December 2008
57 posts
Urbanization: 95% Of The World's Population Lives... →
Pain at the Pump, Suburban Blues and the... →
2009 List: Buy This Way – Eight ways people are... →
Time to Reboot America →
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity?
No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’ →
From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
Science Behind Mysterious 'Fifth Taste' Revealed →
Who doesn’t love umami?
A Shopping Nexus Outside Washington Plots a Future... →
Altogether, there are 115,000 retail and office workers and 17,000 residents at Tysons. This ratio is “just out of whack,” said Stuart Mendelsohn, a land-use lawyer, former county supervisor and task force member. If the plan is carried out, by 2050 Tysons will have an estimated 150,000 full-time residents, who will be able to walk to work, restaurants and shops.
Overweight And Obese US Drivers Burn An Extra 200... →
Stop using your legs. Gain weight. Use more gas. Let your legs atrophy more… Sounds like a vicious cycle to me.
XLR8R Presents Lone
Formerly one half of...
DC Metro Updates Their Website & I Learn About...
I’ve always found it amusing that Morgantown, WV shows up on Google Transit directions, but not Washington, DC. Granted, DC’s is an overly complicated and poorly planned system, which entails delays on a daily basis and confused tourists gathering around the labyrinthian maps on the platforms. I find it amazing how the trains in Tokyo, Japan, with much larger numbers of passengers and...
Searching for Solutions in the Face of... →
“Our transportation system hasn’t changed in a functional way in 80 years,” Mr. Sperling said. “We have the same type of vehicles, the same basic road structure. We’ve let everything but cars atrophy, and today public transit is 3 percent of passenger travel.”
“When we create diagrams, we keep a couple of things in mind. We want to be...”
– Steve Duenes, graphics director at The New York Times
via Infographic news
Krazy About K →
World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of... →
Rutledge argues that governments are terrible at estimating their own fossil fuel reserves. He developed his new model by looking back at historical examples of fossil fuel exhaustion. For example, British coal production fell precipitously form its 1913 peak. American oil production famously peaked in 1970, as controversially predicted by King Hubbert. Both countries had heartily overestimated...
Reason to Love New York #3. Because Robert Moses... →
Now the Department of Transportation has realized that its jurisdiction covers the basic unit of urban life: the street. There, lifestyles intersect and city dwellers co-exist with people different from themselves. It’s where we learn toleration, where leisure shares space with urgency, commerce with activism, baby carriages with handcarts. When it is narrowed by garbage or overwhelmed by...
Reverting back to life without a car
While I’ve been living in my new apartment in Arlington, Virginia for almost two months now, I’m still struggling to get cars out of my life. The commute to work in Reston was one hindrance, where four to ten lane highways and poorly planned roads caused the arrival of my bus to fluctuate anywhere from on-time to twenty minutes late. Where incomplete streets make the walk from the bus...
Best Careers 2009: Urban Regional Planner – A... →
Wow! Really? I would have guessed that that would be a difficult field to get into.
Top 5 Disruptive Music-Making Technologies →
7 Things That Make Your Butt (and The Rest of You)... →
“Countries with the highest levels of active transportation generally had the lowest obesity rates,” Bassett and Pucher conclude in the study published in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health.
Researchers are finding that suburban dwellers are significantly fatter than their urban counterparts, primarily because they drive everywhere, even to the fitness club.
Big...
Washing Laundry in Cold Water is the Same As... →
Treehugger crunches the numbers on all that wasted energy that goes into washing clothes with hot water.
HTMLipsum →
This site will surely confuse anyone who’s not a designer.
Style over legibility →
Another reason I care less and less about UK graphic design.
Life Abroad, A Different Shade of Green →
This reminds me of Shanghai, where they have much stricter emissions laws than the U.S., where I never saw an incandescent light bulb, and where public transportation is really usable. No clothes dryers in China either, or any other country that I know of.
