximately 42% of their annual income goes to paying for transportation. For middle-income Americans, that number is only 22%. And those lowest-income Americans tend to have the longest commutes – many of the poorest NYC residents have a commute of more than an hour each way. Transportation policy affects access to healthcare, to economic opportunity, and to affordable housing. (Source)

4: Via the Washington City Paper, here’s a great oral history of Fort Reno, an institution of local music: [Your Band] Played Here. For those who don’t know, Fort Reno is a park in the Tenleytown neighb DC that’s been putting on free summer concerts (punk, hardcore, indie rock, and other genres) on its outdoor stage on and off since 1968.

5: I haven’t had to search for housing in New York City before, so this is what I hear from friends living there: apparently it’s pretty common to hire a real estate broker to help you find a place to rent. No one I know has had to use a broker to find housing in DC, but then again the real estate market is much more competitive in NYC than in DC. For some of my friends, it’s taken three months just to find an apartment rental in New York.

6: The Guggenheim Lab is a traveling lab that is “part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space.” It’s in NYC until October 16th of this year, and we saw an interesting demonstration of edible water by a culinary performance group called a razor, a shiny knife (these are the same people that put on a 6-course brunch for 50 people on the L train).

You learn something new every day. The key to contentedness in life is to continue learning each day – that sense of curiosity keeps you young and your mind sharp. And experiencing new things, whether it’s a newly-discovered trail through the woods or the culture of a foreign nation, opens up the mind. Here are lessons from the latter part of July. Hello, August!

25: The idea of a third place in cities was a central tenet of urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s writing. In The Great Good Place, Oldenburg describes the benefits of having a ‘third place’ to accompany our homes and our workplaces (the ‘first’ and ‘second’ places in our lives):

Most needed are those ‘third places’ which lend a public balance to the increased privatization of home life. Third places are nothing more than informal public gathering places. The phrase ‘third places’ derives from considering our homes to be the ‘first’ places in our lives, and our work places the ‘second.’

26: Code switching is common in Hong Kong. The two official languages of Hong Kong are Chinese (mostly Cantonese) and English, and many residents will switch between the two often.

27: Longshot Magazine is a project that writes, edits, and publishes a magazine in 48 hours and the only funding comes from Kickstarter. The topic of Issue 2, which just finished, is debt. It’s well-designed and worth a look.

28: The Seven Corners intersection in Virginia, possibly the most confusing and aggravating intersection in the country, was named after the original seven corners formed where four roads crossed. There are now more than seven corners, but the name remains.

29: In modern times, darker, or “tan”, skin is considered more attractive in Western cultures such as in the United States (this wasn’t always the case, even here). In most other cultures, however, darker skin is often associated with the working class and manual laborers – lighter shades represent upper-class or indoors living. This explains the prevalence of sun umbrellas and of products such as whitening creams in India and in most East and Southeast Asian countries. One survey reports “4 out of 10 women in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea used a skin-whitening cream.” (Source)

30: An introduction and a history of go-go, DC’s own music genre, via Jesse Tittsworth’s blog. (The music videos may not be safe for work.)

31: Subway or train station platform screen doors, which are meant to open only when the subway train arrives at the platform, are an expensive addition to the station and are still not very widespread. They do, however, save the station money in air-conditioning costs.

Daily lessons learned are back! And they’ll continue for the rest of the year, since I don’t have any big trips planned for the rest of the year 2011. It’s true you learn something new every day, and writing it all down helps. Here’s the latest installation, with the first 10 days of July.

01: China has opened a 26.4 mile over-water bridge, the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge, connecting Qingdao city with the island of Hongdao. Many of the world’s longest bridge projects are located in China, including the three longest.

02: The sensation of “brain freeze” you get when you drink an iced drink or eat ice cream too fast is a result of your blood vessels constricting quickly. Still, it strikes me as strange how the feeling’s experienced towards the top-back of your head.

03: According to a woman I met from Australia, Australian accents are considered similar to the Surrey accent in the southeast of England. This area of England may be where the Australian English accent first originated. I wonder if the Surrey accent also demonstrates the upward inflections at the ends of sentences that is so characteristic of Australian English.

04: The St. Louis Gateway Arch is taller than the Washington Monument. Learned this from the game You Don’t Know Jack, which is a pretty entertaining game if you like quirky trivia. The arch looks like an impressive structure; never been to St. Louis myself. [Photo at right, which I snagged off the internet.]

05: The angklung is an Indonesian instrument made entirely of bamboo. It’s played by holding the instrument loosely by its upper section (the top horizontal beam of the frame) with your left hand, and moving it to the left and right with your right hand (holding the bottom tube). The sound is a pleasant hollow tone and each angklung produces a specific note – musicians need to play together in an ensemble to play all the notes of a song.

