1. "There are two long runs I have to do from Elmhurst next time I'm there, because even though they go through similar areas seeing all the places I want to would probably make it close to 20 miles." And then I realized that one of them, the new eastern end of the Prairie Path at the Forest Park L terminal, isn't that much farther from my apartment than from my parents' house. About 7.5 miles from their house (according to mapmyrun.com), and probably just short of 9 from mine according to the street grid. One of the things I love about running and biking is that it fills in the gaps in my mind between places I know. And a lot of parts of the near-west suburbs and the west side of Chicago have yet to be really filled in (I've only biked west out of the city by three different roads: Washington, Lake, and 26th). I think I should do a Forest Park run from both sides.
2. But as much as I like doing this, I never would without having good maps and satellite images of... pretty much everywhere. I did set out in search of Heart of Chicago without a great idea of where it was, but that's practically in my back yard. I'm too risk averse to just set out west and hope. I live on Google Maps. It feels like cheating.
3. Wikipedia's description of the proof that the Cantor Set is uncountable is ridiculously intuitive. I think I've lost pretty much forgotten all my math terminology since I finished up with math classes pretty early in college, and I never even studied numerical topology. That is, I shouldn't have any advantages in understanding this over any of you guys. And not only do I understand that, but I have a better understanding of what numerical topology is, and what countability is, just from reading that one section. Kudos to whomever wrote it!
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
List of the Day
Systems of street-naming in Chicagoland that I know of.
- East-west streets
- Chicago grid-aligned numbered Streets and Places: Existing throughout the city and the suburbs south of Madison, the Streets align with grid addresses (i.e. 63rd St. is at 6300 S), and the Places are 50 address numbers, or about 110 yards, south (i.e. 21st Place, where I live, at 2150 S). Usually they're 8 to a mile, except, corresponding to the grid's distortion south of Madison, 12 in the first mile (Madison to Roosevelt), 10 in the second (Roosevelt to Cermak), and 9 in the third (Cermak to 31st).
- Presidential streets: Proceeding south in chronological order (though not including all presidents) between Washington Street and Roosevelt Road. Many of these extend quite far into the suburbs.
- Numbered streets in Elmhurst: First through third, proceeding north of the train tracks.
- North-south streets
- Chicago grid-aligned numbered Avenues and Courts: These never to my knowledge appear within the city, but seem to appear closest to the city in Cicero and Berwyn (hence the 54th/Cermak L terminal). Avenues run on even-hundred blocks, Courts 50 numbers to the west. They come up also in Orland Park, and maybe other places in the south-west suburbs, up to at least 252nd. Always 8 to a mile.
- Alphabetized street names by mile west of the Indiana border: the idea was that streets in the first mile would start with 'A', the second mile with 'B' and so on. The idea came a little late to the game, though. Almost all north-south streets between Pulaski Rd. and Cicero Ave. in most places are 'K' streets, and many 'L' streets exist between Cicero and Central Ave. Up by Irving Park Road you see 'N's to Harlem, 'O's to Pacific, then 'P's until the grid comes to an abrupt halt. Plus the next bullet point, which is sort-of cheating. These are approximately by mile, because they're fixed to even miles on the grid, which doesn't hit the border on an even mile.
- Lettered Avenues east of the Indiana border: on the East Side, Avenue A along the border through Avenue O. Just over 16 to a mile.
- Numbered avenues in the west suburbs: extending west from 1st Ave. in Maywood, they seem to end at 25th if you're near the Ike or on Washington. But if you're farther north, on Lake or St. Charles, you see more, all the way up to 53rd just east of Wolf Road. There's even at least one Court just off of Lake.
- Numbered avenues in La Grange. These go from 6th to 10th extending east from La Grange Road. I don't know if there are 1st through 5th Aves. But, as there aren't, to my knowledge, 1st though 48th Avenues on the Chicago grid, this isn't really very troubling.
I'm sure there are more, but these are all the ones I know of, and including Elmhurst and La Grange ones is... kind of ridiculous anyway. Good night everyone!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
It's a blog, I don't have to be organized
1. My train home yesterday was the Holiday Train! Photo by Flickr user Yuan2003, available under this Creative Commons license.
2. Google maps no longer gives you directions from Boston to Paris telling you to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. For shame, Great Google, for shame.
3. I'm reading a book called Vas: an Opera in Flatland. It's unusual. I like it.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Humanity: for Lose and Fail
Zombies, nothing. Shoppers broke down the door of a suburban New York Wal-Mart as it opened early this morning and trampled and killed a worker there.
