Love this map

(double click for full view)

The weather was beautiful today and I spent almost the whole day finishing off the end of fall clean-up in the garden. In front, I finished potting the two junipers I put in wooden barrels next to a big planter box stuffed with daffodils and hyacinths. I pulled out the sweet potato vines and put in tulips. In back I cut down the morning glory vine after collecting a bowl of seeds, and swept all the leaves and compost off the porch and stairs.

That's when I took this picture: the woodland tobacco flower (nicotiana) is still huge, fragrant and glorious, and some other flowers and perennials are enjoying this last breath of warm weather...

I finished working in the bed last weekend - I moved some of the perennial flowers - echinacea/coneflower, Japanese anemone, and toad lily - to sunnier spots, and put in a few more hostas.

In a related development, reports on the City of Paris' ambitious Velib bike-sharing program are mixed. "80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles [have been] stolen or damaged," which are worth, "when the system’s startup and maintenance expenses are included, $3,500 each."

I have to find a research study for a school assignment in which the investigators actively manipulated an independent variable. I was browsing for journal articles in the areas of crime and public safety, when I remembered this article from the Journal Science that I noticed with great interest around the time it was published: Testing The Broken Windows Theory

I like this:

"The Assumption of Inconvenience" from Streetsblog

public safety, meets transportation planning, meets livable streets: http://www.saferoutesinfo.org/

"And the Pursuit of Hapiness"

I've noticed two NYT blogs lately: A post entitled "The Referendum" and "In the Pursuit Of Hapiness" an illustrated blog on American democracy (thanks to Jeff Miller for recommending the latter).

Sunday Op-Art, in the Times: Navigating the City by Smell

interesting...

link

Double-click to view image

Three Keys to Happiness

What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Schenk in the Atlantic Monthly.

For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.

The conclusions are summarized here:

1. Have a healthy outlet
2. Don't take yourself too seriously
3. Happiness must be shared

“Happiness only real when shared.”

First image of a memory being made...

Link

These are the offices of city council candidate Evan Thies. According to an article in the Greenpoint Gazette, the saloon-like offices of the John Smolenski Democratic Club are being used by Evan as his campaign headquarters. The young new president of the nearly defunct old-line club hopes that Evan will revitalize the club and voter participation in North Brooklyn in general, where turnout has been low in recent elections. The snake-like 33rd council district stretches from Greenpoint, through Williamsburg, Dumbo, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, and Gowanus, ending in north Park Slope.

For the record, this blog endorses Evan Thies for the 33rd District and Brad Lander for the 39th. (Of course, observers in the political world have been on the edge or their seats waiting to see who would gain our influential backing.)

Way to go Danny! I'm glad someone else is having fun cultivating a garden in a semi-wild backyard. I thought this photo he took recently was particularly good...

On 161st Street, in search of Sonia Sotomayor...

A Bronx Tale: In Search of Sonia Sotomayor from weekendvids on Vimeo.

Visualizing......

From the New York Times (article here): "A team of American Navy searchers is being flown in along with two devices that can detect electronic signals to a depth of 20,000 feet, according to the Pentagon, The Associated Press reported. They will be delivered to ships that will then listen for transmissions from the so-called black boxes, which are programmed to emit signals for at least three more weeks. . . .

The ocean floor where the debris is being recovered is a tangle of mountains towering two miles above ocean valleys, which will make the recovery of the flight recorders — or black boxes — very difficult. The recovery, however, is paramount for investigators, as without them, said James T. Francis, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, the Air France case will be “a tough, tough cookie.”

I found this graphic to help me visualize the ocean floor in the middle of the ocean between Brazil and Africa (click for full view). It also reminds me of old fashioned maps in high school classrooms.

I just found out about this, and it looks awesome: Urban Omnibus, a project of the Architectural League of New York.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Make sure "HD" is on.

What Now?

