2011-06-27
Compare and Contrast
BBC News: China tests Beijing-Shanghai bullet train
Engineers have conducted a test-run of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail link, days before its public launch.
Officials, reporters and company bosses were on board for the 300 km/h (190mph) train’s maiden voyage, which the government has promised will halve the journey time to under five hours.
China is planning to roll out high-speed lines across the country.
But the project has come under fire for its high cost - the Beijing-Shanghai line cost 215bn yuan ($33bn; £21bn).
And the government has earmarked a further 700bn yuan for the rest of the project, which would see 16,000km of track being laid by 2020.
BBC News: Clash over new high-speed rail tunnel in Italian Alps
Police have clashed with demonstrators in the Italian Alps over the construction of a new high-speed rail link with France.
Tunnelling is set to start for a line from Turin to Lyon, which is expected to cut the travel time by nearly half.
Local residents built barricades to prevent heavy machinery from starting work in the picturesque Val di Susa, in northern Italy.
Police used fire hoses and tear gas to disperse them.
San Jose Mercury: Central Valley plan snags on politics
The plan for high-speed rail in California is to start on the Fresno side of the San Joaquin River, between Bakersfield and Chowchilla, and go until the money runs out.
The Central Valley, for many reasons, is a practical place to begin. The land is broad and flat and relatively inexpensive, and the federal government, which is contributing billions of dollars, requires it.
The first section will one day form the spine of a system connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, officials say. But there is no money guaranteed to build the rest, and the initial tracks, through towns like Wasco and Madera, are conspicuously far from where most people live.
Babies & This Is Hardcore
I can’t remember who mentioned it, but a few months ago I saw someone mention Pulp’s This Is Hardcore music video, and I dug it out and watched it. Recently I think I’ve seen it every week or two. It’s fantastic.
It dates from a time when bands were more free not to perform in videos, but instead to just go a little crazy. So you get Cocker in a minute-long Busby Berkeley inspired reverie, amongst five minutes of fractured behind-the-scenes of a… noir? gangster? movie from Hollywood’s heyday.
I’m mentioning it partly because you can almost see in the earlier, much lower budget, video for Babies the seeds of the later work. Did Jarvis ever study film? It seems as if he must have. Both of them play around, although in Babies it’s a little more… obvious.
Anyway, assuming the links work for you (is Vevo US only? It gets hard to tell) then both videos are well worth a watch. I’d also recommend reading Owen Hatherley’s piece for the Guardian about how Pulp matter more than ever.
2011-05-09
post/5340336458
Tjardiis, from “Sci-Fi Ikea Manuals” by Caldwell Tanner, Susanna Wolff and Conor McKeonat CollegeHumor.
(via pacificpride)
Pedestrian
1.
When you turn seventeen in Britain, you take driving lessons. Well, almost everyone does. It’s not quite as universal as in the US, when it’s part of the school’s responsibility, but it’s pretty close anyway. Anyway, I took lessons too.
The problem was, I was never any good at it. The very reason I was meant to learn - the fact I lived in rural Suffolk - made it a pain. Thirty plus minutes to the town where I had to take the test, an hour of lesson, then the remaining time home, and it felt like I’d barely learnt anything. It required a certain amount of physical co-ordination, and I didn’t have it. I had some weird ticks, like using the noise of the car to guage speed - which bit me when I drove one without a huge advertising triangle on the top.
Then I saw Autogeddon, a BBC production of the poem by Heathcote Williams - “the most vigorous sustained flow of invective against car culture to date.” I thought about how selfish cars were. I thought about how I was heading to university, and probably living in cities. I worried about the cost of all my damned lessons. I couldn’t afford a car anyway. I stopped learning to drive.
2.
For ten years, I lived in London. During that time, except for visits to my parents, I was in a car perhaps once or twice a year. That includes taxis. They’re expensive, especially once you move out to the fringes of zone 3, and anyway, if I stayed out very late, which was rare, there were night buses.
Of course, during the week, I never needed to drive, and it was folly to do so; £5 a time into the congestion charge zone, parking so expensive only bankers did it, and either the tube or cycling was faster, anyway. Oh, don’t forget the maze of one way streets - it’s one thing to learn your way as a pedestrian, but another to memorise all of that nonsense on top. Driving was for suckers. Rich suckers. I was neither.
At the weekends, well, maybe being able to drive would have been nice. Still, London’s commuter railways work the other way, too. Want to walk in the Chilterns, the North or South Downs, along the Kent or Sussex coasts, take a day trip to Southend or Walton? You can do that. It’ll take a while, but then, so does hacking around the bloody M25. It was rare for me to even consider thinking about it. Anyway, London’s got so much going on, why the hell would you want to leave?
