Peter’s Blog

BLDGBLOG: The mine hijackers

Glaciers are the future of architectural design.

As the saying goes, God made the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands. Of course, no landscape is untouched: walk through the British countryside and what seems to be untouched forests and hills turn out be forests planted several centuries ago and hills continuously molded over the past millenia by human activity. On the road from Haarlem to Schipol I once saw a grass-covered ziggurat-shaped hill with an incredibly straight alley of trees running by it. Rather than pretending that their environment isn’t man-made – the British aren’t the only offenders at maintaining such an illusion though I think they’re some of the worst – the Dutch celebrate the artificialness of their landscape. Building on that thought, there’s a great piece in the Herald Tribune about an MIT professor encouraging a polluted region in Italy to embrace man-made nature.

Los Angeles’ carbon footprint is a light one — sort of - Los Angeles Times

“The Mississippi River roughly divides the country into high and low emitters,” it says. “In 2005, all but one of the 10 largest per capita emitters were located east of the Mississippi.”

Proof again of the inherent superiority of the West Coast! =)

The USA Today, of all papers, has a good summary of worldwide suburbanization trends: Modern suburbia not just in America anymore

This article is just amazing: cityofsound: Transport informatics

And Jack, you’ll like that Boston is doing some cool stuff with biking.

Bike network 2.0
Boston appointed a ‘bike czar’, Nicole Freedman, and her team has used Google Maps to create a set of bike routes across the city, based on the aggregated data from actual routes that cyclists took across the city“We found out where the actual desire lines are,” said Freedman, and has since extended the network to enable users to rate streets for bikes. It’s a little rudimentary at the moment, but shows the promise of such systems. Boston are building the city’s first official bike map from the results of the system.

Nuke Power: The Future Is Coming Up Nukes

Nuclear power is the other alternative energy - cleaner than biomass, and less retarded than ethanol.

Best slogan ever!

Pruned: Vaux-le-Vicomte in the DMZ

Has your village been flooded with landmines or is it now downwind from a nuclear meltdown?

Don’t panic. Let’s garden!

Fascinating.

With rising concerns about carbon dioxide emissions, the first container ship assisted by a giant kite just set sail. However, the real news is that shipping companies are slowing down their boats:

“We’ve saved so much fuel that we added a ship to the route and still saved costs,” said Klaus Heims, press spokesman [for Hapag-Lloyd]. “Why didn’t we do this before?”

Hapag-Lloyd cut their speeds from 23.5 knots to 20 knots and are planning to go down to 16 knots on the Atlantic soon.

I wonder if this will have a subtle and long terms effect on how the global economy works, since ‘just-in-time’ shipping from overseas is so essential to manufacturing these days.

Note: This is based on the European January 19-25 edition.

p.14 I was surprised to read:

“It [America] has much to learn from Europe. Best of all, set a carbon tax, which is less susceptible to capture by business lobbies than a cap-and-trade system.”

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I thought The Economist preferred a cap-and-trade system. But, as they point out, the European system has been largely ineffective and is easier to game than a simple tax. Unfortunately for both them and the US, it’ll probably be a cold day in hell before an aggressive carbon tax gets real headway in Congress. Given that cap-in-trade was invented in the US, it has another thing in its favor.

p.23 I like the line, “ If Napoleon’s armies marched on their stomachs, American ones march on bandwidth.”

p.24 Wow:

“A single Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft flying over Afghanistan can eat up several times more satellite bandwidth than was used for the whole of the 1991 war against Iraq.”

The whole war!

p.41 Did I miss something? Apparently Obama’s admitted to doing cocaine. Bill Clinton, W, and now Obama (and I’m sure most of his fellow Presidential candidates): everyone’s ‘experimented’. It just goes to show that my friend smoking a joint while in Amsterdam and didn’t want their photo taken because of potential problems in the future has nothing to fear.

p. 71 According to research by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh, “Prostitutes [in Chicago] are more likely to have sex with a police officer than to be arrested by one.”

p.78 A mystery indeed:

“Who knew that … the rarely seen $2 bill still accounts for 1% of all American notes printed? (Where do they all go?)”

BLDGBLOG has a really nice interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. A lot of the interview talks about utopian ideas and how he’s continually tried to rehabilitate them in his writing. Some early examples, and not mentioned in the interview, are the books in his Wild Shore trilogy. I read and enjoyed Pacific Edge, and the other two, The Gold Coast and The Wild Shore, also look good. Speaking of KSR, Escape From Kathmandu is also quite good.