Historical superimposition

‘Untouched’ East German flat discovered
[via hawktrainer]

It appears the inhabitant of the humble flat fled in a rush.

Grocery brands from the Socialist state filled the kitchen and old bread rolls still lay in a string bag.

A wall calendar showed August 1988 and an empty bottle of Vita Cola, Marella margarine, Juwel cigarettes and a bottle of Kristall vodka were in the kitchen.

The only foreign product to be found was a West German bottle of deodorant.

See also the most popular bookmarks tagged ‘abandoned’ on delicious.com.

The Siege of Leningrad ended 65-years ago today
[via bldgblog]
Old photographs from the Siege of Leningrad superimposed over photographs from the city as it is today. (English translation of the original page.)

“rising like alien plants on the terraformed lakebed”
[via mtchl]
In order to minimize the carcinogenic dust storms off of barren Owens Lake, the City of Los Angeles built a series of over 5,000 irrigation bubblers on the lakebed at a cost of $425 million. Pruned compares these bubblers—sad, broken sprinklers, really—to fountains:

since time immemorial, fountains have been creating micro-climates, cooling gardens, palaces and sartorially bedecked aristocrats. The array of bubblers, you could say, is also a type of weather modification system: an anti-dust storm.

Looking toward EveryBlock’s future
[via migurski]
Adrian Holovaty announces the EveryBlock publishing system will go open-source when their grant ends five months from today. With so many smart people able to get their hands on that code, I wonder how long until we have the beginnings of a Craigslist for location-based local news.

I also wonder if this decision by EveryBlock will force Sufjan Stevens into open-sourcing his album-writing formula so the rest of us can release material based on the other states.

'Post-speculative melancholia,' saltation & a cemetery in a parking lot

‘Post-speculative melancholia’ [via blackbeltjones]
This post does what everybody circa 1999 thought blog posts would do nothing but: “I felt like X when I walked down the street today and saw Y.” What sets this post apart, of course, is that it describes and names that feeling X we’ve all been having lately when we walk down the street and see Y (let Y=any number of ridiculous iPod accessories). It’s post-speculative melancholia:

in which a sweeping utilitarianism suddenly arises, in which
technologies must do something or else get lost and the drugged
up sense of nothing mattering is followed by a come-down in which the
whole thing seems regrettable.

Through the sandglass: the man who figured out how deserts work
[via rodcorp]
An article about Ralph Bagnold, the man who “documented saltation, the process by which flying sand grains land and kick yet more grains into the air.” In his delicious comments for this bookmark, rodcorp wonders what else works like this? Any suggestions?

Oklahoma’s strip-mall graveyard
[via criticalspatialpractice]
A Native American cemetery in the middle of a parking lot:

View Larger Map

The purpose of The Daily Clique, part one

I began The Daily Clique a few days ago after spending a month thinking not just about the purpose of the blog but also about how to clarify that purpose for visitors, many of whom might never have heard of delicious.com. I also assumed that most of the visitors who have heard of delicious either don’t use it or use it sporadically. That’s okay: I’m not here to evangelize for a social bookmarking site; I’m here to share great links and sources.

But I’m also here to find delicious users who are unknown to me and share some of my interests. The 21 usernames in the list to the right constitute the current Clique. To qualify a user doesn’t necessarily need ten bookmarks per day going back to 2003; she just routinely needs to share interesting links that I would not ordinarily have found.

Sure, I prefer articles and websites somehow related to my chief interests—urbanism, transportation, planning, mapping and pragmatist philosophy—but I’m more concerned that the Clique provides me with a rich set of sources and online experiences.

I hold some members of the Clique as sacred and virtually above replacement (TomC, for example) but I’m very open to your suggestions of new delicious users to replace anybody in the current 21. The idea is that by making incremental changes to the makeup of the Clique, I’ll iterate towards a richer collection of links from which to cull the few that I share each day.

Crowdsourced math and enforced props

Above: Glowing cities under a night time sky [via migurski]. Beautiful.

Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?

[via nielsen]
One day after Michael Nielsen’s post looking at how blogging creates a new forum for solving scientific problems, Fields Medal-winner Timothy Gowers decides “to suggest a problem and see what happens.”

He’s laid down a set of twelve ground rules I think might be helpful for anyone wanting to start a similar project, even in a field outside mathematics; Gowers has obviously spent plenty of time crafting each rule. Number 6, for instance:

6. The ideal outcome would be a solution of the problem with no single individual having to think all that hard. The hard thought would be done by a sort of super-mathematician whose brain is distributed amongst bits of the brains of lots of interlinked people. So try to resist the temptation to go away and think about something and come back with carefully polished thoughts: just give quick reactions to what you read and hope that the conversation will develop in good directions.

The Mission doesn’t want chains

[via TomC]
In 2006 San Francisco voters approved Prop G, requiring Planning Commission reviews for the approval of all chain stores opening new locations. According to a map of what appear to be Census Blocks, most in The Mission voted between 70-90% in favor of Prop G. While the passage of Prop G doesn’t mean chain stores are prohibited, it does mean they now require approval from a Planning Commission whose members are often unsympathetic to their interests. Sometimes this means vacant buildings are left vacant:

ICI Paints operated a store on Market Street for 65 years but needed to relocate after its lease expired last year. The company wanted to move into the shuttered Hollywood Video, whose parent company had gone bankrupt and left longtime landlord Ken Allen without a tenant.

Allen worried that the vacant property would attract graffiti, garbage and other blight. He said he surveyed most neighbors within 300 feet of the site and found that most favored the paint store, in part because the nearest existing one is more than half a mile away.