06: Not all bars give you a new glass or pitcher when you order another of the same beer. This was a relief to see because I had grown accustomed to bartenders performing the (seemingly) pointless act of giving you a new cup when you went up to the bar to get a refill on your beer. If it’s the same beer, I don’t see the point in giving a fresh glass every time. Just looks like it’s creating more unnecessary dishes… but feel free to chime in if there’s a counterpoint here.

07: In the U.S., certain fictional phone numbers are set aside for use in movies and television shows by the Motion Picture Association of America. These begin with “555″ and are not usually given out by phone companies, so that real phone customers aren’t continually harassed by people trying to call their favorite stars. However, Universal Studios is a notable exception. They own the phone number (212) 664-7665, which they’ve used in a few recent flicks and allegedly just keeps ringing when you call it. (via Mashable)

08: The hagfish, misleadingly nicknamed the slime eel, is the only animal that has a skull but no spine. One species of hagfish is caught in the northwest Pacific and exported live to Korea as food – their slime used in similar fashion to egg whites.

09: According to the World Health Organization’s “World report on road traffic injury prevention”, 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents each year. Approximately 85% of these types of deaths occur in low- or middle-income countries. Whereas in most high-income countries car deaths take the lives of car drivers, in lower income countries, the deaths are primarily among pedestrians, passengers, cyclists, motorcyclists, and those taking other modes of transport such as buses. (Source)

10: Watermelon is originally from southern Africa. We had a few people guess on its origins at a picnic, and the most specific we got was my aunt’s answer of “Africa! Because everything comes from Africa.” Today, however, China grows the most watermelon worldwide – over 63 million metric tons were produced in 2008.

A couple more observations I noted on my recent trip to South Korea:

Catch a cab at a cab stand. I saw cab stands (similar to bus stops, sometimes with a shelter covering them) along the busier streets in Seoul. Cabs will come by and pick up any passengers waiting at the stop, or even wait in a line of cabs in popular areas near train stations. I’ve seen cab stands at big transit hubs in the States like Union Station in DC, but I spotted more of them in Korea in a few weeks than I have in all my time in U.S. cities.

Stairs and mountains and… moving walkways. Korea is, more so than not, mountainous. It makes for great hiking. This also means navigating the subway stations involves lots of stair-climbing. And in some of the transfer stations, the different subway lines are so far apart that there are moving walkways to help you get to your destination.

Hotel vs. hostel. We stayed in a hotel in Daegu, but it was worse in every way than any of the hostels we stayed in during our trip. It was a really old building that seemed like it hadn’t been updated since at least the 60s, the shower would only give you hot water for about a minute at a time, and it was completely empty. I think we were the only ones staying on the entire floor, and possibly in the entire hotel. To be fair, Daegu’s not a city that draws in tourists, which is also the reason it doesn’t have any hostels. When we could, we stayed in hostels – they’re cheaper and much more social.

Kimchi! If you’re a fan of spicy food, the food in Korea is so, so good. Kimchi, a fermented Korean side dish with lots of red pepper, is the accompaniment to any proper meal in Korea and essentially the national food. Koreans take a lot of pride in their kimchi, often touting its health benefits and cooking with it in a huge variety of ways.

T-money transportation cards combine a number of important uses for getting around in Seoul, Korea. Not only can these cards be used to pay for the bus, the subway, and taxis, they also work for paying for calls on pay phones and for subway locker rentals. You can buy the T-money cards for 2500 KRW (about $2.50 USD) at any convenience store such as FamilyMart and add value to your card at a machine in any subway station. It’s worth the minimal cost, which you earn back quickly with the 10% fare discount on every subway ride with your T-money card.

Speaking of the Seoul subway… check out how extensive this transit system is. It looks like pure chaos at first, but it’s the complete opposite: easy to understand where you are and where you need to go, with platforms well-marked and maps everywhere. Some of the subway stations even have digital touch screen tourist guides so you can see a map of the local area and browse interesting places nearby. We spotted a cell phone charging machine in the Dongnimmun subway station – important for Koreans who have cell service and wifi almost everywhere throughout the subway – and these free recharging stations are at every subway stop on lines 1 through 4.

One of our Korean friends even has a Visa card that is T-money enabled. This means he can automatically add value to the card from his bank account, and it’s one less thing to carry in his wallet.

Having taken a few trains in Korea, I’ve had the chance to note some differences between the different lines. The newest, the KTX high-speed train, moves passengers between Seoul in the north to Busan on the southern coast on the Gyeongbu line in only 2.5 hours. In contrast, the Mugunghwa lines takes 5 hours to cross South Korea on that route. The local trains have more stops, which also accounts for some the difference in time.

