Aesthetics of Everywhere

Bike to Work Day is this Friday! There will be pit stops all over DC and beyond with giveaways, food, and drink for anyone who is riding into work. A few of them are even hosting pit stops during the evening commute.

For experienced riders and frequent commuters, be courteous to your fellow riders – many will be attempting to ride into work for the first time. We have to encourage bicycle commuting by making it fun and as stress-free as possible for everyone. Yes, the trails and bike lanes will be more crowded than usual, but it’s Friday. Take it easy.

First time riders, make sure you map out your route beforehand. I often use Google Maps’ bicycling directions but your coworkers may have some suggested routes too. Bicycle maps from the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) are also available here. And don’t be afraid to ask for help if you’re lost. Many cyclists will stop for you and get you back on your way.

To stay safe on the road or trails, be predictable. Signal your turns and remember to also look behind you before passing someone.

While it may be too late for the free t-shirts, go ahead and register at the Bike to Work Day Metro DC website. This will help ensure a more accurate count of riders and help for planning purposes.

Finally, it’ll be in the 70s this Friday. Perfect cycling weather – go ride!

My second week of using Capital Bikeshare was good – I put a bit more mileage on than the last week. I rode 17 miles on the Bikeshare bicycles and about 15 miles on my own bike, but I’m looking to increase my time riding because I’m in training for the Bike MS charity ride in June. I set my goal for Bike MS at 55 miles on Saturday and 50 miles on Sunday, which is more than I’ve ever done on any given day. It’ll be a good challenge for me and I plan to push myself to go on longer rides leading up to the event.

I’m lucky to have a very knowledgeable friend teaching me the ins and outs of road cycling, and I’ve also been learning about bike maintenance and repair (“wrenching”) by just reading and practicing on my own. It’s exciting diving into this new world – though I’ve had a bicycle since I was a child, I never knew much about upkeep or riding position and didn’t think much of it. My boyfriend tells me the bicycle is a simple machine, and really, it is. Putting a little time into learning about how to fix up a bicycle on your own pays off.

I stopped in at the Velocity Bicycle Cooperative in Del Ray, Alexandria last week and I think it’ll be a great space for the neighborhood. They offer shop space for you to work on your bike using their tools, for a small donation. There are also volunteers on-hand to assist, though you are expected to work on your own bicycle. It’s not near enough to me that I could see myself going regularly, but there’s a similar co-op in DC called The Bike House. The Bike House is now at the Annie’s Ace hardware store in Petworth on Saturdays, which is a new hardware store run by very helpful people. And once the Bloomingdale Farmers Market is back in season, The Bike House will be there on Sundays. I’m looking forward to checking that out. In the meantime, lots of riding!

Recently I signed up for a Capital Bikeshare membership to replace one of the bus rides on my commute. Before becoming a member I had only used Bikeshare once, to get home from a friend’s party in the Waterfront area. Here’s my first week using Capital Bikeshare (CaBi):

Saturday. Rode to the Orange line and transferred onto Metro to go to lunch out in Virginia. The bike’s heavy so it felt like more of a workout than when I ride my own bike. It’s also very upright. I made the mistake of not confirming the location of a Bikeshare station before heading out, but managed to find a station by asking a fellow CaBi rider. Docked a couple blocks from the McPherson Square Metro station, where there was some construction going on. Nice weekend morning ride.

Sunday. Didn’t Bikeshare – just rode my own bike around all day. But I did notice that there’s a CaBi station near my friend’s house, which is way up 14th Street. The pace of expansion is pretty sweet, with several new stations planned in Arlington, and some stations on the National Mall!

Monday. Rode to the Orange line again since I work in Tysons Corner and I’m trying to use Bikeshare to regularly replace one leg of my commute. I saw a neighbor leaving for work from the same station. Also, I downloaded the Spotcycle app for finding CaBi stations on the go. The UI is a bit wonky but it’s vastly more useful on a smartphone than the station map on the website, which isn’t mobile-friendly.

Tuesday. Morning ride had the benefit of pleasant weather, though it was warmer than I thought and kept shedding outerwear along the way. Shed scarf as I wait at a stoplight, and so on. Evening ride was non-existent. I was a bit late getting back into the city because I went to happy hour with coworkers and all the docks at my two nearest home stations were full (checked on the Spotcycle app). Walked back from the Metro, but by the time I got there it appeared that a bike-shuffling truck had been by because there were now 4 empty docks.

