the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Who knew the aggregator space would be so competitive?
endo is an aggregator that you can use to stay up to date on your favorite news sites and weblogs. Subscribe to your favorite news sites, blogs, and any other website that offers syndication. endo polls them periodically and optionally notifies you of new articles.
I’ll have to try it out.
Rats.
A long piece — too long for me to read at this time of day — but this part was pointed to by Tyler Cowen.
Home Economics – New York Times:
In the years since coming to Harvard — and in the years that have preceded his current work on real estate — Glaeser has methodically examined how transportation, education, crime, weather and sprawl affect the fortunes of America’s cities, as if turning over tarot cards one by one. He isn’t the only economist to look at these subjects, but he is arguably the most original in assimilating careful and highly mathematical economic research. His lecture, given to an audience of about 90 people, first discussed the historical trends that have shaped urban growth. Until recently, cities existed to economize on transportation costs — hence their locations near industries or agriculture to reduce the expense of shipping products by sea or by train. Yet because transport (mainly trucking) costs dropped significantly during the 20th century, location has become irrelevant. In Glaeser’s view, cities now exist so that people can have face-to-face interactions or be entertained or consume products and services. For businesses, cities are a place to benefit from a spillover in ideas and to reduce costs by being near other companies.
OK, this is the old density/propinquity argument, that deals are driven by face-to-face meetings more than by new-fangled connectivity (machines can talk to each over wires, but their owners like to see each other’s faces).
This evolution, of course, has coincided with a vast American migration toward regions of sun and sprawl. Glaeser likes to point out the close correlation between a city’s average January temperature and its urban growth; he also notes that cars per capita in 1990 is among the best indicators of how well a city has fared over the past 15 years. The more cars, the better — a conclusion that seems perfectly logical to Glaeser. Car-based cities enable residents to buy cheaper, bigger houses. And commuters in car-based cities tend to get to work faster than commuters in cities that rely on public transit. (The average car commute is about 24 minutes; on public transportation, it is around 48 minutes.) While many of his academic peers were looking at, and denigrating, how the majority of Americans have chosen to live, Glaeser (though no fan of the aesthetics of sprawl himself) didn’t think an economist should allow taste to affect judgment. “You shouldn’t go around thinking that all these people are just jackasses for deciding to drive an automobile,” he says.
But is that sustainable? Or even universal? My experience in Atlanta (living there) and NYC visiting suggest otherwise. Especially is the real estate needed for roads is already claimed by buildings that suit the density model. There’s no mention of the distances traveled: do people cover the same distances in those 24 and 48 minutes spans? Or are the drivers coming from close in (ie, small drivable cities, like Atlanta was if you lived and worked downtown) while the transit riders are coming from another state (like Connecticut or New Jersey)?
In any case, Glaeser discovered that there can be more to urban success than cars and palm trees. For a city without warm weather and a car-friendly environment, skills are destiny. That is why New York and Minneapolis, with vast numbers of college graduates, have done so well. “Boston would be just another declining, cold, manufacturing city if it weren’t for its preponderance of human capital,” Glaeser says. And his studies suggest that the more skilled a city’s population, the more skilled it is becoming, as entrepreneurs attract skilled workers who in turn attract entrepreneurs. Americans, as a result, are sorting themselves through education and geography more and more with each passing year.
Shades of the Creative Class argument . . .
The process yields losers as well as winners. Late last year, Glaeser wrote a controversial article that made a case against rebuilding New Orleans. He has since become an intellectual leader to a tiny, unsentimental, let’s-not-rebuild-the-city faction. “There’s some small core of the city that should be there,” he says, “but the city itself has been in decline for 50 years and in relative decline for 150 years relative to the U.S. population as a whole. It’s not a great spot to have a city; it’s incredibly expensive to build the infrastructure to keep it there. You can’t possibly argue that New Orleans has been doing a good job of taking care of its poor residents, either economically or socially. And surely some of the residents are better off by being given checks and being allowed to move elsewhere.”