Other ways that the KTX differs from the local/standard trains in Korea:

• It’s more expensive, of course.
• The seats are wider, but the leg room seems about the same.
• There’s a seat-back table on the KTX, meaning it’s easier to bring a meal on board.

It’s possible to buy standing tickets on the standard (non-KTX) trains, without assigned seats. We saw a few folks standing around and at first my brother and I thought they were trying to hitch a ride for free, as we had never been asked for our tickets either in the stations nor on the trains. But most of them had likely purchased standing tickets and were looking for other passengers to alight so they could take the empty seats.

Overall, I think the Korail system operates very much on the honor system – your tickets aren’t checked (maybe it happens, but we’ve taken three different trains without having been asked once for our tickets). There’s a sign at the entrance to the boarding area that says “We trust that only ticketed passengers will enter this area.”

These summary posts of “one thing I learned each day” will be on hiatus during the month of June because I’ll be going on a trip to South Korea, but they’ll resume in July. I’m being realistic about my blogging during that time because I won’t be on a regular schedule in Korea. I’ll try to get online to post to this blog at least a few times, though!

Here’s a day-by-day list of some things I learned the last week of May 2011.

23: A bicyclist’s rolling stop at a stop sign is known as an Idaho Stop, named for the law passed by Idaho in 1982 that allows cyclists to treat the “Stop” as a “Yield” sign. The law is explained clearly in this animation here: “Get an animated lesson in bikes, stop signs, and the Idaho Stop Law“

24: DC has the highest per capita wine consumption in the U.S. Anyone surprised? When I worked at Trader Joe’s, it wasn’t uncommon to have some customers buying a case of wine (12 bottles of wine) or more every couple of weeks.

25: Multiple types of fruit branches can be grafted onto the same tree root stock, allowing one tree to have (for example) branches growing oranges, lemons and limes.

26: Storing your music in the cloud is just better. Hello, Google Music beta invite.

More exciting news: DC’s Capital Bikeshare program is currently largest in the nation with over 1,000 bikes and over 100 stations around the city. NYC’s got a program slated for spring of 2012 – and their bikeshare calls for 10,000 bicycles, which is about as many bikes as Paris’s Velib’ system had when it first launched in 2007 (Velib’ now has double that: more than 20,000 bikes! lots of sharing!). Obviously, DC is a fraction of the size of NYC or Paris, but it’s still got a promising amount of Bikeshare station coverage already. And stats show that the Velib’ program managed to reduce traffic in Paris by 5% in the first year! (Source)

27: Identical twins, although they share nearly identical DNA (they have variations in their copy numbers), have different fingerprints because fingerprinting is a part of one’s phenotype, the observable expression of a gene, which differs based on environmental characteristics in the uterus during development.

28: The doctor in the sci-fi television show Doctor Who has changed several times throughout the show’s long-running history. The modern Doctor Who show is a reiteration of the 1963-1989 series. It’s a great show, and the episodes can be so different from one another that it’s hard to believe it’s the same TV show.

I admit I wasn’t interested in it at first… the episode “The Beast Below” was the turning point for me. Now I really like it.

29: The Washington metropolitan area has the 2nd-largest concentration of Mormons outside of Utah. It’s estimated that the Mormon population in this area is 50,000 to 60,000, with most living in Northern Virginia. (Source)

30: Seersucker is a light cotton fabric that is appropriate to wear in the spring and summer, traditionally between Memorial Day and Labor Day. DC’s Dandies and Quaintrelles (the same group that organizes the Tweed Ride) is organizing a Seersucker Social this Saturday, June 4th.

31: Tired all day. I’ll just post a recipe from tonight’s dinner: Chickpea Marinara over Couscous. Tasty, simple, vegetarian.

16: Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. He’s also won a number of other distinguished awards and recognitions, including the Tony Award. His 1971 play, Old Times, is running at the Shakespeare Theatre (Lansburgh Theatre) through July 3rd. Listen to the Radiolab podcast I linked to last week before you go – Karim Nader’s research into memory is relevant to the structure and dialogue of the play.

17: Meridian Hill is thus named because it lies on the exact longitude of the original DC milestone marker placed by Major Andrew Ellicott and Benjamin Banneker on April 15, 1791. In fair weather, Meridian Hill Park (also known as Malcolm X Park) is the gathering place of many DC residents on Sunday afternoons for a weekly outdoor drum circle. It was deemed a National Historic Landmark in 1994 as ”an outstanding accomplishment of early 20th-century Neoclassicist park design in the United States.”