First thought: I ran cross-country in my schoolin' years, and from time to time people get knocked over at the start of races. It happened to me once in 7th grade, and it happened to Jim Mullaney at the State Meet his senior year. I've never heard of anyone being seriously injured in such a case. These shoppers must have been rabid.
That isn't to say the situations were equivalent. Cross races don't have 2000 runners, and the courses are designed to gradually funnel the wide stream of runners to a narrow one before the first turn. If the shoppers were pushing with enough force to break down the door the people at the front of the crowd probably had little choice but to keep going forward. And the ones at the back applying that pressure obviously didn't have any idea what was going on at the front.
But they broke down the door. There isn't an
First thought: I ran cross-country in my schoolin' years, and from time to time people get knocked over at the start of races. It happened to me once in 7th grade, and it happened to Jim Mullaney at the State Meet his senior year. I've never heard of anyone being seriously injured in such a case. These shoppers must have been rabid.
That isn't to say the situations were equivalent. Cross races don't have 2000 runners, and the courses are designed to gradually funnel the wide stream of runners to a narrow one before the first turn. If the shoppers were pushing with enough force to break down the door the people at the front of the crowd probably had little choice but to keep going forward. And the ones at the back applying that pressure obviously didn't have any idea what was going on at the front.
But they broke down the door. There isn't an
em tag em-y enough for that. And then how they reacted afterwards. You'd think that someone dying as a result of the crowd's insane greed would make people step back and get some perspective. Guess not.
Monday, November 24, 2008
from the Shoulders of Giants...
Not much that's long or coherent to say about this, but... I go between some very, very different worlds all the time. The only way I can keep on top and make sense of all of it is to assume as little as I can. Don't get caught up in the orthodoxy.
One thing to take away from Joel Garreau about "edge cities" is that they're new both in construction and conception. For one thing, the individual built elements are fairly new. One consequence of this is that the wheat hasn't been separated from the chaff; these places may gain a history. Another is that the constructions, at every level, haven't had many opportunities yet for repair. Here I'm talking about Christopher Alexander's Timeless Way... There hasn't been as much time for buildings to be built to provide something observed to be missing in the neighborhood as there have been in older communities. This scales up to how neighborhoods are built and changed to improve the cities and regions they belong to, and down to the same idea for parts of buildings.
The second thing is probably more interesting, the new conception. We don't know how to think about suburban life. If we're going to separate wheat from chaff, we have to be able to identify each. We don't know as many ways to think about suburbs as we do about cities. And often we don't think at all. We build, we make things work, then maybe some people think occasionally. I think we should think more. It might help.
Glenbard East High School has a terribly ugly auditorium. I doubt anyone reading this has been there, so you'll have to trust me. I sat just about in the middle. The front wall is way too big for the stage, leaving a blank white wall stretching on each side. On the wall above the stage a cluster of dark loudspeakers is mounted, looking like a bow on top of a package. Along the side walls are some big circular decorative lights that seem off for a reason I can't identify (any architects reading?). The room is very wide (which is why it has such a large front wall), has no balcony, and the outer seating sections aren't angled in towards the stage. The overall feeling is of something that's been stretched.
The Village President had to mention the names of the people that worked to bring the Elmhurst Symphony to town to "bring some culture to Lombard", and the offices they held at various points in the process. We, the audience, applauded ourselves a few times. At one point during the performance we were given a play-by-play of the middle of A Midsummer Night's Dream by an over-amplified TV announcer. Can we pretend that was high postmodernism? Anyway, my dad can't sit still for very long without getting nerve pains in his hips. And he doesn't like Shakespeare.
Yeah, my dad doesn't like Shakespeare, especially watching it cold (as we were, because we weren't expecting them to put on a play in the middle of the concert). He can't make sense of the dialog as it flies by in a language with many of the same words as the one we speak, but used in different combinations. I think I do a little better than he does, but I understand where he's coming from. I think it's for him like watching a play in Spanish would be for me. My dad is a lawyer.
One thing to take away from Joel Garreau about "edge cities" is that they're new both in construction and conception. For one thing, the individual built elements are fairly new. One consequence of this is that the wheat hasn't been separated from the chaff; these places may gain a history. Another is that the constructions, at every level, haven't had many opportunities yet for repair. Here I'm talking about Christopher Alexander's Timeless Way... There hasn't been as much time for buildings to be built to provide something observed to be missing in the neighborhood as there have been in older communities. This scales up to how neighborhoods are built and changed to improve the cities and regions they belong to, and down to the same idea for parts of buildings.
