Aesthetics of Everywhere

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

Photos from Santarchy DC 2011! This is an annual December festival/invasion of hundreds dressed in their Santa outfits and variations on holiday costumes.

Preserving the world’s historic places is no mean feat. It is inevitable that buildings will fall, statues will be destroyed, and the structures of entire civilizations past will be mere memories. Buildings will erode, be reimagined and rebuilt in a new form. However, technologies such as digital photography are playing an increasing role in cataloguing and recording the world’s historically significant sites. With the advent of new methods of digitizing these places, our histories are better shared and the fabric of our cultures are better recorded.

Ben Kacyra is the inventor of a 3D scanning system that has been used to visualize historic sites. The projects of the CyArk archive use this system to collect millions of data points for each heritage site, capturing the sites in point clouds that together form a precise 3D model. You can browse the public online archive to see a point cloud, a 3D model, a Google Earth representation, and various photos of each site that has been digitally preserved so far. Also see his inspiring TED talk, “Ancient Wonders Captured in 3D.”

Our heritage is much more than our collective memory, it is our collective treasure. We owe it to our children, our grandchildren, and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and pass it along.

Close to home: Google Street View screen capture of the Wonder Bread factory in Shaw.

In a way, the immense efforts of the Google Street View team are also a piecemeal digital cultural preservation of our highways and byways (as well as the life lived around these paths). Camera-mounted vehicles have driven across more than 30 countries, documenting the view from the streets. Small moments are taken out of time.

At an intersection in downtown São Paulo

Those images above are just two of my finds this evening, but especially interesting Google Street View finds can be found at Jon Rafman’s project 9-eyes.com. There you’ll see a wild slice of life as caught by these roaming photo cars: passersby waving, police officer pat-downs, caribou traveling down the highway, chaotic urban scenes and, every once in awhile, bits of serene bliss.

The stirrings of November.

1: Learned what a tweeter is – other than a person who uses Twitter. A tweeter is a high-frequency speaker that uses an electromagnetic coil to produce these super high sounds.

2: Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art and dance form. Performing capoeira is called “playing capoeira.” I just started taking classes last week and it’s a lot of fun (and very physically demanding). The most basic move is called the ginga, and involves rocking from side to side, shifting the weight from one leg to the other while keeping your hands up to guard your face. The ginga is a sort of evasive maneuver, but also used to position oneself for attack. Other moves I learned in my first class include the aú, a type of cartwheel, and the negativa, which is a low to the ground stance for negating your partner’s attack. Video here, and many others on YouTube.

3: You can lock a row or a column (or both) in a Microsoft Excel cell formula by inserting a $ before the row/column you want to lock. This saves me some time at work – really, though, I need to learn how to use Excel macros.

4: British street artist “Moose” (Paul Curtis) creates his art in urban grime – using dirty walls, tunnels, and other surfaces as his canvas and calling it grime writing. He uses cleaning supplies like scrubbing brushes or rags to wipe away dirt and form shapes in the muck. He’s even been arrested for his art, though all he removes is dirt, and adds nothing. An NPR interview with Moose can be found here.

5: A third of all twins born in the U.S. are monozygotic (identical) twins – the other 2/3 are dizygotic (fraternal) twins. The twin rate differs from country to country.

6: The Washington Post reports that take-home pay for cabbies - after accounting for taxes – averages $12/hour in DC. However, Nicholas Maxwell, an independent operator, proposes to increase charges for riders. DCist comments: “Starting with the national mean income of $13 per hour for cab drivers and adding the local cost of living and business expenses, Maxwell found that a cab driver should be making almost $26 an hour.”

7: Via Andrew Sullivan’s blog, ”Rooms of Memory“. A new study suggests that the simple act of passing through a physical doorway can trigger a new memory episode, our brains subdividing our memory as into separate rooms with the doorways as episode markers.

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.

A nice visualization from the WaPo on Irene’s progress along the eastern shore, and some of the measures taken in preparation so far, including evacuations and the shutdown of the NYC transit system. Click on the image to go to the Washington Post website and view full size:

Plus one more, from NOAA.

It’s no news that Seven Corners successfully detours motorists more often than allowing them to go about on their desired path, but I found this description of the intersection by a transplant to the area very succinct:

…consider the instruction “take Arlington Boulevard to Leesburg Pike south,” which involves navigating Northern Virginia’s notorious Seven Corners — a seven-way intersection with seven traffic lights, two levels, 150-degree turns into merging traffic, and signs that refer almost exclusively to state and federal route numbers but not the familiar local street names.

Even when I make the correct turn on my first attempt, I immediately find myself in another intersection, and in the wrong lane to make the next turn I need, because I only knew about one turn at a time.

It’s a discussion about GPS devices for driving, digital maps, and our understanding of places. Read the full article here.

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.

Film: Overheard
Year: 2009
Directors: Alan Mak and Felix Chong

I saw this Hong Kong action thriller movie as part of the 16th annual Made in Hong Kong Film Festival at the Freer Gallery of Art in DC. The festival runs through August 21, 2011 with free screenings of several other Hong Kong films. They’re showing in the Meyer Auditorium at the Freer, and doors open a half-hour before each show.

I found Overheard very suspenseful, with several dramatic twists that I don’t want to spoil for you. Something that caught my attention was the amount of code-switching between Cantonese (branch of Chinese used in southern China and China’s Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau) and English that was present in the film’s dialogue. A character would say something along the lines of “Good morning sir” in English, then continue in Cantonese. This linguistic feature may be exaggerated because it is a movie, after all, but a little research on the subject shows that code-switching between the two are very common, as many Hong Kong residents are bilingual. Both Chinese and English are official languages.

A friend and I agreed that the music was overly dramatic at certain points. You know when you’re watching a film and you’re aware of the background music and precisely which mood shifts the director is trying to achieve using that music? Not a good thing. The film soundtrack is something that should blend seamlessly into each scene, not call attention to itself.

Though the film festivals that run at the Freer Gallery are free, please remember that donations help them keep these public events going.