But as part of their review, planning commissioners concluded that the property could be used for something more beneficial to the community - possibly new housing and some non-chain stores, although no developer had proposed such an alternative.

The shell of a Hollywood Video remains, at least in street view.

View Larger Map

And ICI Paints seems to have found a location a little up the street.

Process blogs, custom cities & cozy airports

Doing science online

[via nielsen]
I’ve encountered several faculty members who have a low opinion of blogs, including academic blogs. I’m thinking about giving a presentation about what I call process blogs. These are blogs that present either one big problem (as I hope the The Daily Clique does) or several problems (as Terry Tao’s does) and work to solve these problems using the tools and communities that have developed around online conversations (comments, RSS, search, delicious). From Michael Nielsen:

You can think of blogs as a way of scaling up scientific conversation, so that conversations can become widely distributed in both time and space. Instead of just a few people listening as Terry Tao muses aloud in the hall or the seminar room about the Navier-Stokes equations, why not have a few thousand talented people listen in? Why not enable the most insightful to contribute their insights back?

You can also think of blogs as a way of making scientific conversation searchable. If you type “Navier-Stokes problem” into Google, the third hit is Terry Tao’s blog post about it. That means future mathematicians can easily benefit from his insight, and that of his commenters.

Customised city

[via anne]
This article’s take on the popular “city as open-source software” metaphor is backed by an exceptional collection of supporting examples, including Montreal’s Roadsworth:

Perfectly mimicking the colours and aesthetics of Montreal’s metropolitan street markings, Roadsworth plays with the visual language of the street itself – joining two streets by painting an oversized zipper head where their lines merge, or transforming a pedestrian crossing into a row of oversized birthday candles. The city’s visual grid no longer functions as a symbol of control but as a catalyst for expression.

In a post from Spacing a few years ago, Peter Gibson—Roadsmith’s given name—explained his motivation for playing with the city:

“Painting images on the street is actually a very innocuous gesture in the face of the problems that exist. We are living in serious denial if we feel that business as usual is going to ensure our continued survival and well-being.”

Documentary filmmaker Alan Koln premiered Roadsworth: Crossing the Line in Montreal late last year.

At home with the modern Goths: Richard Rogers, Graham Stirk and Ivan Harbour

[via bldgblog]
Architects talking about coziness. I’m now fascinated by the Madrid Barajas Airport:

There was a deliberate decision there to go for warmth and texture - to do what airports don’t do. We asked - what don’t we like about airports? It was things like those greying carpet and ceiling tiles, finishes that made you feel uncomfortable. At Barajas the roof swoops down quite low, you almost feel you can touch it.

There are some great images of Madrid Barajas on Flickr.

Homogenizing the internet, criminalizing ornamentation, writing to learn & two blogs

We start with two rants, a hundred years apart. The first is concerned that internet search results increasingly favor a more homogenous bunch of information sources; the second argues that it’s criminal to add ornamentation to useful things.

All hail the information triumvirate!

[via migurski]
For the third consecutive year, Nick Carr reproduces ten Google searches of ten general topics. In 2006 Wikipedia held the top spot in two of the ten searches; in 2007 Wikipedia held the top spot in eight of the ten searches; this year Wikipedia held the top spot in all ten. Carr worries about the homogenization of the internet:

in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine.

I agree with Michal:  ”Google is the only one that’s an actual problem: its methods are secret, its data is proprietary, and its goals explicitly commercial.”

Ornament and crime

[via rodcorp]
Written in 1908, this essay by Austrian architect Adolf Loos argues that “[t]he evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects” and that because ornamentation often forces objects to go out of style it is a crime to waste resources adding ornamentation. The first few pages of the essay are available via Google Books.

Becoming writing, becoming writers

 [via mathemagenic]
I’ve recently finished reading a stack of articles about writing, particularly about writing literature reviews. They’ve helped immensely. The article linked here offers an idea of writing “as a learning tool which enables what researchers know about themselves and their topics” and suggests “that writing should be included more intentionally in our research methods courses” (from abstract).

Designculture in brief

[via anne]
A new tumblelog, centering on “the cultures of design and the designs of culture.”

Sunday is for sounds

[via mtchl]
An mp3 blog. His top five albums of 2008:

1. Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant EP/Fleet Foxes
2. Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4. Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
5. The Walkmen - You & Me

Bird strikes, pneumatic tubes, failed states & tweeting MPs

Don’t blame Mother Nature for the crash

[via nautical2k]
In the wake of the US Airways crash-landing on the Hudson, author Bruce Barcott offers one explanation for the increasing rate of airplane–bird strikes:

“We traded the meadowlark for more houses and big-box stores. The gaining species are terrifically adapted to the human landscape. Turkey vultures dine on roadkill. Gulls and pigeons eat our garbage. To a Canada goose, every golf course is a grassy smorgasbord.”

Pneumatic post in Paris

[via cityofsound]
“Introduced to combat the shortcomings of the telegraphic network in Paris, the subterranean Poste Pneumatique (Pneumatic Post) moved written telegraph messages from 1866 until 1984.”

The new ecology of war: An interview with Mike Davis

[via bfunk]
“When one talks about ‘failed states’ one often means ‘failed cities’, such as Gaza, Sadr City or the slums of Port-au-Prince.” — Mike Davis

Tweetminster—Members of Parliament who tweet

[via rodcorp]
A forward-thinking and well-designed public service website promoting increased transparency and more direct communication between elected officials and their constituents.

Cars parked illegally in bike lanes in Washington D.C.

[via cityofsound]
Another public service website, with a searchable map and listings of the top offenders by license plate. Other cities are available.