Tag: images

Octopus Disaster

Never forget

The disappearance of the Cornelius G. Kolff remains both one of New York’s most horrific maritime tragedies and perhaps its most intriguing mystery. Eye witness accounts describe “large tentacles” which “pulled” the ferry beneath the surface only a short distance from its destination at Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan

NYC Trash

spot on

2018-06-04:

Local 124, the union at Sanitation Salvage, also represents workers at several other Bronx companies owned by the Squitieris, including Metropolitan Transfer Station and D&J Ambulette. It turns out that Local 124 often gives to the same politicians as the Squitieris — and often on the same day. On 5 separate occasions between 2006 and 2010, Local 124 donated to the same Bronx political causes on the exact same days as the Squitieris and their companies. 1 of those same-day matching donations was to Bronx Borough President Diaz, and 2 of them were to Klein. “The Squitieris run the Bronx”. In 2016, the de Blasio administration came out in support of a plan for overhauling the private trash industry. New York would be carved up into zones, companies would make bids to collect the garbage in a given zone, and then the city would pick the winners. In this system, backers have argued, the city could make winning a bid contingent on meeting strict benchmarks for things like safety training, wages, hours or recycling rates.

Kebab

NYC is getting its own kebab:

Heatherwick Studio revealed the first renderings of “Vessel,” a 15-story tall occupiable sculpture comprised of 154 intricately interconnecting flights of stairs that will serve as the centerpiece of the new Hudson Yards development in west Manhattan.

WaveNet

this is extremely impressive.

This post presents WaveNet, a deep generative model of raw audio waveforms. We show that WaveNets are able to generate speech which mimics any human voice and which sounds more natural than the best existing Text-to-Speech systems, reducing the gap with human performance by over 50%.

Urban Under

The book is motivated by an intense desire to see: to reveal the underground circuits of utility tunnels, sanitation services, transportation networks, and everyday labor that writhe beneath the surface of the urban world. By doing so, it hopes “to foreground the connections between space and politics that converge underground.”

Improved Burning Man

Walker’s urban plan for Burning Man simply improves upon the original by applying setbacks along certain streets and intersections for different cultural and urban uses. he built out a “kit of parts” for simple streetscape interventions that he says can have a dramatic impact on urban flow and cultural space. “There are interventions that cities have been using for 100s, 1000s of years”

Cairo Transit Mapping

Transport for Cairo (TfC) is mapping the city’s complex public transit systems—both formal and informal. The group’s ultimate goal isn’t just to draw a paper map of the system, but to eventually build mobile transit apps. All the data they’re collecting feed into the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), the standard format pioneered by Google to openly share public transit information among transit agencies and application developers. GTFS currently works for networks that run on fixed schedules, but TfC hopes to adapt the standard so that it works with Cairo’s informal transit system, as well.

Twin Peaks Photos

Many of the photos in this post captured while the cameras weren’t rolling on the set of Twin Peaks were taken by actor Richard Beymer (who played ‘Benjamin Horne’ in the series) after the photographer hired to take promotional shots for the film quit. Others are what appear to be candid photos including an amusing polaroid of director David Lynch yelling into the ear of actress Grace Zabriskie (who played Laura Palmer’s mother Sarah in the original series) with a megaphone.