I recently mentioned that before Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, Jim Henson made short corporate films for IBM. This led Kent to think, “I hope they work them into a future season of Mad Men.”
How about working Mad Men into Sesame Street?
Mad Men
Monday, June 7th, 2010The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic
Monday, June 7th, 2010Felix Salmon calls Charles Komanoff the man who could unsnarl Manhattan traffic, because of his research into congestion pricing for New York’s centrual business district,the area south of 60th Street:
It turned out to be relatively straightforward to calculate a congestion charge that would pay for public transit; Komanoff arrived at a fee of $16 for every vehicle trip into the central business district. But he knew that he could come up with a model that was much more sophisticated. “I gave them what they were looking for,” Komanoff says. “And then I kept on asking myself more questions.”
So, after the report was released in January 2008, Komanoff requested more funding from Kheel to keep plugging away at the spreadsheet. One of the first tasks was to nail down those externalities. That meant figuring out exactly how much New Yorkers’ time was worth and how much of it they wasted in traffic. He started with a Brookings Institution estimate of the value of a US airline passenger’s time — about $53 an hour. Based on salary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Komanoff bumped that up by 20 percent for people in New York City. He wanted to use conservative estimates, so he assumed that a car driver’s commuting time was 25 percent less valuable than an airline passenger’s; if someone was driving for nonwork purposes, their time was 50 percent less valuable. He drew on survey data to peg a taxi passenger’s time at 90 percent of the average air passenger’s; additional passengers — perhaps children — would be worth much less. Eventually, after taking into account the mix of cars, trucks, taxis, and buses in traffic — as well as the number of people in each type of vehicle — Komanoff concluded that the average vehicle in the central business district has a time value of $53.39 per hour; outside the CBD that number falls to $34.44. (Komanoff based some assumptions on his own research, but the spreadsheet allows anyone to plug in their own estimates to see how they affect the results.)
The rest of his calculations are more complicated. To work out the total delay caused by each car, Komanoff turned to a formula devised by UC Irvine economist Ken Small: S = 24.2/[1 + 0.1(V/Vk)4.08], where S is traffic speed, V is number of vehicles, and Vk is a constant that changes from city to city (it was originally set at an arbitrary level of 1,000 for an area of Toronto in 1978). For S and V, Komanoff drew on the city’s estimates of average daytime traffic speeds (8 mph) and volume (870,301 vehicles) within the CBD. This let him calculate the value of Vk, which came out to be 97,105. He then used that value of Vk and his own estimates of traffic volume to come up with a new — and, by his lights, more accurate — value for S. He then ran the equation again to find the value of S when 1,000 cars were added. The difference, divided by 1,000, represented the impact of each individual car.
In the end, Komanoff found that every car entering the CBD causes an average of 3.23 person-hours of delays. Multiply that by $39.53 — a weighted average of vehicles’ time value within and outside the CBD — and it turns out that the average weekday vehicle journey costs other New Yorkers $128 in lost time. At last, urban planners could say just how big the externalities associated with driving are, knowing that the number was backed up with solid empirical analysis.
“The work Komanoff is doing will be essential,” says Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). “He’s showing the impact of traffic in easy-to-understand language, considering all transport options, and getting away from the idea that transportation happens in a vacuum.”
Kheel hoped that Komanoff’s work would support a plan to offer completely free public transit. But Komanoff found that the system would still be overloaded at rush hour. Drivers had to be encouraged to travel at different times of the day. So he devised a new plan, one that charged both drivers and transit riders different rates at different times. It would charge $3 to cars entering the CBD on weekday nights, $6 for most of the day, and $9 during rush hour. The subway fare also varies, but is always less than the $2.25 it is today: $1 at night, rising to $1.50 as day breaks, and peaking at $2 during weekday rush hours. Buses are always free, because the time saved when passengers aren’t fumbling for change more than makes up for the lost fare revenue. Komanoff’s plan also imposes a 33 percent surcharge on every taxi ride, 10 percent of which would go to the cab driver and the rest to the city.
