Category Archives: Link

No. 1 at No. 2

Screenshot 2014-03-07 21.24.55Travis Rix is a student at the School of Visual Arts, about to graduate.

In his travels he happened upon the idea of including portapotties in his pictures.

The results are uneven, the aesthetic varies in the samples, but the effect is mostly appealing. I’m not sure about the importance of the rationale that the pottie precedes development, though in many cases that’s true.

For me the pictures are a cross between Where’s Waldo and deep thinking. My deepest thought? Before these things were all over the place, where did we “go?”

The Behold blog featured his pictures on Slate.

Yelp! Top 100 Restaurants in the USA

Cutting tuna in Da Poke Shop.
Cutting tuna in Da Poke Shop.
Yelp.com just published a list of the Top 100 restaurants in the US, and the winner is a small take out stand on Hawaii’s big island, which serves piles of raw fish on greens, which if I read it right is called poke.

Now, that’s cool, and the list is an impressive mélange of expensive and much less expensive tastes. For instance, New York’s top restaurant is a vegan food truck called the Cinnamon Snail. Second is the gastronomic playground known as 11 Madison Park. On the whole list I’ve eaten at one restaurant, the Gramercy Tavern, which is one of my favorite restaurants in the city. Well selected, I’d say, but we don’t get out much.

So maybe my lack of familiarity is my fault, but in scanning down the list there are a rather large number from our most populous state, California, which made me wonder if their food is so much superior or if the way Yelp weighted their star ratings (by the number of votes) favored more populous areas.

State By State ranking of the top restaurants in the Yelp 100:

California 48
Hawaii 10
New York 9
Texas 7
Washington 4
Illinois 3
Missouri 3

Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Oregon and Tennessee has two apiece.

I like the list, whenever I get back to Cali maybe it will lead us to some hidden gems, but I have my doubts that the algorithm Yelp used is to be fully trusted.

Some Ukraine Illumination

Reading stories about the bloody riots in Ukraine, it was difficult to know what was really going on. Who was protesting and why? The answers and explanations were often contradictory, once you got past the obvious issues with the government.

This VICE documentary does a pretty good job of showing the diversity of ideology among the participants in the Kiev protests, represented by different groups fighting the current government.

Prime movers are the nationalist Right Sector, right wingers, but there is also a serious progressive element to the protests, as well as a more mainstream group. For now, at least, the different sides are joined by their mutual hatred for the present government and fear of Russian annexation.

The bottom line is that the people of Ukraine are standing up to the government and its special police (the regular police are refusing to act against the protestors) in decisive and dramatic terms, even though they themselves don’t agree about what comes next.

Time Zone Slippage Illustrated

Stefano Maggiolo explains a number of the issues involved with local time, solar time and standard clock time in The Poor Man’s Math Blog, and he created this map that highlights the areas where standard time leads solar time (green) and where it lags (red).

SolarTimeVsStandardTimeUntil mechanical clocks and faster transportation became more common in the early 19th Century, local time based around noon, when the Sun was at its highest point in the sky, was all that mattered. (click map for larger image.)

For reasons Maggiolo explains, local noon varies based on latitude and time of year. Once instantaneous communication connected localities, via telegraph at first, and soon after railway schedules, a standardized time was increasingly important. Maggiolo goes into this in brief but interesting detail.

Looking at the map, I wonder why there is so much dark red near the poles (having the sun come up later makes less difference when winter is nearly all dark and summer is nearly all light) and in China (officially, it turns out, China has only one time zone across its vast expanse).

I’ve almost always lived near the center of time zones, but have noticed that the texture of life changes when the sun comes up earlier or later. Despite our efforts to tame time, its inexorable rhythms shape our experience in often unconscious ways.

This map helps visualize at least one of those.

 

 

The Oldest Subway Tunnel in the World

Screenshot 2014-02-06 10.52.29One day a few years ago I was walking along Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and there was a makeshift cordon of orange safety cones in the middle of the street, an open manhole cover inside the cordon, and a ladder sticking out of the manhole. There was also, at this busy intersection outside of Trader Joe’s, a line of mostly young people waiting to be escorted through traffic to the ladder, upon which they would descend into the subterranean… what?

Some of the people waiting told us there was an old forgotten subway tunnel at the bottom of the ladder and they were signed up for a tour of it. $15 they told us the tour cost, and while that seemed like a lot of money to see a hole, that hole looked awfully intriguing.

I didn’t hear much about the forgotten subway after that, I guess because—as this story in The Verge says—the city revoked the tour operator’s license to offer them. The history of the tunnel, its discovery by an intrepid young man, and the ways it defined and changed his life, makes for good reading.

The intrigue continues.

What Do I Desire?

watts-wisdomofinsecuritycoverAlan Watts was the Joyous Cosmologist, as the title of a book he wrote claimed. He was a major philosophical figure in the 50s and 60s, the writer of many books, and a popularizer of Asian religions and philosophies.

Here he gives a Ted Talk that long predates Ted, and gets to one of the key questions about life. He does it artfully, uses the word retch in a memorable phrase, and you can listen here.

Health Care in France: Not perfect, but. . . .

A first person account of the expensive French health-care system, which seems to work exactly the way Medicare works, only better because it is bigger.

The key points:

  • Everyone gets basic care as part of the package they pay for with taxes.
    Above a certain level of coverage, people pay for extra insurance to suit their situations.
    Employers sometimes provide this secondary level of coverage.
    Care is rationed so the system can sustain itself, but care is privileged according to urgency of need.
    Care is designed to more efficiently and effective use facilities, lowering cost.
    Patients must be told the cost, in advance, of all procedures that cost more than 70 euros.
    All costs are transparent.
    The French spend a lot of their GDP on caring for the society, including health care.
  • This seems so much smarter than allowing insurance companies into the part of a process in which we all implicitly share the risk. That is, the overall health costs from cradle to grave of everyone is known. We don’t know how the costs will be distributed to each family and each individual, but we know the total, which is why we spread the risk. The collective cost of the total, or rather our slice of it, should be our individual cost.

    Insurance companies know this. But they provide a service that adds little to no value to the process, and increases the cost. They make a profit, which is an additional tax we pay, and for what?

    How do we know that they increase costs without adding value? Medicare delivers similar services and costs much less.

    I’m sure that things aren’t always perfect in the French health-care system, bring your own towels, but doesn’t it make sense to craft a system that carves out wasteful players and improves our understanding of our individual health needs can be addressed with quality and at the lowest cost?