[ . . . ]
Glaeser, for his part, says he feels the same about New Orleans as he does about many cities of the Rust Belt. “I believe very strongly that our obligation is to people, not places, and I think we certainly have an obligation — ethical, economic, what have you — to the residents of Detroit,” he told me. But he sees no economic or geographic reason to have a large city there anymore, and he views the prospects for any rebound as dim. (Detroit ranks last among cities with more than 500,000 residents in percentage of college graduates.) The city produced the cars that produced the sprawl that helped destroy the city; such tragedy might have been lessened had it produced more universities too. “There are no reasons why it can’t, and shouldn’t, decline,” Glaeser says. “And I would say that for many other cities. There’s no reason not to let decline go forward.” The greatness of America is dependent in part upon regional evolutions and migrations, he adds. “Places decline and places grow. We shouldn’t stand in the way of that.”
I need to read this in full: there seem to be too many ideas that seem contradictory (a car-based culture and higher-ed — a concept that I associate with density and foot-scale movement — seem not to work together). My skim of this suggests a lot of contrarian or provocative ideas in search of a theme: perhaps it’s there and I didn’t see it.
<update> Another aspect of this came to me as I was walking Green Lake this morning. So much of Seattle was developed in concert with the spread of street car lines: as the traction companies pulled their lines out further from downtown, developers would plat and sell the land around and on route to the terminus. Public transportation does have a role in the building of cities. Picture New York or London without their subways and surface lines. Would they command their status without making it possible for people in outlying areas to access their job markets? I think transportation is a Great Leveller: where getting to and from a job might take pocket change in a transit-served area, the same task requires investing in a disposable asset — cars don’t hold value, after all — for no other purpose than to get to work to pay for it. Surely that money would be better spent on education or housing or even on entertainment in the community. I’d rather spend a car payment as a bar tab than as a car payment with the attendant expenses on fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc.
Now playing: Blue Train by John Coltrane from the album “Blue Train” | Get it
I have seen a few references to this piece on the “Painter of Light” in the past couple of days:
Dark Portrait of a ‘Painter of Light’ – Los Angeles Times:
In an interview, Sheppard, who often accompanied Kinkade on the road, recounted a trip to Orange County in the late 1990s for the artist’s appearance on the “Hour of Power” television show at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove. On the eve of the broadcast, Sheppard said, he and Kinkade returned to the Disneyland Hotel after a night of heavy drinking. As they walked to their rooms, according to Sheppard and another person who was there, Kinkade veered toward a nearby figure of a Disney character.
“Thom wanders over to Winnie the Pooh and decides to ‘mark his territory,’ ” Sheppard told The Times.
In a deposition, the artist alluded to his practice of urinating outdoors, saying he “grew up in the country” where it was common. When pressed about allegedly relieving himself in a hotel elevator in Las Vegas, Kinkade said it might have happened.
“There may have been some ritual territory marking going on, but I don’t recall it,” he said.
Um, if he has a phrase for it — like “ritual territory marking” — I think it’s not an accident or aberration: it’s deliberate. And check out the context: this is the night before an appearance at the Crystal Cathedral, and he is out boozing heavily?
Kinkade’s memory also was fuzzy when he was asked during the arbitration proceedings about a signing party in Indiana that went awry in August 2002.
Held at a South Bend hotel, the party began sedately enough as Kinkade met with a group of Signature gallery owners to sign stacks of prints. Some who were there say it was a goodwill gesture by the artist to smooth relations with dealers, who could sell the signed pieces at a premium.
After the larger group dispersed, Kinkade and others moved to a smaller room for a private signing with Michigan gallery owner Cote and some of his employees. Champagne was served, then hard liquor. By various accounts, most of the partyers overindulged, including Kinkade and Cote.
At one point, according to testimony and interviews with Cote and three others who were there, Kinkade polled the men in the room about their preferences in women’s anatomies.
“He was having a conversation with the men in the room about whether they like breasts or butts,” said Lori Kopec, Cote’s director of gallery operations, who also testified about the party. “There were only two women in the room, and I was very uncomfortable at that point.”
