Sapere Aude
Month: July 2007
They’re Beautiful!™ is a lovingly detailed virtual flower delivery service. As with online greeting card services, users are encouraged to send greetings to their loved ones. However, instead of sending a card, the person sends a one-of-a-kind bouquet of flowers that the recipient can keep “alive” through attentive care.
ex-softies get the rails bug and create beautiful software
Public computer surfaces are reservoirs for methicillin-resistant staphylococci
Mark Mulligan, Reader in Geography at King’s College London, has been gathering an incredible collection of KML geography layers
i hope they can pay the hosting bill
Apple made the same mistake with the Powerbook (a 3rd sub brand, the Apple, Macintosh, Powerbook laptop). They had to give up the word “Power” when they switched to the Intel chip from the PowerPC chip. A multi-billion $ brand name, shredded.
the French capital is making for its massive municipal bike-sharing program that he decided he had to get New Yorkers interested in the possibility of launching such a project here.
more on the background of bike share nyc.
2011-09-14: this is awesome. this will do more for tourism and quality of life in nyc than pretty much any other change in the short term.
With this announcement, NYC DOT and Alta have clearly signaled that they are going big. Once bike-share launches, it will change the way New Yorkers get around the city, extending the range of the transit system and adding point-to-point convenience for short trips.
This will be so amazing.
It will still be months before they are available for rent, and a few days before their precise locations will be revealed. But the 10K bicycles in New York’s much anticipated bike-sharing program have a name: Citi Bike.
2013-07-01:
The credit card reader is fiddly and slow, and has one of those punch screens. you know, “touch” screens with such terrible recognition you need to hit them hard. getting the bikes out of the locking mechanism works 80% of the time. Most bikes are in good shape, with the occasional flat tire. i’d estimate less than 5% of bikes are not in working order. the ride is pretty smooth and it is easy to adjust the saddle height. distribution of stations is decent but could be improved by making each station half as big and putting them into twice as many locations. a maximum walk of 2 blocks would be ideal and would lead to much more usage.
2013-12-05: crucial: a station within half a block. nyc has a ways to go there.
If you want to have a great bike-share program in your city, a few factors are key
- Lots of densely situated stations, ideally no more than 325m apart
- Many bikes (10-30 per 1000 residents in the coverage area)
- A sweeping coverage area that’s more than 13km2
- Solid, usable bikes with hardware that discourages theft
- Easy-to-use stations and payment systems
2014-10-28: 12k bikes (up from 6k) and 705 stations (up from 330) make NYC still the biggest in the us, but only 20% of chinese cities: Wuhan has 90k bikes, and Hangzhou has 60k bikes.
2016-10-19: Citibike essay
When Jay Walder became CEO of Motivate, the parent company of Citi Bike, in 2014, he overhauled the foundering NYC bike share system and turned it into a well-established, fast-growing alternate mode of transportation. By the end of 2016 Citi Bike will have more than 600 docking stations and 10K bikes. In 2015, the bike share program logged over 10M total rides. Here, Walder discusses how, as a means of transportation, a bike share network better serves 21st century demands for movement around the city, and what needs to be done to make Citi Bike an equitable piece of city infrastructure.
By mapping and sharing individual ride data, while actively maintaining system distribution, wide-ranging riders reclaim and forge new desire lines of movement and interaction across the city. The open platform of Citi Bike data has spawned a Citi Bike NYC Hackers forum: an online community platform that engineers the generated data to reveal how the network is behaving. A heightened understanding of the city in motion can help satisfy personal transit needs — for example, to engineer real-time notifications when a certain station has available bikes or docks. This kind of hands-on participation is more than just avoiding jams by passively signing onto a car-traffic app. Directly participating in the bicycle system’s optimum function and interconnection, while using virtually no fuel and occupying only a tenth of the space that a car would, each cyclist rebalances the city’s energy and movement equation, and contributes to empathy on the street.
2018-07-03: Lyft acquisition
Lyft’s announcement nods to how the deal could work out for cities; taking over all those contracts with city halls should further reign in the notion that the ride-hailing company is a rogue operator. “Bringing together Lyft and Motivate will accelerate our collaboration with cities and deliver even better experiences to our passengers and riders”. As ride-hailing runs up against the limits of road congestion (maybe even contributing to its increase), transportation watchers are waiting to see what happens now that both of the 2 major ride-hailing companies have skin in the bikesharing game.
“The proliferation of signs, barriers and crossings could be making our streets more dangerous. We’re not suggesting that removing them all is the answer. But for too long we’ve been designing streets for traffic; they’ve become noisy, congested and cluttered, with people herded behind traffic barriers, ostensibly for their own benefit. Solving the problems of speeding and pedestrian safety doesn’t mean more and more signs telling you to slow down and more protective barriers, it requires clever design thinking.”
this one is for rekha.
The Millwall Brick is a serious truncheon made out of a carefully folded newspaper, invented by English football hooligans who were getting all their other weapons confiscated at matches.
Lots of people have pointed out that the TSA has embarked on a fool’s errand by confiscating our liquids, multi-tools, lighters, matches, etc — a lethal weapon can be improvised out of dental floss, a laptop battery, or a newspaper. And here’s proof.
Say that tomorrow someone attacked a flight attendant and tried to get into a cockpit with a copy of the Wall Street Journal. Would the TSA ban newspapers on airplanes? How much longer are we going to let crazy people (terrorists and the TSA) drive our national policy?
the dead trees industry has enough problems already. they certainly don’t need a war on newspapers
The visualizations shown in today’s screencast were done with Many Eyes, which is another very cool piece of software. But what I realized while making them is that narrated animation is really the secret sauce. Analytical software, whether it’s Excel or GapMinder or Many Eyes or something else, is necessary but not sufficient. The stories that people will understand, and remember, are the ones that have been performed well. Now I’m no Hans Rosling, and you certainly won’t see me swallow a sword at the end of this screencast — as he amazingly does at the end of this video. But I will be trying to emulate his example when I tell stories with data. And I’m struck, once again, by the way in which screencasting can bring software interaction to life.
from data to understanding, perhaps?
The purpose of the Guild is to further professionalize the front-end programming discipline within the Netherlands (and possibly in other Dutch-speaking regions of the world; but I’m not going to do that without some kind of local initiative. I’m busy enough as it is). The most important (or at least most visible) part of this professionalisation will be our certification. We want to issue certificates to good, standards-aware front-end programmers, so that non-specialists can easily see whether a certain person knows what he’s doing. (That means we have to decide what knowledge and skills a good front-ender needs; more on this below.)
Separating out the bozos of web dev is long overdue.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 