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POPSNew study money portends hope for former Vacuum Oil brownfields “Prime land” it is, so close to the University of Rochester and city-center Rochester. Like so many stretches along the banks of the Genesee, so beautiful and hauntingly desolate, it's hard to imagine downtown could be so close. The River Trail there is one of my favorite spots to skate.
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POPSGiant holes open into Martian caves Though the article never addresses what makes the holes nearly perfectly round, it does suggest an answer. Sinkholes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinkhole often do appear round. I would be more surprised if they appeared square, triangular or some other engineered shape. Credit to http://nibot.livejournal.com/589189.html for this article tip.
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POPSShooter slays random cyclist and gets convicted only for manslaughter I wonder how thoroughly police investigated this crime. Could all the supposed victims of the attempted robberies have declined to come forward or to testify? Might they never have heard about the arrest or circumstances? Many other shootings result not in death, but permanent injury. I rarely ever hear about those stories. Do police and prosecutors treat carjackings more seriously than violence against cyclist? Maybe i'm overly skeptical here, but through my years of cycling and skating, enough dangerous objects such as beer bottles flying 40mph have hit me, i wonder if harassment like this doesn't deter others from cycling and skating in the city. The acts go beyond mere objects. The vicious, angry words shouted are evidence of road rage. Yet, i read and hear very little in way of prosecution, and that leads me to wonder. I will tag follow-up stories “Fred Mason”.
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POPSThe Mathematical Lives of Plants The seeds of a sunflower, the spines of a cactus, and the bracts of a pine cone all grow in whirling spiral patterns. Remarkable for their complexity and beauty, they also show consistent mathematical patterns that scientists have been striving to understand. ... Scientists have puzzled over this pattern of plant growth for hundreds of years. Why would plants prefer the golden angle to any other? And how can plants possibly "know" anything about Fibonacci numbers? For the first time, scientists have found convincing biochemical mechanisms responsible for the interlocking spiral growth patterns seen in many plants. (The Romanesco broccoli plant is a striking example.) The video of the experiment with magnetized liquid iron droplets demonstrates how the geometry of such growth could occur in nature.
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POPSNew York State audits the City of Rochester's fast ferry finances and bungling of fiscal oversight A friend and investment analyst for Manning & Napier, the area's most successful money management firm, mentioned to me in the fall of 2002, when the fast ferry had become a hot topic, only three ferries in the entire world ran profitably. Governments subsidized the losses of the others, ostensibly to provide economic benefit for the region, or at least, for politicians to associate their names with useful services and maintain their profile in the eyes of their subjects.
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POPSLas Vegas and San Jose: boomtowns with busted downtowns
What Vegas and Silicon Valley cannot do for their downtowns, can most American cities without booming economies expect to do for theirs? This bodes poorly for conventional planning on how to save city centers. New ideas on how to save American cities need to address unmentionables: racism, classism, the drug economy and the perception of violence that hobbles cities. Meanwhile, mostly driving to and from work, Americans burn five times more petrol than even other industrialized countries, leaving us at the mercy of players who give us oil by trading away our freedoms, and by wrecking the earth to farm all manner of sugars, starches, and now cellulose, to burn ethanol—all for nine lanes of traffic, strip malls, and ugly cities full of blacktop but devoid of civic life and youthful promise. Those who have not traveled to Hong Kong, Manhattan, and other compact cities have not experienced how life could be better with fewer cars. And success would free the need for massive subsidies.
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POPSHomeostasis as a model for climate change Thought-provoking comparison between homeostatic mechanisms in living organisms and the response of planetary climate systems to human influence. In this depressing analogy, we humans are an invading microbe, and the Earth is about to get a fever.
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POPSFractal Food: Self-Similarity on the Supermarket Shelf This great article on computational self-similarity in nature provided the author with an excuse to take a series of spectacular close-up photos of the incredible Romanesco broccoli plant. Fractals never looked so delicious! (Click pictures for high-resolution images.) Nearly exact self-similar fractal forms occur do in nature, but I'd never seen such a beautiful and perfect example until, some time after moving to Switzerland, I came across a chou Romanesco like the one above in a grocery store. This is so visually stunning an object that on first encounter it's hard to imagine you're looking at a garden vegetable rather than an alien artefact created with molecular nanotechnology. But of course, then you realise that vegetables are created with molecular nanotechnology, albeit the product of earthly evolution, not extraterrestrial engineering.
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POPSCandid NYC Subway Turnstile Photos UPDATE: Darn, the site didn't clip as well as I was hoping. But it's still worth seeing. See main site for high-resolution photos . Fascinating installation by NYC photographer, Bill Sullivan, who frames the wonder that is human variety in everyday — yet unexpected — locations. (Love the guy with the BMX wheels in his hands.) (Via kottke .)
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