It was during that bawdy discussion, according to arbitration records, that Kinkade turned his attention to the other woman.
“He approached [her] and he palmed her breasts and he said, ‘These are great tits!’ ” Ernie Dodson, another Cote employee, told The Times, adding that he drank no alcohol that night. “I was just standing in the corner in amazement. It was like, holy cow!”
The woman whom Kinkade allegedly fondled confirmed to The Times that he touched her breasts without her consent. She spoke on condition of anonymity, saying she was embarrassed and concerned for her family’s privacy.
I think her concern for her family’s embarrassment is key to the way these people operate: they can act like pigs, completely antithetical to their public persona, and anyone who calls them on it will be victimized as if they were the one committing anti-social acts.
I never liked his pictures — not sure I would all them “art” unless I called wallpaper art — and I have no illusions about him as a holy man. The comparisons to Leonardo or Michelangelo are laughable . . . .
Now playing: Heart Full Of Soul by Jeff Beck from the album “Beckology (Disc 1)” | Get it
Profiles in courage:
Baseball Season has begun, with teams reporting in the little leagues around here. My own future all-star has a team assignment and one practice under his belt. I decided to take him out this afternoon and get some throwing, catching and hitting in (the hitting was his idea).
Picture yourself pitching (if you can call the wild, untameable slop I throw pitching) to a hitter who only likes to hit balls inside. For him to get a hit, I have to throw over the inner part of the plate. Yuck. Luckily for both of us, I was able to get a few across without a hit batsman, ie, having to explain to his mom that almost 9 years of hard work was all for naught, as I had removed our son’s head with an errant pitch.
Then it was his turn to hurl a few, but he wanted a catcher. So I ended up on the receiving end of his stuff. It went pretty well, when he took his time (meaning I was only in danger if I failed to pay attention, not from any intentional shots to my unhelmeted head). When he was distracted, he was wild and I was only in danger of being hit by ricochets off the backstop (two or three of those).
Adventures in photography:
The baseball practice was at the old Sand Point naval station, so while they got started on all that, I took the old pinhole camera down around the hangars to see what I could find. I really began to think things weren’t right when I kept winding on film without getting a sense I was going to run out. So when we got home, I tossed the camera, the tank, and the 120 reel in the changing bag and used some refreshingly adult language as I worked to get the film on the reel. I have never handled 120 film before and in hindsight, it might have made sense to get hold of an old past-the-sell-by date roll and practice this in daylight. Take that as a suggestion if you ever get the urge to work with 100+ year old film technology.
So I got on the reel, with some certainty that the film is not wound on correctly and probably touching. I tore the paper backing off and was struck by the disturbing realization that it might have been in there backwards the whole time, meaning that non-photosensitive paper backing was facing the light/image source, and the other side facing the back of the camera, slowly absorbing the light through the counter hole (through which I never saw a number, merely blackness).
Chemistry is mixed and cooling (D-76 get mixed at temperatures hotter than my water heater produces, so I had to microwave some of the water to get the desired temperature of 131℉). I will try and process the film tomorrow. If this turns out to have been a wasted effort, I will have my practice film in hand, at any rate.
Adult Entertainment:
The young’uns were attendees at an evening ‘do at their school Friday night, which freed up their parents to go out for a meal at a place that didn’t supply crayons, didn’t have cups with lids, or cater to anyone special at all. Café Lago was our destination, and I can concur with a friend who said their lasagna was the best in the world: I’ve had plenty, and made more than a few, but this was on another plane entirely. I had gnocchi, a dish I try when I can find it.
It justified my beliefs about Italian creativity: you give a potato to the English, they boil it; the Swiss, they fry it; the French, they sauce it. But the Italians give us Potato Gatto and Gnocchi, two things it would never occur to anyone else to come up with.
Now playing: Slave Driver by Bob Marley & The Wailers from the album “Rebel Music” | Get it
To drink my weight, I would have to chug 149 pints of beer!
How big is your beer belly?