Places and Non-Places
Monday, June 7th, 2010There are two kinds of square-footage in a city, Nathan Lewis says — Places and Non-Places:
Places are areas where things happen. This includes:
- Houses
- Offices
- Factories
- Warehouses
- Beaches
- Marinas
- Parks
- Museums
- Restaurants
- Shops
- Theaters
- Schools
- Hotels
- Sports fields
- Train stations
- Plazas/central squares
- Gardens/yards/courtyards
In short, if you “do something,” like work or sleep or go shopping or have a picnic or a party, it’s the place where you do it. A destination. The location where people interact. Places are universally pedestrian places. Nothing happens while people are in their cars. Cars are just the means to get from one Place to another Place.
Non-Places are areas of the city where nothing happens. This includes:
- Parking lots
- Useless greenery (not a park, but landscaping where nobody goes)
- Roadways and other transportation infrastructure
- Areas around buildings which are not “destinations,” and often have no real purpose
I think you understand exactly what I’m talking about. Notice that almost every area is easily categorized as one or the other. There aren’t many exceptions.
When more and more of a city consists of Places, then there’s “more there there,” as Gertrude Stein might say. When most of a city consists of Non-Places, then there’s “less there there,” until finally there is “no there there.”
One of the biggest and most destructive Non-Places in cities today is Green Space:
Note that it is always termed “green space.” It is not a park, or a backyard, or a sports field, or even a wholly natural area like a forest. If people were talking about parks, they would say: “we have plenty of parks.” But they don’t say that, they say: “we have plenty of Green Space.” Green Space is not a place where things happen. Do you ever say: “Let’s get the kids together and have a picnic in that grassy area between the northbound and southbound I-95.” No, that never happens. How about: “Let’s go play soccer in that grassy area by the Wal-Mart parking lot.” These are things that happen in parks and sports fields, which are traditional components of the Traditional City, not Green Space.
Green space is a new invention. What’s it for? Green Space was invented to make our other Non-Places less horrible. It basically doesn’t exist in the Traditional City.
One of the basic problems with Non-Place is that it’s contagious. When you start introducing Non-Places into a city design, you tend to add more and more Non-Places to try to fix the problems caused by the original Non-Places. If you have two Places next to each other, like an apartment building and a store, then you can easily walk from the apartment building to the store. If you put a big roadway in between, now you can no longer walk. You need a car. Now the apartment building needs a parking lot. Now the store needs a parking lot. Now the roadway needs to get bigger because of all the people driving from the apartment to the store. Now you need to surround the apartment building with grass (or better yet, a row of trees) to add a little buffer between the apartment building and the noisy roadway, because who wants to live next to a roaring highway? Then, you need to surround all the parking spaces with more grass and shrubbery, so that you aren’t left with acres of burning asphalt. Then, the apartment building and the store are now so far from each other that you decide you need a freeway system. Then, because you have to drive the on/off ramps at 50 miles per hour, they need to have an enormous radius, and then they need to be surrounded by more green space and probably a cinder block wall so that people can tolerate the endless noise of a major freeway. Then, your city fills up with gasoline stations, car dealers, mechanics, auto parts stores, and all the paraphernalia needed to maintain all this transportation infrastructure. It is quite possible that your portion of Space to Non-Space in the city will fall below 10%. Essentially, the only Spaces left will be building interiors and a few parks (minus their parking lots).
One of the things you’ll notice about the Traditional City is that there is often not a lot of greenery in them. This might be considered a genuine problem. I would be all for greenery in the Traditional City, in the form of parks (concentrated greenery) and also just bits of flowers and trees here and there. However, the Traditional City can still be just fine — in fact quite wonderful — without this greenery. How much greenery is in Siena, Italy?
Not only are there hardly any parks to speak of, but on street level, you would have to get out a magnifying glass to find even the slightest trace of vegetation.
I don’t think Siena is the best possible Traditional City. But, along with Florence, it is a place that people have been traveling to for about 200 years because of its reputation as an urban concrescence of beauty and culture. Obviously, it appeals to people. Out of all the millions of tourists over the years, how many have collapsed in a heap, writhing in agony because of the shortage of Green Space? Exactly none. The Traditional City doesn’t need Green Space. Apparently, not even a single blade of grass — although a few parks here and there should probably be considered an improvement.
