Aesthetics of Everywhere

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.

Following are a few photos from yesterday’s Seersucker Social hosted by Dandies & Quaintrelles. The temperature was ideal for a seersucker-clad bike ride around Washington DC and up to the Hillwood Estate for a lawn party complete with crochet, badminton, gin cocktails, and a live band.

Please leave a link in the comments if you have photos from the event!

More photos after the cut.

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: Seed bombing is about spreading seeds in inaccessible or otherwise unreachable areas through a variety of methods, which you can read more about here. Employ at your own discretion.

10: Followed continuing politics in the Ivory Coast. Laurent Gbagbo, who was president of the Ivory Coast for a decade and democratically voted out of power in a November 2010 election against opponent Alassane Ouattara, was holed up in a bunker and refused to step aside, causing forces on either side to resort to bloodshed… with severe consequences to citizens in these areas, as there were many civilian casualties from the bombing, the rapes, and the village-burning.

11: Did my taxes. Not too much else other than work and taxes.

12: The Rashomon effect describes the situation in which a group of people come together but the individuals leave with different perceptions of what has passed (which are, in a sense, all “true”). In Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, several versions of an afternoon’s events are recounted as they were experienced by these individual subjectivities – yet reality can, and often is, broken up into single truths that can’t quite be repaired into a coherent whole.

13: Certain cities – including LA, DC, Sausolito (California), and SLC – have implemented some combination of low-power sensor systems in the road or special ‘smart’ meters which can communicate which parking spots are open, take NFC payments, alert traffic police about violations, or even help drivers find where there’s open parking using smartphone apps. One example of a company who runs this kind of technology is Streetline.

14: DC’s Metrorail system opened for operation on March 27, 1976. Then, it consisted of 5 stops along the Red line: Farragut North, Metro Center, Judiciary Square, Union Station, and Rhode Island Ave. The planning stage for the Metro started much earlier, however – in the 1950s. Construction began in 1969. See an animated history of DC’s Metro system on Greater Greater Washington: http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9831/happy-birthday-metro/ It’s come quite a long way!

15: camelCase uses median capitals to join multiple words together, and although it feels a little outmoded, it’s still very much alive. Example include: iPhone, WordPress, PayPal.

History of gender-specific colors in America, or why baby girls are expected to be dressed in pink and boys in blue: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html (Not what you might expect!)

16: Crocodiles have some of the most sophisticated hearts in the animal kingdom, four-chambered hearts well adapted for their survival. For example, there’s a valve in the heart that blocks off the pulmonary system (which pumps blood to the lungs, the system they don’t need operating underwater) as the croc dives into the water, allowing them to be more active for longer periods of time in the water as their energy is better spent on systemic circulation of blood. There’s a pretty cool documentary by National Geographic called ‘Ultimate Crocodile’ which goes into a lot of the specifics of crocodilian anatomy.

01: In 1846, Tunisia became the first Arab state to abolish slavery. (“The Casbah Coalition,” Steve Coll in The New Yorker. Subscription required for full text.)

02: Went to Philadelphia for the weekend. A few things I learned from friends there:

• That greenish tint that old copper statues take on is called a patina – the coloration is the effect of copper being exposed to the elements.
• There are three categories of female voice registers, named after the parts of the body from which they are based: the head voice, the throat voice, and the chest voice. We were talking about this in terms of speech (pretty certain it’s also applied to singing). And they’re at least in some part socially constructed – females may tend to develop this ‘head voice’ due to accepted gender norms. Think of the high-pitched, nasal way girls and women speak at times and you’ll have some idea of what that sounds like. Men wouldn’t have what’s called a head voice, however – that’d be what’s known as a falsetto. The Italian term falsetto describes an artificially high imitation of this female head voice.
• Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music) had a super wide range because she had incredibly tight vocal cords which allowed her to hit such high notes that she could break crystal. She later had a throat surgery in which a doctor accidentally sliced through part of her vocal cords, destroying her ability to cover the same musical register.
• How to play the board game Risk. I’ve been missing out – it’s a fun mix of strategy and luck. A German pal notes that it goes by the same name in her language: Risiko.

03: Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA and one of the richest men in the world, built the popular furniture empire from humble beginnings, selling imitations of high-end furniture built with cheaper material for affordable prices. He also allegedly supported a fascist group for some time, but not sure how true this is.