In ten years, I don’t remember anyone being surprised that I never bothered to learn. Half the people I meet didn’t, either. It’s a choice, like not drinking.
3.
America is a car country. There are more cars than licenced drivers. There aren’t that far off as many cars as people, full stop. Nationally, only 8% of households do not have a car. The freeways are wide and flowing, and the journey is as much fun as the arrival. I know of friends who, as students, would just drive around late at night as relaxation, as a place of their own. The US loves freedom, and the car is a physical, and personal, manifestation of that freedom.
I now live in San Francisco. In six months, I can remember more than a few people being shocked to learn that I don’t - can’t - drive. It’s almost as if not having that skill means I’m not a functional adult human being.
Still, so long as you work in the city, you can commute to work without a car. It’s slower than driving, but cheaper; parking is, by the standards of the rest of the country, absurdly expensive and hard to find. If you work in the rest of the Bay Area, though, it’s hit and miss. Oakland’s OK; if you’re close to Caltrain’s line it’s doable. Otherwise? If you’re lucky you’re on a company bus. If you’re not, you’ve no choice but driving down 101 or 280. It’s a good thing I work in the city.
As for weekends, well, the best thing about San Francisco, I keep being told, is that it’s surrounded by wonderful countryside. There’s Muir Woods, Santa Cruz, Yosemite, and a list of others. To get there, there’s the roads; I-80 to Tahoe, I-280 down the spine of the mountains, and above all, there’s Highway 1 - the Pacific Coast drive, the scenic bends and swoops on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. It’s not as fast as I-5, especially if you want to get all the way to LA, but for a weekend jaunt, it’s perfect.
But. I’m a pedestrian. (I’m probably a militant pedestrian, but someone has to be.) I like being able to see the magic. Yet I overhear in a café someone who’s just started driving say that without the ability you’re a prisoner, and I see online that I can’t be a photographer without a car. I can’t go for a country walk without getting a friend to drive me to the country. So for the first time in twenty years, I feel the pressure to learn to drive. I hate it.
2011-05-04
No Entry
There’s a man in London removing the No Entry signs. Or at least, he’s trying to.
He’s put there by Clet Abraham, and he’s all over the place.
Previously: Love Trees.
Photos by SophieMayPhotography, sarflondondunc, Iain McLauchlan, and JOHN19701970.
A Quick Thought On Planetary
Yesterday, Bloom launched Planetary. As I don’t have an iPad, I can’t really comment on it, but it did remind me of one of the better talks I went to at SXSWi, Finding Music With Pictures. For an hour, Paul Lamere of Echo Nest went through a variety of music visualisations and players, ending with a call to arms- music players shouldn’t look like spreadsheets. Planetary definitely doesn’t.
The thing is, a few years ago, this ambition might have seemed impossible to achieve: after all, on the desktop, iTunes was dominant, and nobody was going to choose an alternative UI, especially given the pain of reconstructing their photo library for it. Meanwhile, the iPod was a closed device.
Now, though, iOS offers an API for apps like Planetary that’s good enough to allow them to be built (both with access to the device’s music library and play/pause controls). There’s also a playfulness - and immersiveness - to phones and tablets that seems more likely to encourage use than the same app in a windowed UI.
2011-04-19
Commemorating 1906
If San Francisco has a defining event, it’s the 1906 earthquake. The city’s seal depicts a phoenix because of the many fires when it was a gold rush town in the 1850s, but the most recent city-wide conflagration (and the most devastating) was the one that followed the temblor that year.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that even after a century, people remember. Every year, at 5:12 in the morning, they gather at Lotta’s Fountain, at the junction of Market and Geary. I thought I’d join them. Despite fog and the threat of rain, there were about few dozen people when I arrived at quarter to five, and by the time of the motorcade (which carried the youngest of the living survivors, himself 105) there were probably over a hundred people there, a good chunk in period costume (including the MC).
What surprised me was the tone of the event. The earthquake was, if not the worst natural disaster in US history, one of them, but this gathering was surprisingly lighthearted. Yes, there was a minute’s silence, and a wreath hung from the fountain, but there was also upbeat singing, and the sounding of the sirens of the fire and police trucks around the traffic island was taken more as celebration than memorial. Still, perhaps that sums up the spirit of the city- coming through a tragedy, regathering and rebuilding, taking it in its stride.
