July 03, 2004
You let me get a pregnant elephant ...
At Dutton's in Brentwood, arriving five minutes just before they shut for the weekend, I came across Raphael Patai's The Children of Noah, an account of ancient Semitic seafaring adventures.
July 02, 2004
In massalia there were no networks
Surprised to find an outpost of a local independent bookstore at the airport, and happily picked up Cunliffe's The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
.
Need to find a copy of Mark Buchanan's Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks.
July 01, 2004
Mind your prefixes
In the sentence "After immigrating to New York in 1964, he worked as a clerk at the Indian Consulate ..." shouldn't the use of the accusative be required?
June 30, 2004
June 29, 2004
Anything but pedestrian.
Bless Santiago Calatrava for working on commission for pedestrian bridges. Despite how long an architect's rise to prominence can take, Calatrava has undertaken two of the more beautiful pedestrian bridges (one in Bilbao, and a new one in Redding).
June 28, 2004
Four syllables, or five?
Ever wonder about the physics behind traffic signal sensors? The sensors measure changes in inductance, but that still leaves a lot of issues, like ferrous vs. conductive, and contributions of frame vs. wheels.
If you've got aluminum rims, your frame material doesn't matter, because they operate at high frequencies, where the key component is a conductive piece of metal -- not carbon fibre, you weight weenie -- that allows an induced eddy current (e.g. closed loop). Rims get closer to the wires than the frame, align the wheel with one of the wires, so the maximum number of magnetic flux lines pass through your rim. If the sensor is a figure-8 pattern, the middle wire is twice as sensitive as the edge wires.
California has codes designed to address the engineering of cyclists in intersections.
Isaac Asimov wrote an excellent short story called "Unique is where you find it" about a problem posed to an eager young chemist by his antagonistic professor. There, I've spoiled the story for you.
June 27, 2004
On the origin of cities
Having heard that this year's National Spelling Bee winner took the prize with autochthonous, I wondered where I might stumble upon that word. The answer: on the first page of the Introduction to Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 -- the year that Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx united as boroughs of New York City. This 1100-page volume, the first in the self-billed definitive history of the city, has a table of contents that runs to ten pages.
Once you have a city, you have to decorate it:
Image a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw wherever they liked. Where very street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that a stop leaning against the wall - its wet.