The second thing is probably more interesting, the new conception. We don't know how to think about suburban life. If we're going to separate wheat from chaff, we have to be able to identify each. We don't know as many ways to think about suburbs as we do about cities. And often we don't think at all. We build, we make things work, then maybe some people think occasionally. I think we should think more. It might help.
Glenbard East High School has a terribly ugly auditorium. I doubt anyone reading this has been there, so you'll have to trust me. I sat just about in the middle. The front wall is way too big for the stage, leaving a blank white wall stretching on each side. On the wall above the stage a cluster of dark loudspeakers is mounted, looking like a bow on top of a package. Along the side walls are some big circular decorative lights that seem off for a reason I can't identify (any architects reading?). The room is very wide (which is why it has such a large front wall), has no balcony, and the outer seating sections aren't angled in towards the stage. The overall feeling is of something that's been stretched.
The Village President had to mention the names of the people that worked to bring the Elmhurst Symphony to town to "bring some culture to Lombard", and the offices they held at various points in the process. We, the audience, applauded ourselves a few times. At one point during the performance we were given a play-by-play of the middle of A Midsummer Night's Dream by an over-amplified TV announcer. Can we pretend that was high postmodernism? Anyway, my dad can't sit still for very long without getting nerve pains in his hips. And he doesn't like Shakespeare.
Yeah, my dad doesn't like Shakespeare, especially watching it cold (as we were, because we weren't expecting them to put on a play in the middle of the concert). He can't make sense of the dialog as it flies by in a language with many of the same words as the one we speak, but used in different combinations. I think I do a little better than he does, but I understand where he's coming from. I think it's for him like watching a play in Spanish would be for me. My dad is a lawyer.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Riot?
“Riot?”, asks Sudhir Venkatesh.
He lists a lot of reasons he thinks there haven't been riots or even protests surrounding financial institutions, responding to the generally irresponsible practices leading to a financial meltdown and massive taxpayer-funded bailout. He cites anger from pundits on the radio and on blogs, but no popular uprising.
I'll submit another reason: introspection. We all fucked up. Sure, government failed to regulate, and investment houses took bad risks. And there was out-and-out fraud on all sides of the sub-prime market. But people, too, took out lots of risky mortgages on houses they couldn't afford when they should have known that housing prices were in a bubble. It wasn't like it was a secret that we were in a housing bubble. I'm no economist, but I listened to the news when I lived in California and heard all about housing prices staying high as the bottom fell out of the pre-fab market. It seemed like pretty conventional wisdom to me that that was a harbinger of the bubble's collapse, but people kept buying houses at ridiculous prices. I worked with one. Everyone at the lunch table told him to wait for the bubble to burst (including a guy who'd been studying the market for years). He had all kinds of advice telling him to wait and to act rationally and he ignored it.
I bet a lot of the angry voices are people with an agenda to push. Certainly not everyone whose house has been foreclosed borrowed irresponsibly, but I think among many of them there's more introspection than anger. What is the American dream that I was chasing? What is the foundation of my personal finance, and of our economy as a whole? It gives us pause.
OK, I have yet another reason: the suburbs. Suburbs and exurbs have been hit hardest in the financial crisis, and it's hard to organize in the suburbs. This is because they're not dense and emphasize private spaces over public ones in every aspect of life.
He lists a lot of reasons he thinks there haven't been riots or even protests surrounding financial institutions, responding to the generally irresponsible practices leading to a financial meltdown and massive taxpayer-funded bailout. He cites anger from pundits on the radio and on blogs, but no popular uprising.
I'll submit another reason: introspection. We all fucked up. Sure, government failed to regulate, and investment houses took bad risks. And there was out-and-out fraud on all sides of the sub-prime market. But people, too, took out lots of risky mortgages on houses they couldn't afford when they should have known that housing prices were in a bubble. It wasn't like it was a secret that we were in a housing bubble. I'm no economist, but I listened to the news when I lived in California and heard all about housing prices staying high as the bottom fell out of the pre-fab market. It seemed like pretty conventional wisdom to me that that was a harbinger of the bubble's collapse, but people kept buying houses at ridiculous prices. I worked with one. Everyone at the lunch table told him to wait for the bubble to burst (including a guy who'd been studying the market for years). He had all kinds of advice telling him to wait and to act rationally and he ignored it.