Nonetheless, more to my liking was a follow-up, at Church and 20th, not far from the corner of Dolores Park (which itself turned into a tent city, a refugee camp before that label existed, in the wake of the disaster). There, one of the few hydrants that kept working still stands, and (combined with the firebreak of the park) it saved the Mission and Noe Valley from the worst. During the 1960s, Doc Bullock started painting that hydrant gold, and now it’s turned into an event.
The J got me there before the tourist jalopy, let alone the dignitaries (no doubt taking good care of their elderly passenger), and I was far more impressed by the tone, with the fire chief, Joanna Hayes-White, passing the microphone and paint to a succession of people, young and old, who had short stories of family caught up in the event, or dedications to other earthquakes around the world, or simply thanking the city for their welcome. I’m very happy to have attended, and I’d recommend anyone who lives in the area to get up early next April 18th and attend.
2011-04-18
Photosynth for iPhone- quick thoughts
Microsoft Research have been working on Photosynth for ages. If you’ve not heard of it, here’s the Wikipedia cheat sheet:
Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos and a point cloud of a photographed object.
Today saw the launch of an iPhone app building on that research.
It’s not the first stitcher (Autostitch has been available for a couple of years at least), nor is it the first live stitcher (360 and Panoramatic both came out last year, I think), but it is notable for being free (unlike the three previously mentioned apps), and for having a particularly slick UI.
When taking a panorama with Photosynth, after taking the first shot (by simply tapping the screen), any movement of the phone/camera is reflected on screen. Once the centre of the image (represented by a green dot) gets outside the dotted line marking the edge of the panorama, a new shot is taken, extending it outwards. This continues until you mark the stitch as done.
Then there’s a short wait while the final image is rendered (and saved to the camera roll, although there’s no notification of this). While that’s happening, you can edit a title, but not description, let alone tags. Oddly, you can “add nearby businesses”. Once it’s complete, you can share to Facebook, Photosynth or Bing. Sadly, email, Flickr and Twitter are missing- but then there is a copy you can work with.
Generally, this is very good for a version one. Although I had one crash while stitching, the image was saved anyway. I miss the option that 360 offers of stitching to a white (rather than black) background, and more share options would be nice. I also suspect I take better source photographs when I’m shooting individual photos, but a bit of patience would fix that. Overall, it’s definitely worth downloading and playing with.
2011-03-26
Bridges: A Guide (3/3)
Verrazano Narrows ≠ Manhattan ≠ Brooklyn:
Photographs by edenpictures, wallyg, and 1hr photo. (Additional thanks to buzz for notifiying me of my (rookie) error. I shall be visiting NYC forthwith to renew my Infrastructure Obsessive badge for the city.)
2011-03-23
post/4038393782
“If the world’s 6.9 billion people lived in one city, how large would that city be if it were as dense as…”
When I first saw this map, I was slightly peeved that London appeared to have lower density than San Francisco, or Paris. I lived in London for ten years, and have been in SF for a few months. I hope residents of the latter won’t be too offended if I say that, all too often, even relatively central neighbourhoods feel more than a little suburban.
I decided to go and have a deeper look at the figures. Firstly, at the original post, Tim De Chant (who designed the maps), writes that they’re based on
Strictly city limits. So the San Francisco map, for example, only uses density data for the city of San Francisco and does not factor in Oakland, San Jose, etc.
Now, San Francisco is a city of 600 km², with a population of roughly 800,000. It’s embedded in a larger “combined statistical area” - including the aforementioned cities - of nearly 8 million. The densities for the two? 6,688.4/km² and 320/km² respectively. There’s almost a factor of twenty difference there.
By contrast, London’s nearly 8 million fit into an area barely one-fifteenth that of the Bay Area - making the entire city nearly match San Francisco’s density. The central London boroughs - like Islington, where I lived for six years - come top of the list of districts by population density in the UK, with double the population per square kilometre of SF. (I haven’t bothered to calculate the density of the old LCC boroughs, but my bet would be they handily outrank SF, although I doubt they approach NYC.)
Similarly, the incredible showing by Paris is helped by the fact that the city is still defined by its medieval extent, excluding a large chunk of its metropolitan area: to paraphrase Wikipedia, the city has a population of two million, but the metropolitan area has a population of nearly twelve. The density of the latter is roughly one seventh that of the former - and lower than that of London of SF.
This is, perhaps, too much effort to put into a single graphic, especially one that does such a good job of showing how sprawling a car-centric US city can become (hello, Houston). However, it’s an interesting exercise in noting that defining a city is harder than it may appear.
