notes.husk.org

Yesterday, the new ticket hall at King’s Cross Underground station opened. The official unveiling had been on Friday, with the Mayor and Minister for London, but it was on Sunday that regular commuters got their own chance to have a look around.

So, first things first: the station works. It’s big - surprisingly big, in fact, given how much of it is in deep tunnels. It’s shiny enough (although I’m not sure how long that will last). Generally, it’s well signed. The new ticket hall is well located for St Pancras and the new high-speed domestic services due to start properly in December, and the whole thing has to pretty much double the capacity of the (incredibly busy) station.

The station is so big, in fact, that the lifts have their own map. There are nine of them (although one isn’t open yet and, alarmingly, when I popped in today one was closed), six of which belong to the extended station. Oddly, the lifts don’t go up or down automatically; once called, they wait for a button press to ascend or descend. Generally they’re well signed, but the Piccadilly’s Lift J is hidden between the platforms- I figured out where it was by descending from the interchange subway (pictured above).

The opposite end of the subway to the Victoria line sees the Northern line’s new concourse hosting an artwork by Knut Herik Henriksen, as discussed at Building Design, and photographed by Londonist (cheekily reused above). I suspect the art is so subtle as to go unnoticed by many, but I quite like it (although perhaps more so in photographs and diagrams than in reality). Londonist’s pictures really do a good job of capturing the way a 2009-era Tube station looks when freshly uncovered, too; the shot up at the ticket hall ceiling from the bank of four escalators down to the subway level is lovely.

Speaking of the interchange subways, they’re very, very long. The map above shows how the three deep lines (the Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria) more or less meet at a point a the bottom of the current Tube hall’s escalators. The new hall feeds down to a much longer set of passages (in peach), especially for the Victoria line (where they connect with the existing, now barely used, subway to what was once the Thameslink station, now maintained as an exit to Pentonville Road).

There’s nothing really wrong with that. What is somewhat offputting is that the signage at the new entrance to the Underground from the main-line station’s concourse is that it suggests any deep-level passenger should head via the Northern hall. This turns a one and a half minute journey into a four-minute one.

Of course, the signs are there for the confused, and there’s probably merit in sending people down the wider, shinier new corridors. If I get the choice, though, the older entrance is far more likely to be the one I use.

Still, it’s good to see a project that nearly didn’t happen take a massive step forwards.

nevali:

What if we threw out of all of the existing [personal] taxes, allowances, credits, and bands, and replaced them with a aflat 35% income tax?

I’d be interested to see if anybody’s actually run the numbers and modelled this.

Flat taxes aren’t exactly a new idea, and they’ve been tried, notably in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). They’ve been proposed for the UK, and criticised, too, for cutting the overall government budget (albeit at a 22% above £12,000 rate, not 35% (on everything, presumably, which would surely only increase the size of the poverty trap)).

In the end, though. it just seems like so much geek-friendly “wouldn’t it be great if…” reinvention, when the real world just doesn’t work like that.

This doesn’t happen every day. In fact, I’d be a bit surprised if it’s ever happened before:

Both the Daily Mail and the Guardian have the same headline. It feels wrong, somehow.

noticings:

From tomorrow, each player is limited to three noticings per day. We hope that’ll focus attention on picking the best stuff, not everything you see. Notice wisely.

YEAH.

There’s been a couple of interesting comment piece over the last couple of days on the future of the web: Tim O’Reilly’s The War For The Web and Chris Messina’s The death of the URL, for example. Here’s something I’ve previously ranted about a bit, tangentially related to something Messina mentions, that I wanted to expand on.