Wednesday. Morning ride was great – ideal weather, no jacket riding, few cars downtown around the time I left. In the evening I ran a bunch of errands, which was improved by being able to bike between several points. The stations are, at least for me, conveniently placed. Capital Bikeshare even crowdsources suggestions for new locations here: Crowdsourcing Map. A lot of people must have been hanging out in Dupont Circle (or maybe a lot of members live around there?) because the dock was full at the Massachusetts Ave & Dupont Circle station and a couple others on CaBi bikes were waiting for a docking spot to open. After errands I rode home from Dupont with no issues.

Thursday. Again, superb weather. Just cool enough around 7:30am that I wasn’t feeling too warm by the time I got on the Metro. Also discovered one of the best features of Bikeshare – the Rental Statistics on your member page! See total distance traveled, calories burned, CO2 saved, time spent riding… perfect for any data geek like me. Rode back without a hitch after going out with friends.

Friday. Rode a little further in the morning, though it was grey and (relatively) chilly out – saves me a couple of stops on the Metro for not much more effort. The ride back almost didn’t happen. The Spotcycle app told me that there were no docks open at either of my home stations, but I took the chance and rode to my nearest station… full. Then I biked over to the next-closest and there was one spot open!

Week 1 Statistics – or really, 6 days -

• Total Distance: 14.02 miles
• Total Calories Burned: 602.86 calories
• Total CO2 Saved: 9.52 lbs.
• Total Duration (last 200 trips): 2 hours, 52 minutes, 43 seconds

Not bad for what would have been bus rides instead.

Here’s another cyclist’s story of how bikeshare was his ‘gateway drug’ into commuting by bicycle. And, it’s faster than any other mode of transportation within the city.

Been busy lately with work, side projects, and visiting friends, so here are a couple links to check out for now.

MapCrunch: Randomized Google Streetview images. It’s fun to select “Hide location” and guess with friends where in the world the view is from. We’ve spent probably hours doing this, tallying up points and starting to learn the differences between the features of the different Scandanavian countries, for example. You can think of it as a high-speed contest in the vein of Andrew Sullivan’s View from Your Window contest. But yes, it’s absolutely geeky.

Try this one:

but does it float: A collection of art projects with a tendency towards the abstract. Great mix of photography, drawings, typography, computer-generated imagery, etc. It’s easy to lose a lot of time exploring this site because you can scroll down for as long as you’d like.

Graph of Cosmetic Surgical Procedures: This is how the number of different types of cosmetic surgery in America changed from 2000 to 2011. I find it interesting to note that the number of plastic surgeries dropped from 1.9 million in 2000 to 1.6 million in 2011 – a drop of 17%.

Other notes:

Planning to do the One Day Hike this year. Really excited about doing it but haven’t done much in the way of training yet – guess I need to toughen up my feet and my resolve.

I’m visiting a friend in Boulder, CO in May. I’d love any suggestions about what to see/do there, since it’ll be my first time there. We’re planning to do some hiking and sample many delicious microbrews.

And speaking of cool cities, I’ve also been getting to know Baltimore, MD a bit better and it’s a really fun, artistic place. Last night we grabbed a beer at the Brewer’s Art and struck up a conversation with a Texan girl who’d been living in Baltimore awhile before moving to DC. She happened to be back up there this weekend and we talked a bit about all the great (and more affordable) places to eat in Baltimore, the way the music scene has been changing in the last few years, and how she’s trying to convince all of her friends in DC to move to Baltimore.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard current and former Baltimore residents rave about how great of a place it is to live. Its proximity to DC means that there are even people who opt to live there and commute daily into DC – trading a shorter commute for lower cost of living, amongst other things. Job-wise, I’m not sure how attractive Baltimore is, however.

Another thing I find interesting about Baltimore is that there’s a group, Baltimore Green Currency, that is trying to spread a form of local currency called the Bnote. They report that over 130 local businesses currently accept Bnotes as payment. One of the bars we visited let you purchase Natty Bohs for 1 Bnote each; the equivalent of only 91 cents for a beer!

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.