Chinese South-Pointing Chariot
Sunday, June 6th, 2010
A 1/10 scale Chinese south-pointing chariot is for sale via Makers Market:
Do you know how a differential works? Would you believe that the Chinese invented one nearly three thousand years ago, and used it as a non-magnetic compass to keep track of north and south as they traveled?
The figure on top of this amazing machine maintains its orientation no matter which way the chariot is pulled, pushed, turned or even how fast. How it does this is via a clever application of gears and mathematical ratios that would have earned the awe and admiration of Pythagoras, Euclid and Aristotle themselves.
It took us exactly eight prototypes to get the gearing worked out properly — a fortuitous number, since eight is also the luckiest number in Chinese traditions.
This model is a 1/10 scale reproduction of the South Pointing Chariot. The completed kit stands 14 inches tall, 14 inches long and 7 inches wide. It contains over 37 precision cut hardwood pieces (not including the gear teeth), and when properly constructed, it really works!
Examples of the South Pointing Chariot can be found in fine museums all over the world, and now you can have your own museum quality model for your personal display of ancient technology.
It only works (perfectly) on flat land, as long as both wheels remain in contact with the ground.
A 13th-Century Castle Rises in Arkansas
Saturday, June 5th, 2010
An eccentric Frenchman, Michel Guyot, has decided to build a 13th-century castle in Arkansas:
For years, he renovated medieval ruins. In 1997, he set a grander course: He would build his own crenellated château in the Guédelon forest in Burgundy. To finance the project, he opened the site to tourists. It has been self-sustaining ever since.
The Guédelon castle, which is about halfway built, has drawn visitors from around the world, including Jean-Marc Miret, a French expatriate living in the Ozarks. He was so taken with the concept, he urged Mr. Guyot to build an American version on his estate in Boone County, Ark.
“We went on the Internet to check, where was this Arkansas?” says Noémi Brunet, Mr. Guyot’s wife and business partner. Her conclusion? “It was the middle of nowhere.”
It was also irresistible. Mr. Guyot and Ms. Brunet visited and fell in love with the remote county, best known for its annual crawdad festival. “It’s green and lovely, very authentic, very pure,” Ms. Brunet says.
Returning to France, Mr. Guyot raised $1.5 million from 14 investors—all friends of his—to buy a 50-acre parcel and begin construction.
He cheated at first, just a bit: Mechanized equipment was brought in to build a visitors’ center and a wheelchair-accessible walkway.
But when it comes to the castle itself, Mr. Guyot makes no concessions to modernity–except for those mandated by federal workplace requirements. Workers, though dressed in medieval garb, must wear steel-toed boots and safety goggles.
The stones are quarried at the site; the timber is cut from local trees; every nail and tile is made on premises. Knotted ropes are manipulated to measure angles. Two-ton boulders are hoisted by a foot-cranked crane that resembles a giant wooden hamster wheel.
The site manager has had trouble hiring a basket weaver, but there’s a blacksmith on site, a rope maker, a potter, even a flock of sheep to provide wool for castle tapestries.
Muscles straining as he hoists and splits 50-pound stones to set into the castle’s outer wall, mason Brad Fire Cloud says he dreams of power tools with shock-absorbent grips. “That crosses my mind all day long,” he says.
Six men quit during their first week on the job, including one before noon the first day. There’s no music on site. No cellphones allowed. No McDonald’s runs for lunch breaks. The floppy medieval hats look so goofy that mason Anthony McCutcheon says his wife “just about runs me off when I come home wearing it.”
Still, the two dozen laborers who stuck it out, for wages ranging from about $12 to $20 an hour, have discovered unexpected joys. The work is peaceful and challenging and, best of all, steady.
“Most jobs in masonry last three or four months. Out here, we got 20 years,” says Mr. Fire Cloud, who hides his Dr Pepper in a burlap bag to keep the ambience authentic. “That’s job security.”
To cover construction costs of about $1 million a year, the Ozark Medieval Fortress must draw 150,000 visitors annually — but so far tourism has been just over 1,000 visitors in a month:
But the tourist season doesn’t start in earnest until this weekend, and officials expect it will pick up. They’re marketing heavily in Branson, Mo., a country-music mecca less than an hour’s drive from the castle that attracts 7.5 million tourists a year.
