Matins

¶ What if the Chinese rebuilt Southern California but nobody came? Holly Krambeck takes us to Chenggong, an uninhabited satellite of Kunming that’s as auto-centric as Detroit’s wildest dreams. Very not up-to-date planning. (Transport for Development; via  Marginal Revolution)

The landscape is characterized by long, 450-meter blocks, gated communities with limited access points, expansive intersections that may be challenging to cross on foot, and a segregation of uses that may require residents to travel great distances to work, buy rice, and to go out for romantic dinners – and compete with other residents for road-space, since the mega-block urban design requires everyone to funnel into the exact same roads. My gut tells me this is a worrisome pattern — though, I haven’t seen traffic forecasts or density plans, so I cannot say for certain what will come to be. 

 

What you cannot see in these images are the new light rail stations (not supported by the Bank) that seem to be placed at a distance from development, in the center of an eight-lane boulevard that can only be safely crossed by bridge. It appears as though the stations will only be accessible by bus —  I hope this is not the case, where every light rail trip will require at least one transfer…we will see what happens. 

Lauds

¶ At The Online Photographer, a haunting portrait gets not one but two close readings. The second one, by the photographer who made the portrait, confirms the first. Rich doings!

And then there’s her expression that really puts the cherry on the sundae. That cocked eyebrow on an angrily confident expression is chilling. I don’t want to get any closer to this woman.

No, this is no happy snap. This appears to be a carefully crafted portrait of a woman prepared to convert potential energy to kinetic energy. Perhaps she’s listening to the response from her just-asked question, ‘Where you been all night?’ Perhaps she’s confronting a pesky salesman and is seconds away from ‘Shoo!’ But we’re left wondering what’s about to happen.

First, I made some pictures of Benita and her five-year-old daughter; those first shots are never the best. And then I moved to the fence. Benita said her daughter had hung the wash up and she couldn’t take it down because it was so cute. I love the fence because it creates that important diagonal line. I like a person’s eye to have something to do in a photograph and that line lets one enter the photo, if the gate were closed we’d be blocked out.

She said no one could take a good picture of her because her face is asymmetrical and her eyebrows are not in line. I told her to lean against the fence, get comfortable and take that contrapposto pose. There is always the problem of what to do with hands, but I take so long with this process that most people just give up and wait. That’s when the real portrait comes. She put her right hand in her pocket, but I didn’t notice the tension on the left hand until I made the contact sheets.

Prime

¶ We are huge admirers of Felix Salmon here at The Daily Blague (does it show much?), but we’re more than ordinarily impressed by an entry about paywalls that gets things just right.

David Brauer seems to be of the opinion that any new paywall should be “robust” and shouldn’t be able to be defeated by means of a plugin (or by using multiple browsers, or by deleting cookies, or various other methods, I suppose). But that’s exactly wrong. The purpose of a paywall isn’t to keep people out, it’s to generate revenue from loyal readers. And the expense of making the paywall harder to circumvent is almost certainly greater than the marginal extra revenue that such an action would generate: after all, the kind of people trying to get around the paywall will most likely simply go elsewhere, rather than pay.

It seems grandiose to say so, but we’re taking this as the first principle of the philosophy of paywalls — or, as we prefer to think of them, Internet subscriptions.

Tierce

¶ How much of a Neanderthal are you? Maybe as much as 4%, according to researchers at Leipzig — and assuming that you have at least some non-African heritage. Knowing what we know about homo sapiens, we can’t say that we’re surprised. What’s interesting is the impact that the news may have on the two camps of evolutionary theory, the Out-of-Africa folks and the Multiregionals. (Scientific American; via  3 Quarks Daily)

Intermixing does not surprise paleoanthropologists who have long argued on the basis of fossils that archaic humans, such as the Neandertals in Eurasia and H. erectus in East Asia, mated with early moderns and can be counted among our ancestors—the so-called multiregional evolution theory of modern human origins. The detection of Neandertal DNA in present-day people thus comes as welcome news to these scientists. “It is important evidence for multiregional evolution,” comments Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the leading proponent of the theory.

In a prepared statement, Out of Africa theorist Christopher B. Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London acknowledged that the genome results show that “many of us outside of Africa have some [Neandertal] inheritance.” But Stringer maintains that the origin of our species is mostly an Out of Africa story. Population geneticist Laurent Excoffier of the University of Bern in Switzerland agrees, noting that the alleged admixture did not continue as moderns moved into Europe. “In all scenarios of speciation, there is a time during which two diverging species remain interfertile,” he explains.

When we were young, Scientists declared categorically that prehistoric homo sapiens had never, no way, and no how fiddled around with Neanderthals in a reproductive sort of way. But that was before the Civil Rights Act.

Sext

¶ Dave Bry is still apologizing. Less asshattery, though. (The Awl)

The best part of our night came when Emily saw a sign for the Sheridan Garage across the street from the top of the ramp. I pulled into the parking lot and felt the steering wheel freeze into a locked position just as we rolled through the open door and under the fluorescent lights. “Wow.” I stopped the car and turned to Emily. “That was really lucky!”