Plenty of people have noted that short URLs are fragile, but I’m not sure how many have noticed how much they’re now used for tracking, too. As a random example, here’s a URL I came across on Tumblr, where there’s no reason for shortness, where it contains the giveaway that it’s come via an RSS feed:

http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/hacks/the-simplest-efficient-iphone-stand-weve-seen-
101515?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&
utm_campaign=Feed%3A+apartmenttherapy%2Funplggd+%28Unplggd%29

Obviously everything after the ? isn’t needed, yet both RSS feeds and generated short URLs carry a bunch of unnecessary (but, for the site owner, desirable) tracking data. There’s even a service, awe.sm, which proudly crufts up TechCrunch links posted to Twitter, so that they’re trackable. Even beyond that, it turns out that, as with many sites (the Daily Mail is a particularly fun example) all that’s needed for the CMS to retrieve the page is the article ID (and a leading dash):

http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/hacks/-101515

which then redirects to the actual article. In fact, you can put anything you want there:

http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/hacks/i-love-android-101515

Maybe the URL is already dying, from the inside. Or maybe I should stop caring about what is already something that most people never see. Anyway.

mostlythis:

Stupid shared space thing in Sloan Square. This is a road, I wandered out of the tube, was obviously fiddling with my iPhone then out of the corner of my eye saw something big and fast, looked up and a car sped past me a foot away, had I of not stopped in my tracks it would of hit me. three more went past equally fast, you would think drivers would go though slowly, but NOPE.

There’s more at the original post, which you should read. Meanwhile, Phil Gyford posted to Twitter from Oxford Circus (previously):

The new Oxford Circus junction is sprinkled with careless girls squealing as they’re nearly run over. At least it’ll help ease overcrowding.

My own experience came walking down the Embankment on my way to work, head in the phone as I was reading Twitter, a couple of weeks ago. A cyclist on a folding bike rang his bell as he passed. I was annoyed because I thought he should have been on the road; evidently he was annoyed that I was walking around oblivious to my surroundings.

Maybe that’s the problem with the utopian ideal of shared spaces: attention, or rather the lack of it. As Chris Heathcote put it, “people have forgotten that everyone needs to take more notice”. Putting people in jeopardy seems a rather brutal way of forcing them to re-learn the process. Or maybe this is all just teething troubles? Anyway.

It seems that every few months I think to myself “I should really post about Flight to the Stars”, and once again I’ve seen a link that reminds me to do so. This time, I actually seem to be managing to post.

The first, Phase I, defines the scope of the book. Covering the distances involved, hoped-for travel times (using the exponential curve for speed which seems, sadly, to be wrong) and so on, the book concludes that by 2400 a generation ship can travel within its five parsec radius by accelerating to 0.05c (five percent of the speed of light, 5 psol), coasting, then decelerating. The journey would take a century, meaning just three generations; enough, he hopes, to maintain a continuity of purpose. It also suggests a reconnaissance flight, between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, where the ship could be tested, and considers the possibilities of hibernation.

(One of the best recommendations in this section of the book is that starships should travel in fleets, or at least pairs, if for no other reason than, given light-speed lag, communication with Earth is likely to be stilted at best.)

Phase II goes on to consider the stellar neighbourhood in more detail, settling on some likely targets (Tau Ceti wins), the chances of finding habitable planets around them, how to navigate a starship, and the chances of finding other life.

Phase III is where the science fiction really comes in. A far wider, 50 parsec, radius is chosen, on the grounds speeds may improve and colonies may be able to spawn their own emigrant ships. There’s another survey of the stellar neighbourhood, taking in the three-dimensional layout of the Plough, for example, and then a look at the possibilities offered by FTL travel (although they’re considered with a huge grain of salt). The book concludes with a look at the then-young SETI (known then as Project OZMA).

Looking back from nearly fifty years later, the book generally holds up fairly well. The discussion of science and engineering has stood the test of time best; there’s barely any sociological thinking about crews, for example. The general outline of the generation ship’s construction and flight plan seems sane, even though we’re not really much closer to building it. I’m very happy to have a copy.

¹ The full list, for the curious: James Strong B. Sc (Eng), ACGI, AFRAeS, FBIS