Powered by the mighty Rum and Monkey.
As you may know Octavia Butler, Seattle resident and acclaimed author, passed away last week, and the good folks at NPR re-broadcast a panel discussion with her, David Brin, and Lawrence Krause from the opening of Paul Allen’s Sci Fi Museum.
Not something I would have chosen to listen to, given my feelings about genre fiction, but I liked the meta discussion about the genre. I thought David Brin’s bit about how the ghetto walls erected around the genre by university departments bent to enclose them, not the genre, to be a bit silly, but I give him credit for a new rubric for it: speculative history. I thought speculative fiction, another oft-used alternative, to be unworkable: what fiction isn’t speculative?
Anyway, I recommend the 30 minutes or so of this as good informative listening. I thought Octavia Butler came across just as warm and human as her various remembrances of the past week described her, and I have been struggling to hold one of her, perhaps off-the-cuff, ideas in my head til I could set it down. When asked about where real science inspires science fiction, her answer was that genetic engineering fascinated her. Then she said something about being able to make changes, wise or unwise, permanent or impermanent: what happened next isn’t clear, but what if:
Picture a world where genetic modifications have been commonplace, but with one consequence: for every change that gets made — additional height, immunity to disease, an end to congenital birth defects — something else is also changed, sometimes known, sometimes unknown. Genetic mods as a zero-sum game, where you gain height and lose intelligence, change skin pigment but get unusual and unappealing iris or hair coloring . . . .[*]
These ideas always sound better when I am walking and I circumnavigated Green Lake while listening to this.
Time to hunt one of her books. One thing she said brought this genre-fication down to earth. She wished she could get more than a 9-line review of her works, which seems amazing for someone who won a MacArthur Fellowship award. Unlike many of the people I know who do read widely, regardless of genre, I have also known people whose reading lists were the Hugo Award list (seriously: I knew someone who carried the Hugo list in his pocket in case he ran out of book and needed to know what to get next) and the like, who only hunt the SciFi aisles of bookstores and libraries. I think it would make more sense to just lump fiction in together (but then I am a uniter not a divider-upper). It’s not like the rocketships or planetscapes or sword-carrying maidens in skintight spacesuits or gravity-defying shredded gowns won’t give you a hint of what’s inside 😉
As with most things Teresa Neilsen Hayden has said all there is to say about genres but I can’t find the particle in question: I’m pretty sure it was her. If I find it, I’ll add a link.
* Has this been done already?
When the simple, responsible act of paying down your personal debt can invoke action by a domestic surveillance program, we’re not living in the America of the history books.
Pay too much and you could raise the alarm:
The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.
And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.
And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.
They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast.
After sending in the check, they checked online to see if their account had been duly credited. They learned that the check had arrived, but the amount available for credit on their account hadn’t changed.
So Deana Soehnge called the credit-card company. Then Walter called.
“When you mess with my money, I want to know why,” he said.
They both learned the same astounding piece of information about the little things that can set the threat sensors to beeping and blinking.
They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.
I can’t understand how we got here.
This — The 411: Blog Stats by Elliott Back — has some good ideas in it but it’s a bit overwhelming.
Take a look. Elliott’s the smarty who devised Spam Hash Cash, the still uncrackable comment spam killer.
In a fit of insecurity, I decided to go with a precision pinhole for my experiments. I have yet to inspect anything I have taken with the ancient Foldex-20 I have refashioned into a pinhole camera, but I have my doubts about how well I “drilled” that last hole.
I ordered a .4 mm pinhole from Lenox Lasers. PinholeCalc seems to think that’s close to the optimal size.
Their bass-ackwards website doesn’t like Safari and isn’t all that thrilled with anything else. But the best part of it is that I griped about the shipping costs (US$16.54 on an US$18 item that weighs less than an ounce?) and got a reply that I could use USPS shipping for US$5. Cool.
They have a nice pinhole gallery there as well: check it out if you’re interested.
Now I just have to get up the nerve to mix up the chemistry and see what this roll has on it.