Boris Johnson, mayor of London:

But above all, talented people seek cities for fame. They can’t get famous in the fucking village.

That’s one way of looking at it.

Shelby Brown:

Roman poetry is filled with entertaining rants against urban evils, which I revisited with glee while preparing for a gallery class I taught at the Getty Villa last month.

Some of the most illuminating diatribes come to us from D. Iunius Iuvenalis (Juvenal), an embittered poet of the late first and early second centuries A.D. As translated by Peter Green, his verses showcase many of the irritants still encountered in city life today, from traffic jams to fashion requirements.

(Via Sarah Goodyear.)

Wendell Cox:

Census data indicates that in 1940, the core accounted for 53 percent of the region’s population. This dropped to 41 percent in 1950, with the largest share of war-time population losses in the ku area. The core gained back to 47 percent of the population in 1960. After that, nearly all growth was in the suburbs. Between 1950 and 2000, 87 percent of the population gain was in the suburbs. In the last decade, the suburbs share of growth dropped to 63 percent.

While the trend suggests the core (the “ku” areas) is making a comeback, you’ll notice that it’s merely growing faster than before, not faster than the suburbs. If the suburbs were a bathtub, their water level would be sitting higher than the core’s tub. And despite the core’s resurgence, the ‘burbs’ tub is still filling faster.

William Grimes, writing for the New York Times in 1992:

Over at the laboratories of Edison’s rival, Bell was insisting on “Ahoy!” as the correct way to answer the telephone. It was trounced by “hello,” which became the standard as the first telephone exchanges, equipped by Edison, were set up across the United States and operating manuals adopted the word. The first public exchange, opened in New Haven on Jan. 28, 1878, wavered between “hello” and the fusty “What is wanted?” in its manual. By 1880, “hello” had won out.

I can’t see why “What is wanted?” didn’t win out. It’s just so…so…genial. 

(Via Clive Thompson.)

Robert Siegel:

We’ll be reporting on issues that confront cities all over these days, issues that probably come up where you live.

Perhaps somewhat predictably, it’s going to be crowdsourced.

Amanda Erikson, writing for The Atlantic Cities:

The story of American zoning is really the story of how Americans learned to legislate their NIMBY impulses.

Shawn Allen of the Stamen Design (I’ve linked to their work before) produced this clever map of trees, cabs, and crime in San Francisco. I’ll let him explain it:

I’ve had this idea to use subtractive blending so that you can see where these three data sets overlap for a while, and decided to scratch the itch this weekend. I’m still not sure if it’s significant or even interesting, but here it is. This is a slightly improved version of the original with a more useful (and attractive!) legend and no base map. The colors have also changed: Trees are cyan and crimes magenta because I felt that the latter should stand out more. And yellow to produce red, which seems to me a more crime-y color.

To see the map in all it’s halftone glory, take a look at the embiggened version.

(Thanks to Jon Christensen.)

FEMA has released a web map that tracks disasters and emergencies in real time. Today? Mostly fires with a few floods. 

Via Nate Berg.

It’s not just young people who are fleeing small towns in the Great Plains. According to Matt Carmichael at AdAge, who analyzed migration data from the U.S. Census, the over 65 set is packing up and moving out, too. It makes me wonder, who will be left?

Wonder how fast your state has been warming? Climate Central has an interactive map that’ll tell you exactly that. Three of the six states I’ve lived in are in the top ten for warming since 1970. Not a heartening thought.

Matt Novak:

Googie is a modern (ultramodern, even) architectural style that helps us understand post-WWII American futurism — an era thought of as a “golden age” of futurist design for many here in the year 2012. It’s a style built on exaggeration; on dramatic angles; on plastic and steel and neon and wide-eyed technological optimism. It draws inspiration from Space Age ideals and rocketship dreams.

NASA’s MODIS sensor on the Aqua satellite caught this unusual high-pressure hole in a cloud bank off Tasmania earlier this month.

Andy Baio clears up some of the confusion regarding maps in iOS 6. It’s comprehensive, well written, and hits the nail on the head regarding mass transit directions:

Why is Apple doing this? Do they hate public transit?! Of course not. Transit directions aren’t in iOS 6 because Apple replaced Google’s maps with their own solution, which didn’t include access to transit data. Maintaining transit feeds and keeping it up-to-date for hundreds of cities was presumably too difficult to attempt for this first release, so they decided to outsource it to third-party apps.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of transit agencies in the United States (not to mention the rest of the world). That’s a lot of agreements to ink. Once Apple gets those worked out, I expect mass transit directions will return.

Emily Badger, contemplating the urban-suburban dichotomy:

But as I have been drilling deeper into the distinction, I realize I don’t know exactly what defines a “suburb” as such. Is it a matter of geography? Authenticity? History? Density? Diversity? Housing stock? Land-use patterns? Auto dependence?

That, and more. It strikes me that suburbia isn’t just a checklist of physical features—it’s also a state of mind.

Another neat tool from a PSM reader. This one is from Jeremy Faludi and friends, who are working to quantify and map which parts of a city are greener than others. Sort of like WalkScore, but this one weighs trees instead of grocery stores.

So far they only have data for San Francisco and Seattle, but they’re working on obtaining more. If you’re a GIS person or have data you could donate, shoot them a note. I’m sure they’ll be happy you wrote.

PSM reader Andy Moskowitz is working on an algorithm to distinguish greenscape from hardscape in cities, which is a pretty good predictor of income inequality. His 1.0 is a nice start, and he assures me version 2 is already in the works. I’m looking forward to it.

Redditor Lycerius:

I’ve been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I’m not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows.

• The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
• There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

Sounds a bit like George Orwell’s 1984.

David Roberts:

We live in the Anthropocene, a geologic era shaped by humans.

We have not yet begun to grapple with that realization. In time, I believe it will rank alongside evolution by natural selection among ideas that have fundamentally transformed our understanding of ourselves and our world. Like Darwin’s dangerous idea, it will ripple its way through the physical and social sciences.

In case you’re not the kind of person who rises with the sun, you can still catch my segment on PRI’s The Takeaway online, any time you like. Thanks to producer Kristen Meinzer and host John Hockenberry for having me on.

If you’re up early tomorrow, tune in to The Takeaway on public radio. I’ll be talking about seeing income inequality from space.