Wednesday, February 28, 2007
A recent article in the WSJ, entitled Census 2010 Plays Six Not-So-Easy Questions (behind paywall), discusses the difficulty of choosing and wording the questions that will go into the 2010 Census. This kind of information is important for many things, from allocating members of Congress to policy planning to learning about the growth and decline [...]
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Braess’s Paradox, named after Dietrich Braess, is when you add roads or capacity for cars, and thereby worsen traffic (or alternatively, you lower traffic costs by removing roads). Formally, this simply means that the current traffic equilibrium state is not the optimal one. Dietrich Braess, on his website, notes that this concept has applications to [...]
Monday, February 26, 2007
Michael Chabon, the author of many books, among them The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay, has a website whose front page currently shows a poster for the Sitka World’s Fair. At first I thought this was a just an interesting retro poster from 1977. However, between the Yiddish on the poster and the [...]
Friday, February 23, 2007
Sam Schwartz, a.k.a. ‘Gridlock Sam’, is one of New York City’s premier traffic experts, and the man widely recognized for coining the term ‘gridlock’ itself. He also writes a Traffic Forecast for the New York Daily News. Here’s an interview with Sam from Metropolis Magazine, where he discusses tolls and pricing, gridlock, mass transit, and [...]
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Lightning strikes the Empire State Building about 100 times a year. Someone happened to catch one of these event from their bedroom window, and got it on tape:
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=V3gRBeRpPJQ]
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
John Seabrook, in a New Yorker article from a few years back called The Slow Lane, discusses the problem of traffic and its possible solutions. This article, which focuses on New York City, is bursting with some great information about traffic-engineering, and traffic in general. It includes discussions of congestion pricing, the history and science [...]
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
The American Highway Users Alliance ranked thirty seven large cities in the United States in terms of how prepared they are to undergo a mass evacuation. The results? Most cities are in bad shape (full report card, in pdf, is here). Kansas City, however, can be evacuated easily, mainly “because it’s not densely populated, there [...]
Monday, February 19, 2007
Common wisdom holds that the larger city teams in baseball have the advantage, with all their added financial resources and the like (think George Steinbrenner). Well, as discussed in the most recent WSJ Science Journal article by Sharon Begley, A New Study Shows How Baseball Myths Can Hurt the Game, the economist J.C. Bradbury has [...]
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
The Wall Street Journal had an article yesterday called the Myth of the Superstar Cities. This op-ed piece, by Joel Kotkin, discusses the concept of American ’superstar’ cities, such as New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Boston, and how they are generally considered ‘better’ in ways such as economic growth, trendiness and opportunities. [...]
Monday, February 12, 2007
Now here’s an odd one: megapolisomancy is a fictional occult science that predicts and alters the future using large cities. The concept for megapolisomancy appears in Fritz Lieber’s novella Our Lady of Darkness:
At any particular time of history there have always been one or two cities of the monstrous sort — viz., Babel or Babylon, Ur-Lhassa, [...]