Michael Grothaus interviews app developers Lee Armstrong and Bryce McKinlay about their experiences with Apple’s and Google’s mapping software development kits, or SDKs.
Surprise: Neither is perfect.
Data mining 101 ∞
Brooke Borel has a nice primer on data mining over at Last Word On Nothing.
Is It Time to Move Past Urban Studies and Toward Urbanization Science? ∞
Eric Jaffe, reporting for the Atlantic Cities:
Scholars from any number of disciplines — economics and history to ecology and psychology — have explored and documented various aspects of city life through their own unique lenses. What’s needed now, Solecki contends, is a new science of urbanization that looks beyond the surface of cities to the fundamental laws that form their very basis too.
“What we need is a comprehensive, integrated, system-level analysis of the city-building process,” says Solecki.
Sounds about right.
What are the odds a meteor will destroy a city?
Sources:
Ivezic, Zeljko. 2013. Personal communication.
Schneider A., Friedl M.A. & Potere D. (2009). A new map of global urban extent from MODIS satellite data, Environmental Research Letters, 4 (4) 044003. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/044003
What is this strange structure in the Arizona desert? ∞
Annalee Newitz, writing for io9:
Normally when you see something bizarre like this on Google Earth, you want to believe it’s for secret spy stuff. But the skeptic in you says, “Naw, this is just for irrigation.” In this case, however, your spy dreams would be right.
The Small-State Advantage in the United States Senate ∞
New York Times:
The Constitution has always given states with small populations a lift, but the scale of the gap has grown in recent decades.
Unless something reverses the trend, the gap between population and representation in the Senate is likely to widen.
Personal politics and electricity use ∞
Tom Jacobs, writing for the Pacific Standard:
Two UCLA economists report that, in the area served by an unnamed utility in the Western United States, households headed by registered Democrats use less electricity than those headed by registered Republicans. This holds true after factoring in variables such as climate, the price of electricity, and the size and age of the homes in question.
Vegetation Goes Vertical ∞
Cassandra Willyard, reporting for Studio 360:
Growing celery in a skyscraper may seem a bit unnatural, but so is growing celery in a field, Despommier argues. “The act of farming is totally unnatural,” he argues. “The moment you start to replace everything with just one thing — like wheat or rice or corn or lettuce — you create problems.”
Not sure I agree with that statement entirely. Fortunately, Willyard was kind enough to give me a rebuttal.
Torre Guinigi ∞
A commenter at Slate (where my latest was reposted) pointed to this 120-foot tall, 14th century Tuscan tower
as an example of trees that live atop skyscrapers. At 12 stories, it’s tall, but not quite at the height which many architects are proposing to plant trees. Plus, I’m guessing these trees get a lot of TLC given their cultural status.
The End of Federal Transportation Funding as We Know It ∞
Eric Jaffe examines the many possible futures that await transportation funding in the U.S.
There’s a subtext in his article that’s implied but unstated—networks are more valuable when they connect more nodes more efficiently. That argues for more federal involvement, I would think, not less.
The Decline of the Private Car ∞
Emily Badger, reporting for the Atlantic Cities:
“We’re probably closer to the end of the automobility era than we are to its beginning,” says Maurie Cohen, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “If we’re 100 years into the automobile era, it seems pretty inconceivable that the car as we know it is going to be around for another 100 years.”
We’ve been so focused on what’s next for the automobile—electric, hydrogen, etc.—that we’re not looking out for what comes after the automobile.
Can we please stop drawing trees on top of skyscrapers?
Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I’m not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, “Put a Bird On It“.¹
It turns out architects have been doing the same thing, just with trees. Want to make a skyscraper look trendy and sustainable? Put a tree on it. Or better yet, dozens. Many high-concept skyscraper proposals are festooned with trees. On the rooftop, on terraces, in nooks and crannies, on absurdly large balconies. Basically anywhere horizontal and high off the ground. Now, I should be saying architects are drawing dozens, because I have yet to see one of these “green” skyscrapers in real life. (There’s one notable exception—BioMilano, which isn’t quite done yet.) If—and it’s a big if—any of these buildings ever get built, odds are they’ll be stripped of their foliage quicker than a developer can say “return on investment”. It’s just not realistic. I get it why architects draw them on their buildings. Really, I do. But can we please stop?
There are plenty of scientific reasons why skyscrapers don’t—and probably won’t—have trees, at least not to the heights which many architects propose. Life sucks up there. For you, for me, for trees, and just about everything else except peregrine falcons. It’s hot, cold, windy, the rain lashes at you, and the snow and sleet pelt you at high velocity. Life for city trees is hard enough on the ground. I can’t imagine what it’s like at 500 feet, where nearly every climate variable is more extreme than at street level.
Wind is perhaps the most formidable force trees face at that elevation. Ever seen trees on the top of a mountain? Their trunks bow away from the prevailing winds. That may be the most visible effect, but it’s not the most challenging. Wind also interrupts the thin layer of air between a leaf and the atmosphere, known as the boundary layer. The boundary layer is tiny by human standards—it operates on a scale small enough that normally slippery gas particles behave like viscous fluids.
For plants, the boundary layer serves to control evapotranspiration, or the loss of gas and water through the tiny pores on a leaf’s underside, known as stomata. In calm conditions, a comfortably thick boundary layer can exist on a perfectly smooth leaf. But plants that live in hot or windy places often have adaptations to deal with the harsh conditions, including tiny hairs on their leaves which expand each leaf’s surface area and thus its boundary layer. Still, plants in these environments aren’t usually tall and graceful. In other words, not the tall trees we see in architectural drawings.