I bet a lot of the angry voices are people with an agenda to push. Certainly not everyone whose house has been foreclosed borrowed irresponsibly, but I think among many of them there's more introspection than anger. What is the American dream that I was chasing? What is the foundation of my personal finance, and of our economy as a whole? It gives us pause.
OK, I have yet another reason: the suburbs. Suburbs and exurbs have been hit hardest in the financial crisis, and it's hard to organize in the suburbs. This is because they're not dense and emphasize private spaces over public ones in every aspect of life.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Same title as the last post
God, the air was filthy on my run this morning. I've even run through this exact area before and it wasn't nearly as bad the other time. It's not easy to find perfect running routes around where I live if my criteria involve safe neighborhoods and lack of pollution.
I went to a talk on the use of human-powered technology today (human physical power, stuff like hand-powered blenders and bike-powered washing machines). It was at the Chicago Center for Green Technology Training Center (Richard M. Daley, Mayor), which is at an odd location next to a Metra railyard on the west side. Also adjacent to a stretch of the boulevard system, which these days mostly provides confusing and poorly-configured extra lanes on roads that don't need them. Anyway, the most interesting parts of the talk for me were examples of its use in remote areas, and the note that the low power requirements of today's portable electronics make it much more feasible to use manual generators to power gadgets.
I also had an opportunity to display my pretty good instinct for understanding people and my complete incompetence at communicating. One chart in the presentation showed the relationship between power and endurance, how much power a typical person could generate while sustaining for various lengths of time. One questioner was confused that more power was generated over shorter lengths of time. It sounded to me like she wasn't clear on the difference between power and energy. The presenter wasn't helping much, so I chimed in to try to explain, but only convinced the presenter that I didn't know the difference between power and energy.
EDIT: More things I'm remembering from the presentation. Because mechanical energy is pretty cheap in the developed world our development of human-powered devices often lags behind that of motorized ones in convenience, efficiency and ergonomics. But some recent efforts, like the OLPC's "yo-yo" generator, buck the trend. Carousel-powered water pumps whose maintenance is ad-supported. WEIRD. Even where there's no running water, we must get ads to the people. Oh, and a bike-powered washing machine is just silly. The guy that set it up said it's pretty hard to keep up the tempo for the spin cycle. Well, duh! If you're going to wash your clothes with manual power, why do it in a washing machine designed around a very non-human motor? People have washed their clothes manually for ages using techniques more suited to comfortable levels of exertion.
And I met up later with Nisha, from the relay a couple years back, who was in town for a conference. Good to catch up. We wound up talking a lot about politics. Seems to be in the air.
I went to a talk on the use of human-powered technology today (human physical power, stuff like hand-powered blenders and bike-powered washing machines). It was at the Chicago Center for Green Technology Training Center (Richard M. Daley, Mayor), which is at an odd location next to a Metra railyard on the west side. Also adjacent to a stretch of the boulevard system, which these days mostly provides confusing and poorly-configured extra lanes on roads that don't need them. Anyway, the most interesting parts of the talk for me were examples of its use in remote areas, and the note that the low power requirements of today's portable electronics make it much more feasible to use manual generators to power gadgets.
I also had an opportunity to display my pretty good instinct for understanding people and my complete incompetence at communicating. One chart in the presentation showed the relationship between power and endurance, how much power a typical person could generate while sustaining for various lengths of time. One questioner was confused that more power was generated over shorter lengths of time. It sounded to me like she wasn't clear on the difference between power and energy. The presenter wasn't helping much, so I chimed in to try to explain, but only convinced the presenter that I didn't know the difference between power and energy.
EDIT: More things I'm remembering from the presentation. Because mechanical energy is pretty cheap in the developed world our development of human-powered devices often lags behind that of motorized ones in convenience, efficiency and ergonomics. But some recent efforts, like the OLPC's "yo-yo" generator, buck the trend. Carousel-powered water pumps whose maintenance is ad-supported. WEIRD. Even where there's no running water, we must get ads to the people. Oh, and a bike-powered washing machine is just silly. The guy that set it up said it's pretty hard to keep up the tempo for the spin cycle. Well, duh! If you're going to wash your clothes with manual power, why do it in a washing machine designed around a very non-human motor? People have washed their clothes manually for ages using techniques more suited to comfortable levels of exertion.
And I met up later with Nisha, from the relay a couple years back, who was in town for a conference. Good to catch up. We wound up talking a lot about politics. Seems to be in the air.
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