And ever wonder why overheard cell-phone conversations are so much more annoying than conversations overheard in person?

18: Meat can be grown in labs for human consumption. This one turned into a full-fledged blog post, In Vitro-meat: More research, more questions.

19: I learned how to play cornhole. Two ‘cornhole boards’ are set up at a set distance from each other, and players take turns throwing beanbags, attempting to throw the beanbag through the hole on the board (3 points) or land the beanbag on the board itself (1 point). It’s played groups of two. First group to 21 points wins, but there’s something that I’m still not sure about with certain points being cancelled out: I think that happens when two players from opposite teams who are throwing from the same side make the same move (both land it on the board, or both get the beanbag through the hole). It’s a fun, casual game, though many get quite competitive about it and play in leagues. One of my coworkers even builds his own custom cornhole boards.

20: There are many difficulties associated with maintaining a saltwater tank, including risk of death (!) from zoanthids. People often buy live rocks for these marine aquariums, in which case you aren’t really sure what organisms you’re introducing into your saltwater environment… there are often ‘hitchhikers’ living on the rocks. There’s a story my roommate mentioned about a guy who tried to rid his tank of aiptasia (considered a pest in aquarium communities) by boiling the rocks. However, what he didn’t realize was that there were zoanthids on the rock, which released toxins into the water vapor he inhaled as the rocks boiled in his kitchen. In general, saltwater tanks are considered more challenging to keep than freshwater tanks, as they’re more expensive and time-consuming.

21: Pink Amazonian river dolphins (Inia geoffrensis) are the largest and most intelligent of the freshwater dolphin species, with a brain capacity 40% larger than ours. They start off as a greyish color and their skin becomes more translucent as they mature, giving them their characteristic pink coloration due to the presence of capillaries close to the surface of the skin. These dolphins have humps on their backs rather than dorsal fins, an unfused vertebrae in the neck that allows them to turn their heads around 180 degrees while feeding, and rely on their great eyesight and sonar to navigate through sometimes very murky river waters. They’re found mostly in the Orinoco River system of South America.

22: The Mississippi River transports a lot of important cargo, especially for the Midwest. A neighbor mentioned that she didn’t realize how important the river is for transporting goods in that region, having never lived there. I’m the same way – never lived in the Midwest, and I never really thought that rivers were still such an important shipping method. The majority of the cargoes are made up of grains from the Midwest and petrochemicals from the Gulf of Mexico. Recent flooding on the Mississippi caused a temporary halt in barge traffic and the effects rippled throughout the region, including lots of damage to homes and businesses.

Flood waters from the Mississippi River pour over a levee on the Yazoo River, a tributary to the Mississippi River, north of Vicksburg, Miss., May 13. Thousands of residents who live along or near the river from Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana have been forced to evacuate, and thousands of acres of prime farmland have been covered by the record-setting rising waters. (Chris Todd / EPA)

09: The Smithsonian American Art Museum is opening an exhibit on video games in 2012 that showcases eighty iconic games from the past forty years. The museum recently polled the public to make the final decisions on which games should be featured in this exhibition. However, I’m not sure why they’re making a point of saying that people in 175 countries voted in the poll; nor can I figure out how Super Mario Bros can really be considered ‘American art’. Judge for yourself when they open The Art of Video Games on March 16, 2012.

10: The famous interview question “Why are manhole covers round?” was intended to gauge the interviewee’s reasoning skills. This is a question that has multiple correct answers, some of them including “easier to transport by rolling” and “the circular shape means you don’t have to line up corners when you replace the cover”… but the really interesting part of asking this is to see how the person works through the problem.

Random: See how baby’s faces are formed. It’s a bit strange to watch.

11: The reasons behind the need for train-stuffers, the station attendants who pack people into the subway cars (most well-known example is Tokyo) during rush hours, are two main ones:

• Too many people in the station waiting for trains and, somewhat paradoxically,
• Too many trains

Curious? Read more from the Quora user who answered this one! http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-as-a-pusher-in-Tokyos-subway-system

12: According to United Nations, the world’s population will reach 7 billion people on October 31, 2011. (H/T Grist)

13: Tempeh (tempe) is a soy product that’s gaining increasing recognition as a great, healthy source of protein. It’s an Indonesian product made of fermented whole soybeans (fermentation is an amazing process, honestly) that is seen more of a ‘health food’ or ‘specialty’ product here, but is very common in Indonesia and prepared in all kinds of delicious ways.

14: Check out this great mural artist, BLU. My favorite’s the liberty-spiked key-swallower. All pretty edgy pieces… and the installations look enormous!

15: Memories can be erased… or at least eroded. And of course, false memories can also be implanted in peoples’ minds. (Source)