"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.