I don’t see the obvious cross-over appeal between Branson and an authentic castle.
Get Zombie Fit
Friday, June 4th, 2010I’ve been watching parkour for years — and watching Jackie Chan’s proto-parkour before that — and I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to think, this would be excellent training for escaping a zombie horde.
A few Chicagoland traceurs decided to commercialize that fanciful idea and created ZombieFit. Then the local WGN news team covered their zombie workout:
Is the female reporter trying to make us hate her?
By the way, preparing for a zombocalypse is also a fun way to get prepared for a more mundane disaster.
Intellectuals and Capitalism: Honeymoon and Divorce
Friday, June 4th, 2010Arnold Kling cites Alan S. Kahan on the honeymoon and divorce between intellectuals and capitalism:
To put it baldly, since capitalism undermined aristocracy, it was a good thing from an intellectual’s point of view.
Kling continues:
Kahan’s history is that as long as aristocrats at birth were important, intellectuals as a class had something to gain by bringing down these aristocrats, and promoting capitalism did that. Once the birth aristocracy weakened and a strong business class emerged, anti-capitalism became the more natural ideology of the intellectual class. Remember the Masonomic view that politics is about relative group status. Intellectuals aspire to the status of the clergy and aristocracy in Kahan’s view. Klein raises the question of what accounts for those of us who claim to be intellectuals yet are pro-capitalist. Well, we’re outliers.
It’s not a new idea.
Able to Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound
Friday, June 4th, 2010
I recently mentioned the classic Fleischer Superman cartoons from the 1940s, which brings up an interesting bit of Superlore:
The Fleischer cartoons were also responsible for Superman being able to fly. When they started work on the series, Superman could only leap from place to place (hence “Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” in the opening). But they deemed it as “silly looking” after seeing it animated and decided to have him fly instead.
Now it’s Marvel’s Hulk who leaps tall buildings in a single bound.
Bacteria in the Sky
Friday, June 4th, 2010The accepted precipitation model is that soot and dust form the nuclei for raindrops and snowflakes, but bacteria may be seeding all those rain clouds:
Scientists have found these [Pseudomonas syringae] bacteria in abundance on the leaves of a wide range of wild and domestic plants, including trees and grasses, everywhere they have looked, including Montana, Morocco, France, the Yukon and in the long buried ice of Antarctica. The bacteria have been found in clouds and in streams and irrigation ditches. In one study of several mountaintops here, 70 percent of the snow crystals examined had formed around a bacterial nucleus.
Some of the bacteria promote freezing as a means of attacking plants. They make proteins that will trigger freezing at higher temperatures than usual and the resulting water ice damages the plant, giving the bacteria access to the nutrients they need.
This ability to promote freezing of water at higher-than-normal freezing temperatures has led Dr. Sands and other scientists to believe the bacteria are part of an unstudied system. After the bacteria infect plants and multiply, he says, they may be swept as aerosols into the sky, where it seems they prompt the formation of ice crystals (which melt as they fall to earth, causing rain) at higher temperatures than do dust or mineral particles that also function as the nuclei of ice crystals.
(Hat tip to Matt Ridley.)
Artificial Creativity
Friday, June 4th, 2010Composer David Cope has been writing software to help him compose music for 30 years, and his musically creative computer program’s latest album came out a few weeks ago:
The current version of Cope’s software is named “Emily Howell,” and it is the successor to an earlier effort he called “Emmy,” an almost-acronym for “Experiments in Musical Intelligence.” (Howell is Cope’s father’s first name and his middle name.) Ms. Howell’s ancestry dates back to 1980, when Cope — by then a successful human composer — hit a brick wall while trying to write an opera. Cope, a genuine polymath with an aptitude for computers, had been playing music his entire life and was respected among modern composers, but around his 40th birthday his ideas started to dry up. In desperation, he wrote a computer program to generate random melodies and musical ideas.
