Not only does this post include two great (and chilling) maps of how Robert Moses’ New York City might have looked, but it warns us against our impulse to accept online base maps as apolitical representations.
I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways … Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before … but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context … We have become so accustomed to viewing the world through Google Maps (or some other online mapping software) that I feel like these maps are starting to shape our view point of the city.
I’m reminded of the introduction to Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps, in which he says maps “enable the past to become part of our living . . . now . . . here.”
Traffic engineers in Korea have challenged convention by reducing the traffic capacity along a section of Seoul’s road network in order to increase the efficiency of the system as a whole. Somehow it worked. Researchers from the Sante Fe Institute recently concluded that a large number of network options countervails a large network capacity.
The “price of anarchy” is a measure of the inefficiency caused by selfish drivers. Analyzing a commute from Harvard Square to Boston Common, the researchers found that the price can be high—selfish drivers typically waste 30 percent more time than they would under “socially optimal” conditions.
The solution hinges on Braess’s paradox, Gastner says. “Because selfish drivers optimize a wrong function, they can be led to a better solution if you remove some of the network links,” he explains. Why? In part because closing roads makes it more difficult for individual drivers to choose the best (and most selfish) route. In the Boston example, Gastner’s team found that six possible road closures, including parts of Charles and Main streets, would reduce the delay under the selfish-driving scenario. (The street closures would not slow drivers if they were behaving unselfishly.)
“But what I do can work for any artist. In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”
Related: See bookmarks tagged counterintuitive by myself and others on delicious.
A New Orleans architect has organized a partnership between Dutch and Louisiana engineers, planners, and scientists.
History repeatedly shows the folly of living in a delta: disasters are common there. …
“Living with the water” has recently become an ordering, corollary principle of Dutch policy. Dutch Dialogues participants believe that adapting a Living with the Water principle is necessary in post-Katrina New Orleans; they likewise reject the false choice posited by those who see only a choice between safety or amenity from water in the Louisiana delta.
[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.
[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.