Everywhere you look around Brooklyn, there are condos and highrises under construction. Some of the ones that are finished are being marketed to renters instead of buyers. But, I suspect many of these buildings may be left half-built, the dreams of housing developers never realized. Can these stacked concrete slabs be put to creative use? Here's one case study: "Second Life: Locals look to nab foreclosed condos for affordable housing."

The Potomac's Keeper

The Potomac River valley north of Georgetown is surprisingly wild - I spent a lot of time wandering around there and exploring when I was a kid, and still do sometimes even now that I'm a grown up.

Here's an article from yesterday's Washington Post about one of Washington's true characters, in this case, Paula Smith, a bit of a "strange bird" who's made wandering this urban wilderness her whole life and maybe knows more about what goes on in this unusual urban wilderness better than anyone else:

Washington Post Article

Incidentally, Ms. Smith is concerned about an increase of illegal deer hunting ("poaching") on National Park Service land. A sign of the economic times?

From NYT: Parks Fortify Israel's Claim to Jerusalem

Waterlines. This interactive website shows how Seattle's landscape has changed over time....

Stress Tests....?

It's been reported that the large banks received the results of their stress tests on Friday, and the results will be publicly announced at the end of this week. So far, this exercise, hopefully an important step in some kind of comprehensive reckoning seems like the brightest spot in the otherwise mostly ad hoc, deal-by-deal, approach taken by the Obama administration.

I thought this analysis of our financial crisis was very insightful:

The Quiet Coup, by Simon Johnson (Atlantic Monthly, May 2009).

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

US/Mexico

Apparently Barack Obama is making his first trip as president to Mexico (Hillary Clinton and Janet Napalitaliano have already visited). It seems like there are a few big policy questions of mutual interest.

1. Interdiction of illegal firearms flowing from the US into Mexico for use in the ongoing drug war raging there.

2. Reducing the demand for illegal drugs in the United States

3. Reducing poverty in Mexico

If Barack Obama wanted to propose serious programs on each of these issues, I wonder what he would propose. Especially on numbers two and three, I wonder if good public policy could deliver a lot more results than we're currently getting from our "war on drugs".

Tax Day

I made my yearly trip to the big post office on 34th Street to postmark my modest little 1040 and New York income taxes a few hours before the April 15th deadline.

You can view the Obama's tax returns here and the Biden's here.

The Colorado Gardening Project: blog

Slow Gardening

I enjoyed this article on "slow gardening" in the Times. It reported on a movement or style of gardening that focuses on perennials, serendipity, outsider art, re-purposing, informality, and a certain sort of "wabi-sabi" aesthetic.

I think this approach is very much a kindred what I see in a lot of the gardens of Brooklyn. I've always thought someone should really write a great field guide to the gardens of Brooklyn....!

hmmm

map new york city crime trends?

link

Neighborhood Financial Services Study: An Analysis of Supply and Demand in Two New York City Neighborhoods. From the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs Office of Financial Empowerment.

Barack Obama ReMixed

I listened to this on WAMU in Washington before the inaugration - I found it on the internet, let's see if this link works:

windows media player

realplayer

"Invincible Cities"

images of harlem, richmond, CA, and Camden...... over the years here.

interesting blog

link

academic history of New York housing

interesting - link

A great encyclopedia of New York's Places, from Place Matters, a project of City Lore and the Municipal Arts Society.

NYT's article on the local paper crime blotter

Guerilla Gardening........

Principles of "Engaged Ecology"

1) We have the right to fresh air, clean water and healthy soil.

2. A government that cannot provide them loses legitimacy.

3) The earth is in crisis.

4) Cities are not the problem, the're the solution.

5) Cities are alive and should be treated that way.

6) Biodiversity is the best measure of a healthy place.

7) Humans have evolved to live in harmony with nature.

8) The public creates the best public spaces.

9) People will care for a place they plant themselves.

10) Engaged ecology creates a community.