Next let’s add extreme heat and cold to the mix. Extreme cold, well, we all know what that does. It can kill a plant, turning the water inside its cells into lethal, crystalline knives. At the other end, hot conditions post a different set of challenges. To cool off, plants can “sweat” by opening their stomata to release water vapor, at least as long as there’s water available. But even then, plants reach a limit. At certain temperatures, which vary from plant to plant, the photosynthetic machinery inside a leaf starts to break down. Keep in mind these are temperatures on the surface of a leaf, not ambient air temperature. The surface of leaf—especially in direct sunlight, as on the unshaded side of a skyscraper—can be many degrees hotter than the air, up to 14˚ C in some species (nearly 26˚ F).
Then there are the logistical concerns. How are these trees going to be watered and fertilized? Pruned? How will they be replaced? How often will they need to be replaced? As someone who grows bonsai, I can tell you that stressed plants require constant attention. Daily monitoring, in fact, and sometimes even more frequently. It’s not easy. Growing simple green roofs is a chore, and those plants are chosen for their hardiness and low maintenance. Trees are generally not as well adapted to the wide range of conditions likely to be experienced on the side of a skyscraper.
All of this may sound a bit ridiculous coming from someone like me, an advocate for more trees in urban spaces. It probably comes from having seen one too many sketches of a verdant vertical oasis but too few of them actually built. Plus, having studied plant physiology, I know that it’s a pipe dream in many ways. Trees just weren’t made for such conditions. Now if someone want to gin up a tree that can survive on top of a skyscraper, go ahead, I guess. But I can think of far better things we should be putting our time and effort into, like preserving places that already have trees growing on them or planting more on streets that need them.
- “What a sad little tote bag. I know! I’ll put a bird on it.” Etc. ↩
Illustration of Editt Tower, a proposed 26-story building in Singapore.
Related posts:
More reasons to stop putting trees on skyscrapers
How TED and The City 2.0 took the internet for a ride
Patient Urbanism ∞
Steve Mouzon:
Building neighborhoods patiently requires far less debt for infrastructure and results in places that are more interesting than those that are built all at once. This was once the way we built everywhere, but it is now illegal all over. Why? Because cities insist on “seeing the end from the beginning,” meaning that they want the developer to begin by building the final condition of the neighborhood. In human terms, it would be like deciding that we can no longer tolerate giving birth to a child that grows into an adult; we will only allow giving birth to an adult… an incredibly painful proposition that simply doesn’t work.
A map of traffic congestion by metropolitan area ∞
More people, more cars. Not a surprise. But you can see that congestion is worse in, say, the Washington, D.C., area than the New York metro area. New York has many more people, but also a better mass transit system.
New Hampshire bill proposes aerial photography ban ∞
AGBeat:
Neal Kurk (R), member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives since 1986 has recently sponsored HB 619-FN to make aerial photography illegal in their state, which many are considering a look into the future. States are currently struggling with how to deal with advances in drone technology, particularly mini-drones, fueled by fears not only that the federal government is using drones on U.S. soil, but are using them abroad not only to take out terrorists, but suspected terrorists, even if American.
I wish this were a joke. There are ways to regulate a drone-filled future, and this isn’t it. As Mark Frauenfelder points out at Boing Boing, kite aerial photographers would be criminals. Charles Benton, whose site Frauenfelder also linked to, dropped by our lab in grad school, and I can tell you the only thing criminal about his photos is how good they are.
Why Are There So Many Sinkholes in Florida? ∞
Rebecca J. Rosen, writing for the Atlantic Cities:
Here’s what’s going on underground: the entirety of Florida sits on a bed of limestone, covered in varying degrees by composites of sand, clay, and soil. Limestone is soluble and porous, and over millions of years, acids in water have sculpted out a network of subsurface voids beneath the Floridian ground (think: Swiss cheese).
What Rosen doesn’t mention—but should—is that most of Florida south of Lake Okeechobee is basically a river we call the Everglades.
A plow, now! ∞
Andy Woodruff at Bostonography:
The city of Boston set up a web map that tracked the live location of snow plows and their ground covered, which would be excellent for a summary map, but in an excessive triumph the site was overloaded and had to be shut down because the demand was interfering with the city’s ability to track plows itself.
We live in the future. Almost—I’m hoping the future has more server capacity.
Correlation of Population Density to Designated Urban Areas ∞
Interesting article on determining population density through aerial photographs captured by drones.
An open letter to the New York Times
As a longtime reader and subscriber of the New York Times, I’m disgusted by the move to shut down the Green Blog. The closure of the environment desk a couple of months ago was frustrating, but I had hope that the Times would continue its coverage on the Green Blog. I should have known better.
Claiming that environment coverage will continue through other desks is a farce. Here’s the argument managing editor Dean Baquet made to Inside Climate News when the environment desk was shut down in January:
[E]nvironmental stories are “partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects,” Baquet said. “They are more complex. We need to have people working on the different desks that can cover different parts of the story.”
That same logic could be applied to the Washington bureau. “Political stories are ‘partly business, economic, national or local, among other subjects.’ ” But it won’t be. The Times thinks environmental stories are second rate, not important enough to merit their own desk, or even their own blog.
I let the Times know how I feel. You can, too.
"An act of total cowardice" ∞
The New York Times shut down their Green Blog on 5 pm last Friday (no doubt hoping that most people would forget by Monday). This follows the paper’s closure of their environment desk a few months ago.
Curtis Brainard at the Columbia Journalism Review, linked above, took the words right out of my mouth:
Those masthead editors should be ashamed of themselves.