The results were predictably unlistenable. But his composer’s block persisted, so he kept working on the software. His first breakthrough came when he began to rethink how human beings compose. His software had been starting its work from scratch, but it occurred to Cope that human composers draw on a huge amount of data when they sit down to write a piece of music. “We don’t start with a blank slate,” he said. “In fact, what we do in our brains is take all the music we’ve heard in our life, segregate out what we don’t like, and try to replicate [the music we like] while making it our own.” What separates great composers from the rest of us, he says, is the ability to accurately compile that database, remember it, and manipulate it into new patterns.
Cope built a huge database of existing music, beginning with hundreds of Bach chorales that he tediously coded by hand. (Each note is given five values: pitch, duration, volume, when it appears in the piece, and which voice or instrument is making it.) The software then did essentially the same thing any complex computer model does: It scoured huge amounts of data by breaking them up into manageable chunks — in this case, short passages from the chorales — and looked for patterns. It then altered and recombined bits and pieces into new works that fit the patterns it had found. “It was an analytical problem more than a composing problem,” Cope said. Before long, the program could compose mediocre Bach-like works. It was a start.
Chorales were a natural place for a program to start because, like canons and fugues, they operate according to a set of musical rules governing harmony and structure. Unfortunately, Cope had not been commissioned to compose thousands of mediocre chorales — he had an opera to write. So next he set about analyzing more complex works that relied less on a prescribed structure. In addition to short phrases, the software now analyzed the structure of an entire piece; for instance, looking at how themes would repeat at different points. He expanded the database to include Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Barber, Copeland, and many others, including his own work.
By 1987, “Emmy” was sophisticated enough to help Cope finish his long overdue opera, “Cradle Falling.” It was a collaborative effort between Cope and his brainchild: The composer would listen to the computer’s musical ideas and incorporate the ones he liked into his piece. Working with Emmy, a project he had struggled with for seven years took only two weeks to finish. At the time, he didn’t tell anyone about the work’s genesis, and its debut in Richmond two years later garnered the best reviews of his career. The Richmond Times Dispatch described one passage as “a supreme dramatic moment, punctuated by the captivating beat of drums.”
As the program continued to improve, Cope began playing less and less of a role in the compositions Emmy was producing. Shortly after his opera debuted, he began publishing works under Emmy’s name. In 1992, she wrote 1,500 symphonies, 1,000 piano sonatas, and 1,000 string quartets, among other works, which Cope bundled under the modest title “5,000 Works.
Drainspotting
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Drainspotting is a new book about Japanese manhole covers. Seriously.
In Japan, modern sewer systems began to appearduring the late 19th century, though evidence of sewage systems in the country dates back to over 2,000 years ago. Foreign engineers introduced the Japanese to modern, underground sewer systems with above ground access points called manhoru (manholes). At that time, manhole covers utilized the geometric designs similar to those used in other countries. In the 1980s, as communities outside of Japan’s major cities were slated to receive new sewer systems these public works projects were met with resistance, until one dedicated bureaucrat solved the problem by devising a way to make these mostly invisible systems aesthetically appreciated aboveground: customized manhole covers.
(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)
Tesla’s Elon Musk is Out of Cash
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk says he has run out of cash. By coincidence, he’s going through a divorce:
“About four months ago, I ran out of cash,” he wrote in a court filing dated Feb. 23, reviewed by VentureBeat. That’s a problem not just for him but for Tesla, where he is the lead investor and chief product architect, as well as CEO. Musk’s willingness to funnel his own cash into Tesla has for years sustained the faith of fellow investors and reassured would-be car buyers in 2008 when the company’s finances were in perilous shape.
According to the filing — part of his pending divorce case from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk — Elon Musk has been living off personal loans from friends since October 2009 and spending $200,000 a month while making far less. Musk confirmed this in an interview with VentureBeat.
Tesla, likewise, is dealing with its cash flow problems by borrowing money from a friendly source — the United States government, which has eagerly backed cleantech startups through a Department of Energy loan program. Tesla burned through $37 million in cash in the last three months of 2009, according to amended S-1 documents, filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission in preparation for its IPO. Tesla slowed this burn rate in the first quarter of 2010 to $8.4 million, but only by drawing down part of a $465 million loan from the DOE, while reporting a net loss of $29.5 million. Tesla’s sales were flat year-over-year in the first quarter, but declined precipitously in the U.S., according to a former Tesla executive.