This is maybe where the worst part of your night began. You work at the Sheridan Garage. And after I got out of my car and knocked on the frosted-glass kiosk there, it was you who opened the door and stepped out to greet me.

¶ Kari does the laundry. In Paris. (Karigee)

Part of the challenge and most of the reward here is simply realizing you can accomplish the little things, like doing the laundry. I was so nervous about doing the laundry! For months every time I’d think about it I’d have to stop thinking about it because it made me so tense. I never worry about terrorists or volcanoes or muggers or murderers, or losing my passport or even getting lost, but the laundry!

¶ Rupert Murdoch sees all. (Get Excited; via  kottke.org)

I am pretty much paralyzed at the notion that Rupert is staring at me via some hidden camera. So I’m like, “Dude, tell him I’m wearing shorts cause I’m going to the gym” (the gym is on the same floor as the cafe). And so Sal says into the phone, “Mr. Murdoch, he says he’s wearing short pants (for some reason, they keep calling them “short pants” instead of shorts) cause he’s going to the gym.” So while they’re on the phone, I make a beeline to the gym, where I proceed to hang out for 25 minutes before I scope the hallway, make sure Sal is off the phone, and leave.

Nones

¶ Martha Nussbaum refutes five Lockean arguments for banning burqas. Particularly keen is her attack on the idea that the outfit is coercive or anti-feminist, and associated with domestic violence. (Opinionator/NYT)

We should reply that of course all forms of violence and physical coercion in the home are illegal already, and laws against domestic violence and abuse should be enforced much more zealously than they are.  Do the arguers really believe that domestic violence is a peculiarly Muslim problem?  If they do, they are dead wrong.  According to the U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, intimate partner violence made up 20 percentof all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women in 2001. The National Violence Against Women Survey, cited on the B.J.S. Web site,  reports that 52 percent of surveyed women said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of perpetrator.  There is no evidence that Muslim families have a disproportionate amount of such violence.  Indeed, given the strong association between domestic violence and the abuse of alcohol, it seems at least plausible that observant Muslim families will turn out to have less of it.

Even sharper:

Suppose there were evidence that the burqa was strongly associated, statistically, with violence against women.  Could government could legitimately ban it on those grounds?  The U. S. Supreme Court has held that nude dancing may be banned on account of its contingent association with crime, including crimes against women, but it is not clear that this holding was correct.  College fraternities are very strongly associated with violence against women, and some universities have banned all or some fraternities as a result.  But private institutions are entitled to make such regulations; a total governmental ban on the male drinking club (or on other places where men get drunk, such as soccer matches) would certainly be a bizarre restriction of associational liberty.  What is most important, however, is that anyone proposing to ban the burqa must consider it together with these other cases, weigh the evidence, and take the consequences for their own cherished hobbies.

Vespers

¶ Even if it doesn’t motivate you to re-read the Bard, or order a copy of Shakespearean Tragedy, Kevin Frazier’s appreciation of A C Bradley’s 1904 classic. (The Millions)

At heart, though, Bradley’s method is personal.  He says what he thinks of Shakespeare’s characters, and why he feels they matter to our understanding of life.  Obviously, this approach exposes him to ridicule.  His only real shield against failure is his own insight into people, based on his inevitably dated and incomplete notions of human nature.  In the end, he can’t begin to tell us more about Hamlet or about the world than Shakespeare tells us himself.  Bradley knows this, and his modesty is appealing.  He assumes that good literature always has more to give us than even the best critics can express in topic sentences and abstractions.  And it’s precisely Bradley’s humility—his willingness to embrace his ultimate defeat—that allows him to polish and display certain facets of Shakespeare we aren’t likely to have seen so sharply on our own.

Compline

¶ We can’t figure out precisely what made “parudox,” a contributor to MetaFilter, link to Josh Stephens’s undated piece on parking lots and spaces in a magazine put out by the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, intransition, but it’s a good read about a favorite subject (we don’t like cars much when they’re in motion, but we hate them when they’re parked).

Published in 2005, Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking amounts to an unwieldy volume full of data, regressions, and intricate analysis of these most overlooked squares on the grid of American cities. If America’s streets were a Monopoly board, it would be a dull contest indeed, with almost every space “Free Parking.” Each of the country’s roughly 200 million vehicles typically demands spaces at home and work, with shares of countless spaces at the market, restaurant, post office, mall and every other imaginable destination. Eighty-seven percent of all trips are made by personal vehicle and 99 percent of those trips arrive at a free parking space.

Many of these spaces stem from carelessly planned street parking schemes and arbitrary minimum parking requirements, by which cities dictate the number of spaces that different types of land uses must provide for tenants and customers. The result is a land use that is as ubiquitous as it is vapid and that, according to Shoup, “disfigures the landscape, distorts urban form, damages the environment, and wastes money that could be spent more productively elsewhere.” Shoup estimates that the total annual subsidy of free off-street parking exceeds $300 billion per year.

We went straight to Facebook and joined The Shoupistas.

Have a Look

¶ Einztein. An intereview with founder Marco Masoni. (via Good)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 10:43 am.