Facing Leaner Times, Small Start-Ups Get Busy →
UPS Back to Delivering by Bike →
Grant says for every three bikes used during the holiday season, UPS will save $38,000 in vehicle operation and upkeep costs.
Recycling Is Garbage →
John Tierney gives a mostly honest look at the process and economics behind recycling. Although he fails to really go into detail the environmental impacts of discarding plastics – think the great gyre of plastic soup in the Pacific.
Breaking: California Adopts Nation’s Most... →
California one-ups the federal government, again.
Wind Power Beats Nuclear & Clean Coal, Other... →
The energy alternatives that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful. Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels.
Webapp Workaround For iPhone Copy/Paste →
According to their twitter feed, should be up in an hour or so.
The Obama Generation Takes the Helm →
The financial crisis is not only a cause of our national malaise, but also a symptom of the deeper wrong turn that America made decades ago, when Ronald Reagan declared that government had to get out of the way to restore the national economy. After a wild decade of high inflation and soaring energy prices in the 1970s, Reagan made government the enemy. From that point on, the name of the game...
Chris Pullman: What I've Learned →
So when the phone rang and it was Ivan Chermayeff saying that there was an opportunity to work at a TV station in Boston, my first reaction was “definitely not.” This was because my teachers and mentors at Yale had made it clear that the only way to squander a good education faster than going into advertising was to go into television. But I was vaguely curious to see what a TV studio was like,...
Study Proves Talkers Are Lousy Drivers →
“Our research shows that simply using phones hands-free is not enough to eliminate significant impacts on a driver’s visual attention,” Kunar said, because for all our love of Bluetooth headsets and speaker phones, we humans simply aren’t biologically advanced enough to drive and talk simultaneously. “Generating responses for a conversation competes for the brain’s...
“We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Green Tea Instead Of "Fizzy Drinks" →
After experiencing the true convenience of Japanese convenience stores, the U.S. counterparts just don’t live up to my expectations. Why can’t I get a bottle of green tea here when I’m on the run?
Is Home Ownership a Good Thing? Part II →
Our reliance on single-family homeownership is a product of the past 50 years – and the experiment has outlived its usefulness. Not only is it now readily apparent that not everyone should own a home, and that the mortgage system is a big part of what got us into the current financial mess, but homeownership also ties people to locations, making it harder for them to move to where work is....
Deep in the Heart of Texas: A Smart Grid →
For those of you who don’t exactly know what I’m talking about when I use the word smart grid.
Coal Mining Debris Rule Is Approved →
It’d be nice if I had a place I could call home even after I have kids…
30 best cities to find a job →
#5 Morgantown, WV
#13 Charleston, WV
That is, if you like working in retail…
A Design-Oriented National Endowment for the Arts →
The National Endowment for the Arts should embrace design and innovation as a means to fulfill the larger agendas and programs of the Obama Administration. The choice of the NEA Chairman is an important opportunity to shape the contribution of the NEA in coming years.
Linen n' Things Could Become Cardboard n' Plastic... →
It never did make much sense to collect garbage and ship it to China. Now it is exposed once again as a system where the consumer does the work and the taxpayer pays the bills, all for the convenience and profit of the industries that sell the stuff. It really does prove that recycling is bulls**t.
Silver Line To Dulles Wins Crucial Federal Okay →
In addition to easing congestion, the transit line is expected to spur a revival of traffic-choked Tysons, where the planned Metrorail stations have become the focal points of a planned transformation from suburban office park and malls to a series of walkable downtowns with shopping, nightlife, city-style residences and jobs.
With 120,000 jobs and two malls but only 17,000 residents, Tysons is...
End Of An Era: Honda Pulls Out Of Formula One →
Honda has been involved in F1 racing since the 1960s. The sport is increasingly seen as a relic from the past, and even insiders and experts are feeling the crunch. Earlier this year, Max Mosley, president of FIA, the world motorsport governing body said “Formula One is becoming unsustainable.”