Trees, cabs and crime in San Francisco (part deux)

Urban tree locations come courtesy of Friends of the Urban Forest, one day’s worth of taxi cab locations from Yellow Cab (via Cabspotting), and a week’s worth of reported crime incidents from Crime Reports.

Originally uploaded by shawnbot

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.

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