Now, Toyota has agreed to buy $50 million in shares at the time of Tesla’s initial public offering — if it manages to go public before Dec. 31. But for now, the company doesn’t have access to that promised cash, and must pay $42 million to buy the NUMMI plant in Fremont, Calif., from a Toyota-General Motors joint venture.
Musk had a lot of money not too long ago:
And throughout Tesla’s history, Musk has used his entrepreneurial legend — Zip2, sold for $305 million to Compaq; PayPal, sold to eBay for $1.5 billion — to bolster his credibility as a technology executive. Musk’s personal take from Zip2 was a reported $22 million, much of which he invested in his next startup, PayPal, netting $160 million when eBay bought the online-payments startup. According to filings in his divorce trial, he had roughly $48 million in income from his investments between 2005 and 2008. But he sunk much of that money back into Tesla, as well as his other enterprises, the space-exploration concern SpaceX and solar panel finance startup SolarCity.
His finances were not always so strained. In other documents filed in the divorce case, Musk reportedly made $9,551,753 in 2008 and an average of $17.2 million a year from 2005 to 2008. As of Dec. 31, 2008, he also had extensive holdings in venture capital and private equity partnerships, ranging from Softbank Technology Ventures to Charles River Ventures to Clarium Capital. These partnerships, however, tend to be highly illiquid investments: It can take months to get out of them because you have to find a sophisticated buyer willing to bear the risks of a private sale.
As he ran low on cash, a contentious divorce — in which his ex-wife, Justine Musk, is seeking a sizable chunk of Musk’s holdings — caused him more financial problems. Justine Musk is asking a court to rip up a post-nuptial agreement she and Elon Musk signed in March 2000, which could in theory lead to much of his holdings being deemed community property. While there’s no telling how the case will turn out — it has already gone to appeal — more important is the protective order the court has slapped on Musk’s holdings in Tesla and his other illiquid assets. These include his stakes in private equity funds. He won’t be able to sell significant holdings without first getting permission from his ex-wife. And he has also been ordered by a court to continue paying her legal fees for the duration of the lengthy appeal process.
Guatemala City Sinkhole
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010I did not realize the enormity of the Guatemala City sinkhole:
I can’t help but expect Mole Man and his Moloids — or maybe the Underminer — to appear.
It doesn’t even require outright bribery
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010How Department of Defense corruption really works:
The US Department of Defense (hereafter DOD) has put in place a ton of procedural protections to stave off corruption. And God knows they need protection: only in the DOD can you find a 20-something purchasing officer who knows nothing about the stuff he’s buying, who makes around $30k per year, and who is in charge of a half-billion-dollar budget.
For starters, low-paid people with large purchasing budgets are the easiest to corrupt outright. Find someone makes $30,000 per year but who has a $10m budget, and you have struck gold: it doesn’t even require outright bribery.
Just show up at their office and mention that you might have some product for them to take a look at. “Can you spare some time this weekend? I have tickets to the playoffs if you’re free. Whoa!? You’re a fisherman? Let’s forget about business: why not have the family come by the beach house? I just got a new boat and the stripers are running. We’ll talk business later.”
Take a guy living in a military-base trailer out fishing on a yacht or to courtside seats, take him on a golf weekend, or to front-row seats at an A-list concert, hell, even just take him and his lady to a swank restaurant, and you’ve made a new best friend. And if he happens to be in charge of a $10m budget, that lavish night might be about to pay for itself 100,000 times over.
And all that assumes that you did not actually have a stripper with a cell-phone camera waiting in the car after the concert. We haven’t even talked about blackmail, so why bring it up? Especially considering that these days, you don’t even have to blackmail someone to blackmail them. Just linking your pics to their facebook, or setting up a “my party with Joe Blow” web page can ruin their life without malice or legal consequence. We’re just posting our own party pics!
LEGO Felt-Tip 110 Printer
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010The LEGO Felt-Tip 110 Printer was designed, built, and coded from scratch — including the analog-motor electronics, sensors and printer driver; the USB interface uses a “wiring” board: