Month: June 2007

Open Streets

DOT presented its renovation plan for the intersection of Ninth Ave. and 14th St. to Manhattan Community Board 4 on Wednesday evening. Ryan Russo, DOT’s Director for Street Management and Safety, explained that the agency is taking advantage of a scheduled repaving of Ninth Ave. in mid-July to respond to long-standing community request to remove the 2-block northbound contra-flow traffic lane from the avenue, which has been blamed for several pedestrian fatalities

the NYC DOT seems quite pragmatic, coming up with workable solutions in months rather than decades.
2008-07-31:

For Mr. Tsao, taking over a piece of the bridge for a dinner party, as he did Friday night and likes to do at least once each summer, is an act both political and personal, a conscious gesture of civic engagement and a way to lay claim to a terrific party space. He is captivated and inspired by the persona of the 19th-century flâneur “the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.” Being a flâneur “is all about taking in the world we’ve been given; we want to embrace it and engage with it.”

more take back the streets stuff.
2011-01-06: nice! astor place is currently a downside of living in the east village. not much longer.

2013-10-09: janette is one of my heroines. she is responsible for a huge quality of life increase in nyc in the last 5 years. in this video she talks about how she made even that pimple on nyc, times square, bearable.

2020-04-30: Restaurant reopening could include seats on closed streets. Perhaps this will trigger a longer-term change in street usage, which would be a great thing.
2021-01-28:

The New York City Council voted Thursday to approve Intro. 1116-B, the legislation that will create 4000 new permits for street vendors in the city over the next 10 years.

This is a tiny step in the right direction. The future of much of NYC is in the street, we shouldn’t limit these permits at all. Let a million flowers bloom.

LifeBrowser

Horvitz wanted to use his research in memory landmarks to help people to find what they are looking for within their growing personal stores of information. He and his team developed a rich timeline of different types of landmarks that Horvitz refers to as a “memory backbone” for navigating content. They combined the predictive models for calendar events and images and added a user’s computer activities, such as files created or edited and Web pages visited. They also added public news events. They organized the results into a timeline browser they call LifeBrowser. The LifeBrowser interface allows you to search your memories just as you can search the Internet. You can access a news event on the timeline such as “Seattle Earthquake,” or personal events, such as “Travel to DC” or “Group Off-site,” and view emails that you sent or received, documents that you worked on, and Web sites that you visited at these times. A memorability slider allows users to control the detail displayed in the memory backbone. You can display just a few ‘most memorable’ events or include a larger number of events, some of which will fall into the ‘less memorable’ category.

bayesian models to help your recollection. ship it, microsoft.

Cocktail Condom

a city councilor from Boston wants the city’s licensing board, alcohol manufacturers and owners of nightclubs and bars to seriously consider cocktail covers, a creation that will deter would-be predators from slipping date-rape drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting victims.

reminds me of a paper by bryan caplan why people vote for politics that have them worse off. see also carlo cipolla’s theory of stupidity.

Molecular Machine Feasibility

Richard Jones lists 6 challenges for molecular nanotechnology:

  1. Stability of nanoclusters and surface reconstruction. Surfaces have a tendency to “reconstruct” – seek out stable equilibria in ways not necessarily predicted by molecular dynamics simulations.
  2. Thermal noise, Brownian motion and tolerance. Atoms on the nanoscale may be too wobbly to build complex machines out of. Drexler addressed this, but not in thorough detail.
  3. Friction and energy dissipation. Surface area becomes much larger as machinery scales down, and high functional densities will give rise to high power densities in molecular machine systems. The friction and heat may be so intense that molecular machine systems cannot be reliably constructed.
  4. Design for a motor. Richard is skeptical that the electrostatic motor as described in Drexler’s Nanosystems would actually work. More detail needs to be fleshed out and supported by experimental testing.
  5. The eutactic environment and the feed-through problem. For MNT systems to work, they would need to operate in ultra-high vacuum. But, interacting with the outside, they’d be exposed to a very atomically messy environment. Valves and pumps need to be around 100% efficient to exclude foreign molecules.
  6. Implementation path. How do we get there from here? If “soft” nanotechnology is all that works, how do we transition from there to hard?

These are all valid arguments, but some are a bit more interesting than others. To estimate them roughly in order of declining importance based on my own opinion, I’d list them as 3, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6.

beats tracking down all the physical chemistry papers