Ceviche is a dish in which fish is cooked using the acid of lemon juice. No heat is applied in this method of cooking.

04: A kost is an Indonesian boarding house. It’s described as similar to a private dorm.

05: In Ireland, the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) is the one who makes the decisions, and the President of Ireland serves in more of a ceremonial (figurehead) role.

06: The nutria is a large rodent that looks much like a beaver, but much uglier and with a narrow tail. It’s a semi-aquatic animal that can be found living in sewage systems, so it’s considered a pest in many places. Because of this, some states have issued bounties on these rodents. Their fur is also used for clothing.

07: The feeling of muscle soreness a day or two after a workout is called delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Since this seems common, and most sites say it kicks in from 24-72 hours after the workout, I guess I no longer have to wonder why I feel sore two days later rather than the next day. DOMS isn’t prevented by stretching: stretching before physical activity is to reduce the risk of injury, not reduce soreness.

08: The H St NE corridor, or ‘the Atlas District,’ has really changed a lot in the past three years. The two blocks along the main strip are packed with small restaurants and bars, with 2.5 hour waits for the popular places like Granville Moore’s and the newly opened Toki Underground. I miss that free shuttle that stopped running recently. Before that, it used to be nothing more formal than a guy you’d call to pick you up in his small passenger car – sometimes fit 7 or 8 people in there at a time – to take you back to Union Station from the H St corridor. It’s a fun area, but probably better for a weeknight than the weekends. (Same as how Adams Morgan is much more bearable on weeknights.)

22: This is a relearn: “Generative systems are systems that use a few basic rules to yield patterns.” I remember playing around with Conway’s Game of Life in a population geography course. Might the Chrome app Isle of Tune be considered generative music?

23: There are long-term travelers out there in the world who travel with zero baggage – “Total Nada” mode, pretty much the clothes on your back, your passport, a toothbrush. I don’t think I could do it without carrying ANY kind of bag (I even carry a messenger bag to the office), but it’d be neat to try traveling for over a week with just one messenger bag or daypack. Read more on modes of travel sans baggage. That’s the minimalist spirit!

24: My coworker taught me some more about SQL and even lent me his textbook to read. I’m only one chapter in, but at least I’m not lost.

25: DC has a Victims of Communism memorial. Has anyone considered erecting a “Victims of Capitalism” memorial? Just curious.

26: I was in NYC this weekend. See my previous post, NYC: Around Battery Park, and Graffiti.

27: Google Maps traffic information uses data from a variety of sources, but perhaps the most interesting portion comes from traffic data collected from the users of Google Maps on their smartphones. They can track where you’re going and how long it takes you, and that info is aggregated into their database to figure out how much traffic is on that particular route. For main roads, Department of Transportation (DOT) sensors in the road give Google data on traffic, but for the smaller roads, there aren’t any sensors. And those are the routes for which Google can still provide traffic estimates through other means (such as from mobile users).

28: I’ve been working my way (slowly) through Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Here’s a direct quote:

“The Greek word ponos, or “toil,” was a term used by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, to describe the fight of a body in disease. Today this idea is called homeostatis, or equilibrium as a strategy of the staying power of any body. All organizations, but especially biological ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man-made social environment as an extension of man’s physical body is no exception. The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensions – always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostatis.” (98)

29: Oysters are strange beings. Not all kinds are edible, and even those that are are pretty odd. I grew up near the Chesapeake Bay… Can’t remember for certain, but I must have seen an oyster reef at some point in my childhood.

30: Haptic refers to the tactile – the faculty of touch. First encountered the word on my phone when I disabled the keystroke vibrations, and explained in McLuhan’s writing later in the day. Funny how learning a word causes you to instantly notice it everywhere you go.

31: From David Brooks’s description of concepts worth using in everyday life:

Clay Shirkey nominates the Pareto Principle. We have the idea in our heads that most distributions fall along a bell curve (most people are in the middle). But this is not how the world is organized in sphere after sphere. The top 1 percent of the population control 35 percent of the wealth. The top two percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of the messages. The top 20 percent of workers in any company will produce a disproportionate share of the value. Shirkey points out that these distributions are regarded as anomalies. They are not.