To survive in prison, one must develop ways to take satisfaction in one's daily life. . . I saw the garden as a metaphor for a certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden: he, too, plants seeds and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the results. -Nelson Mandela


The experience of being in a place where the forces are resolved together at once is completely restufl and whole. It is like sitting under an oak tree: things in nature reolve all the forces acting on them together; they are, in that sense, whole and balanced.
-Christopher Alexander



From Guerilla Gardening, A Manualfesto, by David Tracey.

Don't Divorce Us

Ever since Election Night, I get choked up really easily. This video totally made me cry. As my sister Hannah said to me in an e-mail, "When there's so much pain in the world, why are people trying so hard to destroy happiness?"


"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

good song...

The water systems of New York....link

Orwell

I read a reference to Orwell's famous essay on politics and the English language, which made me want to go read it. I found a copy here. In fact this site contains searchable versions of all of Orwell's works. Homage to Catalonia is one of my favorite books.

Martha's Table

Wondering about opportunities to volunteer on MLK day, which made me think of Martha's Table. I worked there many times while growing up in Washington DC.

The Writing is On The Wall

This is the most revealing map that I've seen in a while - when the New York Times produced this map, they put it on the front page and I wish there was a way of linking directly to it. Go here, then select "Voting Shifts" in the left hand side bar. The red areas are the only areas of Republican strength in 2008. Party leaders know they've painted themselves into a corner - they are at risk of being limited to no longer national party of southern, white, rural resentment.

Greening Cities Can Help Reduce Crime and Poverty

"...scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control.

...human attention is a scarce resource -- focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon...

...[researchers] measured the two groups on a variety of tasks, from basic tests of attention to surveys that looked at how the women were handling major life challenges. She found that living in an apartment with a view of greenery led to significant improvements in every category.

...Related research has demonstrated that increased "cognitive load" -- like the mental demands of being in a city -- makes people more likely to choose chocolate cake instead of fruit salad, or indulge in a unhealthy snack. This is the one-two punch of city life: It subverts our ability to resist temptation even as it surrounds us with it, from fast-food outlets to fancy clothing stores. The end result is too many calories and too much credit card debt.

...City life can also lead to loss of emotional control. [Researchers] found less domestic violence in the apartments with views of greenery. These data build on earlier work that demonstrated how aspects of the urban environment, such as crowding and unpredictable noise, can also lead to increased levels of aggression. A tired brain, run down by the stimuli of city life, is more likely to lose its temper.

... [A] recent paper demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

...When a park is properly designed, it can improve the function of the brain within minutes. As the [one] study demonstrates, just looking at a natural scene can lead to higher scores on tests of attention and memory.

[Other] research ... used a set of complex mathematical algorithms to demonstrate that the very same urban features that trigger lapses in attention and memory -- the crowded streets, the crushing density of people -- also correlate with measures of innovation, as strangers interact with one another in unpredictable ways. It is the "concentration of social interactions" that is largely responsible for urban creativity, according to the scientists. The density of 18th-century London may have triggered outbreaks of disease, but it also led to intellectual breakthroughs, just as the density of Cambridge -- one of the densest cities in America -- contributes to its success as a creative center. One corollary of this research is that less dense urban areas, like Phoenix, may, over time, generate less innovation. The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits.

From an article in the Boston Globe. Click here to view the article.

I decided to try to find some of "the classics"

The Art of Sabrage

I think we have to try "sabering" a champagne bottle soon. Here's a video with instructions on how to safely open a champagne bottle with a sword (or machete, or even the dull side of a chef's knife) at home. Of course we'll need something to celebrate.

Roller Derby

New York City is playing the best roller derby in the country: our Gotham Girls are the 2008 national champions.

"The 2009 schedule is To Be Determined, but will likely kick off in April and run through November with another exciting season of battle between the Mayhem, Bombshells, Gridlock and Pain."

rose bushes

Most rose pruning is done in the spring, with the blooming of the forsythia as a signal to get moving...

Pruning rose bushes: link